Why the FBI Is on Your Campus

A graduate student was the first to alert me to the activities of the FBI on campus. She was the chair of the program committee for an international conference of science and technology scholars to be held in Washington, D.C. The FBI wanted to see her about the event, and she asked me to join her at the meeting. Their concerns were straightforward. A number of people from China had registered. Were they bona fide scholars, or was this a cover for more nefarious activities? My student was asked to report on any “suspicious activity.” It was clear that this kind of request was a routine matter for the FBI agents.

Sensational stories revealing the clandestine presence of the CIA on American campuses, such as Daniel Golden’s recent cover story in The Chronicle Review, are disturbing and certainly catch the eye. But they obscure far more important institutionalized challenges to traditional academic values that are publicly acknowledged and widely accepted because they are deemed to be necessary.

A few years ago, the FBI held a town-hall meeting at Georgia Tech that was attended by about 150 engineering faculty, students, and staff. The FBI had one main point: There were foreign nationals on campus who would not hesitate to get ahold of whatever sensitive knowledge they could, by fair means or foul. All manner of safeguards were already in place, but these could not prohibit informal modes of deviant behavior. Typical examples included casually asking questions about research that was not directly related to what the questioners were supposed to be doing and failing to turn up at a conference workshop for which they had registered. Such suspicious behavior should be noted. “Awareness and reporting are the two most important things you can do,” one agent stressed.

From its inception, the national-security state has been suspicious of academe’s adherence to openness and the free circulation of ideas. America’s global leadership is built on its scientific and technological pre-eminence. Classifying knowledge is one way of keeping it out of circulation. But it is far too crude an instrument to deal with the vast amount of sensitive but unclassified knowledge produced by America’s leading research universities. In the backlash against détente in the early 1980s, an official from the Department of Commerce accused universities of being the “soft underbelly” of America’s open society. The KGB, he added, was operating like a “gigantic vacuum cleaner sucking up formulas, patents, blueprints and know-how with frightening precision.” A spokesman for the Los Alamos Weapons Laboratory warned a Senate Committee in 1982 that the Soviets had taken advantage of “the best technology transfer organization in the world … the U.S. university system.” Today China is the threat.

Two factors have converged to trigger the alarm. First, there has been a sharp rise in the number of foreign nationals on campuses, many of them from China. National Science Foundation data show that between 2008 and 2013 roughly 4,000 Chinese nationals annually earned Ph.D.s in science and engineering at American colleges and universities — far more than from any other foreign country. Second, there is the commercialization of university research stimulated by legislation in the 1980s, most notably the Bayh-Dole Act. This quest for commercialization reduces the gap between basic research and development, between producing ideas and turning them into useful products.

I’m not suggesting that every foreign national poses a threat to national security. The strength of the American research system lies in its openness to people from abroad, who bring new ideas and take away a greater appreciation of American values like democracy and free inquiry. But it would be naïve to assume that only bona fide students come to study or visit our labs. The FBI has an Academic Alliance Program that alerts faculty to various threats, including thefts of intellectual property. These warnings have nothing to do with terrorism, though that threat is also there, of course. They are about the loss of sensitive knowledge to rival powers. And we have to admit that the urge to do socially useful research, much of it dual-use, in an environment heavily populated by foreign nationals cannot but cause deep concern to the intelligence community.

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that the FBI is present on our campuses. But it is unavoidable so long as higher education adopts an economic model that combines the commercialization of research with the expansion of enrollment to include thousands of students from a country whose stated aim is to become a world science-and-technology power. As one senior engineer told me, “If you were a Chinese spy or were tying to figure out how to get U.S. technology, how would you go about it? … The technology-centric institutions of the U.S. are very, very, very, very open organizations from which there is leading-edge technology that is much, much easier to access” than from companies like IBM. That’s the main reason why the FBI is on campus.

John Krige is a professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Parts of this story draw on a 2015 article in the journal Engaging Science, Technology, and Society.