Rollback of US restrictions on global scientific exchange slows

US universities are growing wary of the Biden administration’s approach to national security and collaborations with international researchers, fearing that bureaucratic inertia might allow some of the more overt anti-foreigner antagonisms of the Trump era to continue and to hamper vital work.

The Biden team has brought universities a baseline improvement in respect and communication as well as a shared sense that barriers to global scientific cooperation fundamentally hurt the US more than they help.

But universities are growing increasingly vocal about what they say are continuing problems, including: no major regulatory easing of anti-foreigner suspicions; no clear unification of scientist disclosure requirements that fuelled the Trump administration’s anti-China legal prosecutions; and no assurances on reversing the rising costs of administrative vigilance, especially in cases of lower-resourced institutions.

In one of the more direct challenges to the government’s approach, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has issued a 54-page document setting out its own policy regarding collaborations with China, saying it cannot trust federal officials to set the right balance of risk and reward.

“The US has more to lose than to gain if we begin to degrade or dismantle the system of open science,” Richard Lester, MIT’s associate provost in charge of international activities, told a gathering of colleagues organised by the National Academies of Sciences to examine issues of foreign engagement in federally funded science.

The two-day event featured numerous academic leaders arguing that the departure of the Trump administration – with its policies and pronouncements designed to scare off scholars from China and beyond – was insufficient by itself to revive a badly needed stream of top scientific talent coming from abroad.

Participants included Michael McQuade, the former vice-president for research at Carnegie Mellon University, who warned of a possible collapse in government promises to simplify and harmonise across funding agencies the financial disclosure forms that are used by researchers to report their overseas ties – a priority for universities after the Trump crackdown on Chinese partnerships, which relied heavily on amplifying discrepancies in paperwork filings.

“We have lost the bureaucratic battle if NIH and NSF have both independently already issued interpretations in guidance,” Dr McQuade said of the top two federal science funding agencies, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Keith McIntosh, vice-president for information services at the University of Richmond, was among several who complained that managing government-imposed security requirements involving overseas work had grown unaffordable for small institutions.

Ernest Moniz, an MIT professor of physics and former US secretary of energy, said the government could help by making clear that international students have no restrictions on research participation once they have been deemed eligible to enter the US. He and others also criticised the government’s practice of sometimes imposing new restrictions on specific research projects after its overall topic had been ruled to warrant no security-based classification.

Professor Lester made clear that MIT, with its new China policy, intends to work within existing federal rules and regulations. But he said those rules leave universities with significant flexibility in handling individual cases. The MIT policy includes creating new formal review processes that make greater use of the institute’s expertise in such fields as history and economics to determine the most productive ways of engaging more fully with China and any other countries that pose challenges for the US in areas such as national security, espionage and human rights.

“Universities can’t afford to outsource China policy to the federal government,” Professor Lester said. “There’s just too much at stake, for the universities themselves and for the country.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com