Gagging Research

Next year McKay Professor of Applied Physics Michael Tinkham may be out the $100,000 in research funds he presently gets from the Defense Department.

Tinkham, however, is not alone. A government proposal, on its way to enactment, would allow the agency to restrict University researchers from publishing the results of work funded by the department.

Harvard, and many other universities, however, have stated that they will refuse to conduct the militarily sensitive research if the proposal is enacted.

The proposal is the Reagan Administration's latest move in its attempt to curb the release of information it deems militarily sensitive. The current proposal goes well beyond what universities have tolerated in the past and many officials view it as a violation of researchers rights to publish.

Last week the presidents of MIT, Stanford, and the California Institute of Technology sent a joint letter to the Defense Department protesting the proposal, arguing that it would interfere with academic communications.

University officials acknowledge that other schools with stronger technical orientation will be hit hardest, but Harvard could lose up to $4 million annually, in Defense Department grants, says Richard B. Leahy, associate dean of the Faculty for research and the allied institutions.

Harvard receives approximately $160 million annually in total federal aid.

Harvard professors see withholding information from print as potentially a great scientific setback.

Publication is an important part of the flow of science: stopping it will have a profound impact," says McKay Professor of Applied Sciences R. Victor Jones, adding. "It'll mean a loss for the country, a loss for the University, and a loss for the advancement of science."

Harvard's stance is based on a set of University regulations drawn up in the 1950s, and revised in 1983, stating that all information derived from research conducted at Harvard must be available to the public.

"Right now general support [for research] is not so easy to come by. If [the regulation is enacted] things will become even more difficult," says Tinkham.

For enactment of the proposal, no congressional approval is necessary, and officials agree that the Reagan Administration is not likely to back-down.

"They've taken a strong anti-communist stance, and are much more committed to the arms race than previous administrations says Director of Governmental Relations Parker L. Coddington.

But despite the Reagan Administration's plans to restrict publication it has strongly supported basic research as a means for advancing the national economic and military standing.

As a result, the government--instead of granting funds to university scientists will build its own research laboratories and contract private firms which do not hold the same research publication principles.

"Temporarily, they will continue to work with the universities, but the opposition will just push the Defense Department even further toward conducting its own research," Coddington says.

The opening moves in the now heated controversy came in January 1982 when Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, then deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): stated publicly that the Soviet military buildup over the past two decades has been based largely on technology acquired from the United States and her allies.

He went on to suggest that scientists should accept a system of voluntary regulation, including pre-publication censorship.

Fields most closely associated with militarily sensitive research include cryptology, the study of coding--electronic, lasars, and computer technologies.

A series of events following Inman's speech heightened concern among researchers. That April, the Administration issued an executive order which allowed the government to clamp down on any information that "by itself or in the context of other information could be expected to cause damage to the national security."

Critics immediately noted that the order's vagueness gave the government virtually a free hand in restricting information and argued that it reversed 30 years of policy aimed at casing such limitations.

On the legislative side, several bills have been introduced which would increase the authority of the Defense Department to limit what sort of information gets sent abroad.

Meanwhile, the government has been more zealously limiting travel by foreign scholars, mostly from the Soviet Union and China, and the Commerce Department recently initiated "Operation Exodus," which is aimed at checking the export of high technology information.

In an attempt to alleviate the growing tensions the Defense. Department has established a joint panel of its own members and academics to discuss such issues.

Graduated Scale

Under the proposal currently being debated, three different levels of control over the publication of papers from research the department supports would be enacted. The restrictions would be spelled out in advance in individual contracts so that the universities would know what is required before agreeing to a specific contract.

The three levels are

*In areas deemed "not sensitive," researchers would send papers to the Defense Department, at the same time they submit them for publication.

*In sensitive areas of basic research, the scientist would send findings to the Defense Department 60 days before submission for publication. The department's review would be purely advisory, and the researcher would make the final decision whether to publish.

*The third area has caused the greatest controversy. The Department wants to see all results from research in sensitive areas of exploratory development before submission for publication, and it wants the right to change or withhold publication.

Harvard scientists are concerned primarily about being forced to yield the decision on whether to publish to the Pentagon and about the vagueness of what the government means by "sensitive," says Dean of the Division of Applied Sciences Paul C. Martin '51.

But less than one percent of the academic research funded by the Defense Department will be considered "sensitive," an agency official says. Although a policy directive has not been formally issued. "The proposal has been approved by an internal Defense Department committee, and accepted as de facto policy, the official says.