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From the Editor: Scientific Openness and Security
Lawrence Hanley
Science has always been plagued by a deep irony: at the same time that it unleashes tremendous powers of human creativity, it also harbors the potential for awesome destruction. September 11, 2001, transformed this irony into a critical challenge for universities and academic scientists. The success of academic science, in turn, has depended largely on the revolutionary openness of the American university and academic profession. Now, with the threat of terrorism and new threats posed by biological and chemical weapons, the openness that drives academic science appears to some as a major vulnerability. From this perspective, the virtues of academic science look like defects in our national security. How can the necessary goals of security and openness be balanced?
As Charles Vest, Ronald Atlas, and Mitchel Wallerstein argue forcefully, scientific achievement depends on the free flow of people and information. Atlas and Wallerstein first presented their remarks at the January 9, 2003, Scientific Openness and National Security Workshop, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In fact, as Atlas suggests, this free flow may be our best defense against biological and chemical terrorism: the more scientists know about, for example, the anthrax pathogen, the better prepared they are to neutralize its threat.
On the other hand, these authors agree that in today's world, there is such a thing as "dangerous" scientific and technical information: information that, if published openly, could directly aid those bent on destruction. As our contributors also agree, large-scale government-built walls and moats to make science more secret will only sabotage the power of academic research. Instead, the proposals advanced by each of these authors depend on a value familiar to professors: governance. Those in charge of national security need to recognize the expertise of scientists in distinguishing between benign and "dangerous" information, and academic scientists need to develop voluntary and communal policies regarding the definition and circulation of dangerous information.
Our globalized university depends on the rapid, wide dissemination of research, but it also depends on the free exchange of researchers. As noted in congressional testimony by Shirley Tilghman, Princeton University's president, and a statement by the National Academy of Sciences presidents, efforts to fortify our borders since September 11 have significantly affected foreign scholars and students working in American universities. Both Tilghman and the NAS presidents point to immediate problems and concrete remedies.
It's not just scientists who must wrestle with the problem of controlling information while preserving openness. Institutional review boards, as Cary Nelson illustrates, have begun to extend, often inappropriately, their regulation of research and publication into new disciplines and fields. Meanwhile, Martha McCaughey offers a cautionary tale of information control and ownership for any of us who use our office computers. In a piece on student evaluations of teaching, Mary Gray and Barbara Bergmann explain how these evaluations can be misused to undermine faculty autonomy.
Whether external or internal, these new pressures on intellectual openness should be recognized for what they are: challenges to our usual notions of academic freedom. The stakes are high, especially for colleagues in the sciences, and the solutions are not easy.
Finally, as Ann Springer explains, the Supreme Court, in one of the most important judicial reviews of affirmative action in over twenty years, recently upheld the educational value of diversity but left open the question of how best to institute it on campus.
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