Shane Duarte and Randall Rose: A controversial new policy

This past Tuesday, Penn administrators announced that the University is considering returning to secret research. This is a controversial subject, and it should be.

Two classified biological-warfare projects at Penn, "Spice Rack" and "Summit," caused massive protests here by student groups in the past. As a result, the University pledged in 1970 to never accept research agreements which restrict dissemination of the results, or which require Penn people to obtain security clearances.

Now, President Rodin and Provost Barchi want Penn to reconsider whether it should engage in secret research again. Barchi emphasizes the new possibilities that have opened up "after the Patriot Act" and expects that there will probably be an increase in the number of available projects for secret security work. For those who are eager to make deals with any available funding source, no matter how much it may conflict with the University's values, it may be attractive to sacrifice openness for the sake of getting more grant money.

But the money comes with dangers. As Rodin and Barchi's initiative acknowledges, these new research projects will have their results treated as government secrets, and the researchers will sometimes be required to obtain security clearances. This would likely mean that many would find themselves excluded from research projects because of their nationality or personal history.

Would a department on the hunt for graduate student researchers pass over the Pakistani admissions candidate because his nationality might be an obstacle to the security clearance needed for some research projects? What would the impact be on admissions criteria, tenure appointments and promotions? Would students and faculty avoid questioning the government's policies for fear of risking their security clearances and losing access to much of their department's research funding?

These are not remote possibilities -- on Wednesday, we learned that the Department of Defense had abruptly canceled the remaining funding for a Penn research project after the project manager made anti-war comments to a Toronto newspaper. Furthermore, it is dangerous for universities to come to rely on deals that keep their most advanced research secret. A university should be open with its ideas, and not focus on developing secrets that most of the community can't learn about.

Rodin and Barchi have formed a new Committee on Classified Research to consider whether Penn should return to secret work, but the committee is apparently not expected to find these issues worth discussing in detail. The official announcement in the Almanac states that the committee "will work expeditiously in order to issue recommendations as quickly as possible," apparently during the summer. This is a bad approach when considering a controversial new policy -- expecting quick decisions makes more sense when it's pretty clear what the decision will be.

The way the announcement was timed -- during the last week of the semester, when many people are very busy, with much of the committee's work done during the summer while people are away -- tends to minimize involvement by the university community. And the committee's members, who were picked by Rodin and Barchi, include no junior faculty, graduate students or undergraduates, even though it may end up reinstating a policy that aroused great opposition from student groups and others.

The Almanac announcement calls it a blue-ribbon committee, because it's composed of senior faculty. But if they expect a faculty-only committee to be more conscientious than the student groups who organized opposition to biological-warfare projects, why rush the committee in advance by saying that it will work "expeditiously" and "as quickly as possible"?

Why not give the community as a whole time to discuss these issues? (The committee is also slated to decide how Penn should respond to the new federal rules which exclude researchers from some government research projects based on their nationality and personal history. This, too, should be discussed by a wider group.)

The University is one of the strongholds of openness, in a society whose freedom is increasingly being questioned. We should organize in response to this development and, among other things, demand a voice in a serious and honest discussion of the issue, rather than the kind of "discussions" Penn's administration typically sponsor, which are more often than not a presentation of a done deal under the guise of an invitation to offer one's input.

Shane Duarte and Randall Rose are graduate students in the Philosophy Department.

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