Academia becomes target for new security laws
Foreign students have helped propel the research for which US universities are famous. New security concerns could limit their ability to contribute.
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The Institute of International Education in New York reports that students may choose Canada, Britain, and Australia instead of the US because of these visa issues. The American Physical Society says early results of an e-mail survey of 184 physics departments indicates Chinese students are having the worst problems.
But don't tell that to Mohammed Alsaid, a Saudi Arabian student pursuing his PhD in computer science at the University of Southern California. Like many from the Middle East, he has a visa "horror story."
"My two friends were already students at USC for three of four years," he says. "They have apartments here, cars here, but when they went back to Saudi Arabia to renew their visas and see their families, they got stuck."
Those students have been neither approved nor denied, but just told to wait, he says. Mr. Alsaid thinks the visa slowdown will harm US higher education.
"I never thought of going to Europe when I planned to get my master's," he says. "We all believed the US has the best education in science and engineering. This [slowdown] is going to [mean that students] go elsewhere. I totally understand the US position, though. They have to be careful."
Roshanak Roshandel is an Iranian graduate student also in USC's computer-science department. Hailing from a nation on the US State Department's list of countries that sponsor terrorism, she is familiar with all the background checks. It took her six weeks to pass an FBI check in 1996. She says other students she knows in Iran despair of ever getting to the US. "Almost all the Iranian students I know who came here as graduate students have had a hard time."
She has a green card that used to allow her to view restricted data as part of her research for a branch of the US government. Now an escort takes her to the data.
"It would be impossible for the [US] Department of Defense to do all the research they need without foreign students," she says. "They need us."
It was the 1940s, and Hitler's Germany was racing to build an atom bomb. Sensing the Germans were on the wrong trail, and not wanting to help, American university scientists collectively did the nearly unthinkable: They all but stopped publishing about nuclear physics.
Flash forward to this summer. Amid the new "war on terror," a university researcher discovers how to create the polio virus with mail-order materials and a genetic blueprint. Another discovers how to modify a smallpox-like virus, making it more virulent. Both publish their findings in scholarly journals.
Debate flares. Might not terrorists use such research as a cookbook to create more dangerous biological weapons, policymakers wonder?
A few microbiologists are already asking journals if they can publish their research but omit the methods that others would need to know to reproduce experiments, says Ronald Atlas, president of the American Society for Microbiology. That idea, he says, is a "nonstarter." It would prevent peer review and undermine science.
Still, Dr. Atlas has called for serious debate about security and self-censorship within the academy. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) plans to host a November conference to debate such issues. And the American Association of University Professors announced last week it would create a committee to review the impact of new security laws on academic freedom.
A key concern: government censorship. This summer, the Department of Defense circulated a 111-page draft directive outlining criminal sanctions for open discussions of certain types of research on campus. The draft was buried, its recommendations too controversial even within the Pentagon. It's the sort of thing that makes many shudder.
"Our nation's security depends on the balance between openness and security," says NAS president Bruce Alberts. "We have to get that balance right."
