Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOUIRNAL
Universities in growing numbers are spurning Government contracts that call. for secret research.
Mounting opposition, by both professors and students, to the Vietnam war and to war-related research is spurring the trend. But just as significant is increasing faculty concern that classified contracts may curtail a scholar’s traditional obligation to disseminate his research
findings.
The upshot: Some universities are scaling down or canceling such research projects. And at a number of other schools around the country heated debate is under way.
The University of Pennsylvania this spring. canceled two classified Defense Department contracts for assessing the effectiveness of chemical-biological warfare. Administrators abandoned the $1 million projects-known as Spicerack and Summit-after a two-year campus dispute that reached its climax when some professors threatened to wear gas masks at commencement exercises.
Stanford University, New York University and the University of Minnesota are tightening restrictions governing acceptance of classified research contracts from Federal agencies. Some secret projects at these schools have already been phased out. Faculty committees at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California’s Berkeley campus are currently taking a new look at secret research.
Debate at Michigan
And just last week debate erupted at the University of Michigan when the Michigan Daily, the student newspaper, disclosed the existence of about $9 million in classified Defense Department projects at the school. The contracts range from counterinsurgency projects in Thailand to research on a new intercontinental ballistic missile. The controversy probably will prompt reassessment of university policy, observers say.
“Schools are starting to cut back on classified research, and they will continue to do so,” says Jay Orear, chairman of the executive committee of the Federation of American Scientists, a professional group of 2,000 researchers on and off campus. After polling some 300 colleges and universities this summer, the federation found that “a good many” schools that previously had no policy covering secret contracts were beginning to restrict such research, Mr. Orear says.
In August, the federation urged universities not to “accept funds that impose restrictions on the publication of research findings.” Worried that such contracts may be getting out of hand, other academic groups have taken similar positions. Early this year the American Anthropological Association, a professional group, came out against classified research. And earlier this fall the American Association of University Professors set up a committee to study the matter.
Amount of Classified Research
In dollar terms, the total of classified research contracts is relatively small. During the 1967 Federal fiscal year, universities received Defense Department research and development contracts totaling $290 million, of which only about $34 million involved classified projects, according to an official of the department’s Office of Defense Research and Engineering. (The Defense Department provides the bulk of classified contracts, although some come from other agencies like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Atomic Energy Commission.)
Nonetheless, the Pentagon official asserts “it would be adverse to the national interest” should more schools cancel classified grants. “At the University of Pennsylvania we lost a very experienced research source,” he explains. “It might be a year before we start getting the same quality work from another contractor.” The work at Penn was transferred to the research subsidiary of Booz, Allen & Hamilton Inc., a Chicago-based management consultant firm.
Some university defense contracts have been so secret that even the school’s president has known little about their nature. Last month, for example, a University of Minnesota vice president urged the regents and newly selected President Malcolm Moos, a political scientist who served as a speech-writer for President Eisenhower, to approve a classified contract with the Pentagon even though details of the contract couldn’t be revealed. The regents and Mr. Moos knew next to nothing about the project, though a newspaper story subsequently disclosed it was concerned with methods of prisoner-of-war interrogation.
A New Policy
“We were asked to approve it ‘on faith,'” recalls Mr. Moos, who strongly objected to the project. “Unless we were on the verge of World War III, I don’t think I’d favor secret research at a university.” While the regents approved the project over Mr. Moos’ objection, the Air Force soon withdrew it, purportedly because of lack of funds. Mr. Moos says that later this month he will propose to regents a new research policy that would “make highly unlikely a recurrence” of the September episode.
Those opposed to secret research agree that anti-Vietnam feeling has brought the controversy to a head. But there are more basic causes. “A university should be an open community of scholars devoted to advancing
knowledge,” says Gabriel Kolko, associate professor of history at Penn, who fought projects Spicerack and Summit. “The Defense Department likes universities because they do high class work very inexpensively. So, in effect, the very nature of the schools is being compromised to save the Government some money,” he says.
Adds David LIsdy, chairmain of Pittsburgh’s anthropology department: “I object to classified research because it often gives the sponsoring agency a censorship function. Findngs often can’t be shared with colleagues who are unable or unwilling to get security clearance of their own.”
Pentagon officials reply that the classified label doesn’t necessarily mean that the research can’t be published. Projects are classified when researchers are given access to secret information, and findings may be
published provided none of the secret information is disclosed. However, the sponsoring agency usually reserves the right of review prior to publication, the officials concede.
Harvard and some other universities ban all classified research, although even Harvard allows individual scholars-to work on secret projects outside the university on a consulting basis. Many schools tend to discourage secret research but permit exceptions when the particular interests of their professors touch on areas related to national defense. Some schools, however, are making fewer exceptions than in the past.
Last spring, after the Penn controversy, trustees of New York University, on the recommendation of a faculty committee, adopted a policy requiring that all classified projects have the “written approval” of the president. Prior to that move, approval of such contracts was left to individual department heads.
A Contract Is Dropped
Already the new policy has resulted in the scaling down of some secret research. NYU recently declined to renew a $44,000 Defense Department contract to evaluate chemical warfare weapons systems. “We discontinued the project after deciding it wasn’t in line with the humanitarian purposes of a university,” says John R. Ragazzini, dean of the school of engineering and science.
To keep secret contracts at a minimum. Stanford University’s faculty early this year inaugurated continuous, case-by-case review of new proposals for classified research. Says William F. Baxter, professor of law, who headed a group that recently proposed tougher restrictions on such research: “We want to head off the contracts that make you lie about
the kind of research you’re doing.” He adds: “There have been cases where the Central Intelligence Agency has attempted to negotiate contracts here that would have made us deny the existence of the project.”
Faculty concern about secrecy has already prompted Stanford to refuse some Government contracts. The school recently declined an Agency for International Development (AID). contract to start a graduate program in physic at an Argentine university. The proposal caller, for two Stanford professors to set up the program while, in exchange, several Argentine students attended Stanford. AID wanted to review all research performed by participants, professors and students, with the right to bar publication if it chose. AID also wanted the right to demand recall of Stanford professors on the project if it chose to do so. “These terms simply were unacceptable,” says a Stanford official.
Despite such cases, some Federal agencies claim they’re trying to ease contract restrictions. “We’re attempting to eliminate some problems by expediting declassification where it’s reasonable to do so,” says a Pen-
tagon spokesman. But a Stanford official says: “We’re experiencing greater efforts by the Defense Department and other Federal agencies to insert ‘right of review’ provisions into research contracts that normally wouldn’t be classified. This is sort of the back-door approach to classification.”
In some cases, universities have attempted to get around the problems posed by secret contracts by forming off-campus affiliates or wholly-owned, but independent, laboratories where such research can be done. But these efforts don’t always satisfy an aroused faculty or student body.
This month faculty members at Cornell University voted to recommend that the school sever ties with the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, an autonomous Cornell-owned facility that does a good deal of secret military research. Controversy developed this fall when it was learned the lab had a classified $1.5 million contract with the Defense Department to help plan counterinsurgency projects in Thailand.
Cornell’s Center for International Studies, which has a research team of its own in Thailand, charges that the lab’s project “may inflict irreparable damage on the university’s teaching and research throughout the world.” The Cornell administration is currently considering the faculty, recommendation that the school disassociate itself from the lab,
and observers say it s likely the university will take steps in this direction.
Just this Monday 30 Princeton students were arrested for blocking entrance to a campus building housing at a university-affiliated corporation that specializes in secret military research for the Defense Department. The students, members of Students for a Democratic Society, a New Left organization, were protesting Princeton’s role as one of 12 university sponsors of the corporation, the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), headquartered in Arlington Va. A Princeton spokesman says the communications research division of IDA asserts that IDA isn’t legally part of the university and that its research is independent of the school’s. He observes, however that “specially trained people in the (Princeton) environs may be in a position to help in the studies it (the division) conducts.”
Perhaps to head off such troubles Columbia University earlier this fall turned over to a newly formed nonprofit corporation classified research previously performed at the school’s Electronics Research Laboratory. Columbia officials say the new corporation called the Riverside Research Institute, will have no corporate or financial connection with the university.
Drawing the Line
How to draw the line between justified and justified classified research for weeks has plagued a faculty committee at the University of Pittsburgh, whose faculty senate later this month will consider several possible resolutions suggested by the committee. The resolutions range from a suggested ban on all secret research to a proposal that each department frame its own policy.
“We couldn’t agree on a definite recommendation,” admits Richard Tobias, an English professor who is co-chairman of the committee. “At first, I wanted to abolish all classified contracts, but now I see this issue is complicated beyond all expectations.”
The Pittsburgh committee was formed after disclosures of classified projects ranging from rewriting of technical reports on weapons development to work on quality-control procedures to check bomb release mechanisms developed by industry.
Some faculty members say that they become more receptive to such projects after Thomas Donahue, a professor of physics who is working on a secret project of his own, argued that “it isn’t a question of good or evil.” Says Mr. Donahue: “By no means all secret research is aimed a killing people, much of it is defensive. And there are circumstances where it must be done in a university. A complete ban on classified research would be morally indefensible.”
Reprinted with the permission of The Wall Street Journal
