White House Officials Will Visit Campuses to Discuss Foreign Threats to Research

Research universities in the United States have felt increasing government pressure to confront the potential theft of intellectual property and national-security secrets from countries like China. Now White House representatives will visit campuses to discuss that effort.

In the next few months, representatives from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will hold meetings at academic institutions to speak with researchers and students about “matters of research security,” according to a letter the office’s director sent on Tuesday to universities and professional organizations. The letter warned about some nations’ “increasingly sophisticated efforts to exploit, influence, and undermine our research activities.”

Kelvin K. Droegemeier, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said he would visit campuses in order to talk to faculty members. “The faculty would benefit by being part of that conversation,” he said. “That’s really the target audience.”

Another goal would be to make sure researchers are aware of the rules and what they mean, Droegemeier said.

University leaders have tried to balance government warnings about spying and theft with researchers’ fears that they are being targeted and stereotyped because of their ethnicity. Collaborations between researchers in the United States and China, as well as government-sponsored talent programs that recruit scholars to China, are under the microscope, straining the closest research relationship between any two countries in the world.

For scholars, the threat that they could be investigated by the government for their contacts in other countries is real. Already this year, scientists at Emory University and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have lost their jobs after the National Institutes of Health wrote letters to their universities highlighting behavior that the agency found suspicious. In May the NIH said it was investigating more than 50 institutions for a range of behavior it saw as questionable.

Some Chinese American researchers have been wrongly accused of spying. In 2015 a physics professor at Temple University was charged with sharing sensitive information with China, but the charges were later dropped. Many U.S.-based scientists of Chinese descent say they are confused and frustrated by the lack of clarity about what they can and cannot do when it comes to working with Chinese colleagues. They worry that government pressure will hamper the free flow of information that is important to research.

Droegemeier’s letter said that a committee of government officials has been formed that will establish guidelines on disclosure requirements for researchers who receive federal funds, develop best practices for academic institutions, and highlight ways to identify risky research practices.

The effort wasn’t specifically targeted at China, Droegemeier said. “Regardless of where you come from,” he said, “if you’re involved in research we expect you to follow the rules of research. First of all, we need to make sure you’re aware of them.”

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.