The US Department of War (DoW) has ordered 30 major research universities, including Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to audit and report on their financial and research collaborations with foreign institutions by the end of the month or risk losing federal funding.
The universities must assess the exposure of sensitive or export-controlled research and implement strict mitigation plans, ‘including the termination of problematic partnerships’, the DoW decreed on 17 August.
‘The Department of War has zero tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security,’ stated Emil Michael, undersecretary of war for research and engineering. Joseph Jewell, the DoW’s assistant secretary of war for science and technology, added: ‘Universities are critical partners in executing a wide range of Department of War research programs, and the department must therefore ensure that our research investments are well protected from foreign exploitation.’
The stakes are substantial and the institutional risks extend well beyond traditional research compliance, according to Scott Schneider, an adjunct law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, which is included in the review. He specialises in education law, higher education and civil rights.
’Universities now have to determine how broadly to define an implicated “collaboration”, trace relationships across faculty, laboratories, grants, visiting scholars and affiliated entities, make difficult judgments about whether a relationship presents an unacceptable security risk, and potentially unwind longstanding academic partnerships on an extraordinarily compressed timeline,’ Schneider stated in an 18 August post on the social media platform X. In addition, he said ‘significant governance and legal questions’ remain, including what happens when the department concludes that a university must terminate a research partnership and the university disagrees.
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign said it takes seriously its responsibility to safeguard the US research enterprise, protect sensitive and export-controlled research, and comply with applicable federal research security requirements while also supporting appropriate and transparent academic engagement.
‘We have initiated a coordinated review involving appropriate campus offices and will work with DoW to provide a response to their requests,’ said university spokesperson Patrick Wade. ‘Transparent and secure international collaborations create perspectives that deepen our understanding of global challenges, promote scientific discovery, and strengthen US innovation, he added.
Meanwhile, the Association of American Universities, which represents more than 70 major research universities in the US, says it is still assessing the audit’s implications and working to better understand what the Pentagon hopes to gain from it.
The paradox of overly broad measures is that they may end up doing the opposite of what they intend
Rosie Levine, US–China Education Trust
The Pentagon’s review comes after DoW last month released an updated list of 130 foreign universities and research institutions that it says engage in activities that increase the risk of US-funded research being misappropriated. Most are Chinese institutions but several are Russian and Iranian.
The demands will have ‘an enormous chilling effect on US research collaboration with China,’ according to Rosie Levine, executive director of Washington, DC-based non-profit US–China Education Trust that promotes educational exchange between the US and China.
‘The paradox of overly broad measures is that they may end up doing the opposite of what they intend: actual problematic activity may go unnoticed, while other institutions err on the side of caution by cutting ties altogether, to the detriment of projects that are harmless or bring real benefit to the United States,’ she warns.
A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC said China ‘consistently opposes the overstretching of the concept of national security and the politicisation or instrumentalisation of normal scientific, educational, and academic exchanges.’ They suggested that scientific innovation and academic development require open cooperation, cautioning that restricting normal research exchanges ‘will ultimately harm the interests of all parties, including US researchers and institutions.’
John Holdren, an environmental and climate scientist who was science adviser to former president Barack Obama, says that the directive’s specifications are vague in important respects, and that the timetable demanded is ridiculous and clearly intended to be punitive. ’This action is clearly just one more piece of the Trump administration’s wide-ranging punitive attacks on the nation’s research universities, which Trump dislikes because they are bastions of independent analysis and training grounds for critical thought, none of which he can abide,’ Holren says.
