Academic Freedom Remains Secure on U.S. Campuses

By Wendi Maloney

By The U.S. response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has not prompted a return to the intellectual repression of the McCarthy era, Robert M. O’Neil, chair of the AAUP’s Special Committee on Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis, told a special panel convened by the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists. The panel, which is holding hearings worldwide on counter-terrorism measures and human rights, heard testimony in Washington, D.C., over three days in September from prominent lawyers, judges, human rights defenders, and academics. O’Neil said that the fact that most colleges and universities have been able to preserve a healthy climate for academic freedom arises in no small part from prompt and vigorous reaction by the academic community to threatened governmental intrusions.

Still, he said, the extent of such intrusions remains a matter of conjecture. For example, only the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress receive detailed reports about demands for library-borrower and bookstore-purchase records—authorized by section 215 of the USA Patriot Act—and those reports are classified. Another matter of concern has been a sharp rise in the application of the “sensitive but unclassified” designation to federally funded research grants and contracts. “In earlier times,” O’Neil said, “such a limbo status was not wholly unknown, although most federally funded research was either classified or unclassified. What we have seen in the past several years has been a substantial expansion of the use of this ominous label, which has most of the effects of a classified label without the attendant process or demonstration of need for secrecy in the laboratory or in the publication of results.”

Instances that O’Neil cited in which the academic community succeeded in pushing back governmental intrusion include widespread protest against post–September 11 efforts by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to severely constrain publication of research involving scientists from trade-embargoed nations, including Iran and Cuba, even though Congress made clear years earlier that it did not wish the statute underlying trade embargoes to bar publication of academic research. In December 2004, after the filing of a lawsuit in federal court challenging OFAC rules on constitutional and statutory grounds, the Treasury Department authorized U.S. publishers once again to edit and publish texts from trade-embargoed countries as long as the authors of papers are not part of the government of one of those countries.

“One of the most ominous post–September 11 developments affecting science,” O’Neil told the panel, was a proposal to make research institutions obtain an export license to employ visiting scholars or foreign graduate students on a broad range of projects. He explained that the proposal argued that merely giving such a person laboratory space would be a “deemed export” and thus should be officially sanctioned by the Commerce Department. The proposal was abandoned in June 2006, following sustained protest from the academic community.

Less encouraging was the U.S. government’s denial of a visa to Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan last September (see the story in this issue) and the case of Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian-born computer science professor, which O’Neil described as “exceedingly complex” (see the story in the July–August 2006 issue of Academe).

He ended his remarks on a “cautiously hopeful note” but underscored that “all bets are off” in the event of a future terrorist attack.

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