Tag: isolation
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Facing global isolation, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu addresses U.N. General Assembly (PBS NewsHour)
Higher Education Inquirer : Facing global isolation, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu addresses U.N. General Assembly (PBS NewsHour)
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U.S. Universities Can’t Innovate in Isolation (opinion)
In a paradoxical bid to “make America great again,” President Trump and congressional Republicans are pushing to restrict international research collaboration in U.S. higher education. The Department of Education is investigating Harvard University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Pennsylvania for potential violations of the Higher Education Act, which requires universities to report foreign gifts and contracts valued at $250,000 or more.
Policymakers are further proposing to lower that threshold to $50,000 and require universities to obtain federal waivers before entering into contracts with “foreign countries of concern.” The administration is also seeking to prohibit Harvard from enrolling international students and placing full or partial travel bans on people from 19 countries. And after pausing student visa interviews for about a month starting in May, the administration is now scrutinizing applicants’ social media accounts to approve or deny their visas.
At a time when the global race to develop cutting-edge technologies is accelerating, the U.S. should be expanding—not constraining—its international research partnerships.
Federal demands for foreign gift reporting kicked off in 1986, after Georgetown University received donations from Arab governments to establish its Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Policymakers worried about potential strings attached, such as influence over curricula and threats to free speech, resulting in legislation requiring universities to disclose foreign funding. Over time, however, compliance waned, and successive administrations allowed the law to fall into disuse.
That changed in 2019, when the Trump administration revived enforcement and began investigating universities for noncompliance, uncovering billions of dollars in unreported funding. The concern then, as now, was that a lack of transparency threatened academic independence and posed national security risks.
It is understandable to want to know if foreign governments are influencing American institutions. But is there good reason to think current rules are effective, or that stricter ones would be?
There is little evidence that decades of lax enforcement have led to significant harm. The Trump administration’s China Initiative, for example, sought to root out espionage in academia but instead cast a wide, indiscriminate net, leading to criminal charges against professors like Feng Tao, Anming Hu and Gang Chen based on questionable allegations. In each case, charges were ultimately dropped or the scientists were acquitted, but not before reputations were damaged and careers derailed. Of the 162 cases prosecuted by the Department of Justice under the China Initiative, only about 20 involved university researchers, and at least nine of these cases ended in dismissed charges or acquittals. The initiative illustrates how geopolitical anxiety can erode academic freedom and damage innocent collaborations for little gain.
Both the previous and current Trump administrations have scrutinized universities’ research, including on dual-use technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics systems and laser technology, arguing that they can be used to advance foreign governments’ (particularly China’s) military objectives. But politicians too often fail to acknowledge that most applications in these fields are nonmilitary, including autonomous vacuum cleaners, industrial robots and self-driving cars. Autonomous systems have been a long-standing area of global research, much of it geared toward civilian innovation. Moreover, federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, have implicitly supported this research through funding.
While reporting can be onerous, requiring universities to obtain federal waivers to collaborate with researchers from “foreign countries of concern” is more intrusive. So too are possibly biased social media screening of foreign students and travel bans that prevent entire populations from engaging with U.S. institutions. These policies move beyond transparency into gatekeeping, forcing universities to seek permission before working with researchers from countries like China, home to more than 1.4 billion people and a global leader in scientific research. Past historical lessons on how political tensions have been allowed to erode academic freedom do not need to be relearned.
Although the U.S. Department of Education claimed to improve the process for foreign gift reporting with a new portal in the first Trump administration, it increased the amount of information for colleges to report. The reporting process, while intended to enhance transparency, imposes bureaucratic costs on institutions.
Preserving open academic environments, where innovation can thrive, is not a liability, but a strategic advantage. Still, precautions should be taken. Sensitive research should be classified by the federal government. Companies partnering with universities should set clear terms about who can access proprietary projects. People who violate classification rules or contract terms should face consequences. But the default should be freedom, not prohibition.
To keep America great, it is essential to preserve the openness and intellectual freedom that define U.S. higher education and make it the best postsecondary system in the world, at least as indicated by its dominance of international rankings, share of Nobel laureates and attractiveness to international students. Open academic environments encourage innovation, foster critical thinking and enable researchers to explore cutting-edge fields—including those vital to national competitiveness.
If the U.S. is to maintain its position as a global leader in research, it must champion academic freedom, not restrict it.
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Supporting the careers of researchers means innovation, not isolation
The phrase attributed to Sir Isaac Newton, “if I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants,” is often used as a metaphor for research and innovation: how each great thinker builds on the thoughts and research of others, the unending column of prize winners and esteemed fellows pursuing academic endeavour.
However, the environment I sought as a researcher and aim to enable as a university leader is more of a supportive collective, certainly one with a much less precarious base.
Perhaps the most important lessons learnt during my own research career was that the giants of research, innovation and knowledge exchange whose shoulders we are more often standing on are not the senior staff but rather the PhD students, early career researchers, postdoctoral fellows and technicians, who turn challenging questions posed into the most exciting innovative answers. And often without the bias of doing things the way we have in the past.
Untangling
Achieving the UK’s priority of innovation and the growth it drives requires a long-range vision to set direction matched with agility to rapidly pivot as new opportunities arise. This agility needs a skilled research workforce and the attraction of the brightest minds into roles at all stages of a research and innovation career.
However, these giants, whose shoulders we balance UK innovation on, need long-term confidence to initiate a career which currently has precarity baked in. Growing investment to support research and innovation is needed, but investment in equipment, facilities and consumables will not succeed without engaged and enabling expertise.
Alongside this, regional disparity of funding, low research cost recovery, and increasing regulatory demands are posing the question of how much research can any university afford to undertake. The simple answer may appear to be to do less, or divert funding to specialist institutes without dual responsibility for teaching – however, this would undermine the agility that is underpinned by broad expertise, civic and industrial partnerships and infrastructure which resides across our higher education institutions.
Fixing this knotty problem needs a systematic approach, balancing external and internal funding alongside improved recovery of the true cost of research. With restrictions in the sector and reduced internal funding impacting decisions, it is imperative to not forget the essential role of the precarious base on which our research activity in the UK is built – and to support it accordingly.
Concordat priorities
My commitment to career development and recognition of researchers is why I am excited to be continuing the great work led by Julia Buckingham as the incoming chair of the Researcher Development Concordat Strategy Group, which oversees the Researcher Development Concordat.
The concordat was first published in 2019, building on agreements of funding bodies and universities over a decade earlier. The current signatories are over 100 higher education and research institutes, who commit to the principles of environment and culture, employment, and career development for researchers in our institutions and 17 funding agencies who set grant holder requirements relating to the concordat commitments.
The concordat has recently undergone a review which identified future areas of focus to achieve continued effectiveness. Three priorities were identified:
First, agreeing a set of shared principles to define the characteristics of a positive environment for research culture, and second, working to a shared set of research culture values with measurable indicators of progress. We seek to align a set of shared broad principles to define the characteristics of a positive environment for research culture. While these must link to the REF people, culture and environment measures, they need to be high-level shared principles and ensure that they define measurable indicators of progress to avoid confusion across multiple agendas. These also need to be high enough level to ensure a collective agreement to deliver whilst also accommodating the diversity and breadth of higher education institutions and research organisations.
The third priority is simplifying the bureaucracy. This is essential in a sector with ever-growing demands of attention and associated costs to deliver. While we must maintain accountability, we need to simplify the bureaucracy to work in service of our principles and values, not dictate them. In short, we must simplify for our communities how the different national concordats can complement rather than compete for attention. To achieve this, we are reviewing and reforming reporting requirements to achieve better alignment and to incorporate them into existing reporting where possible. We are working with other bodies to align data and reporting requirements.
I am also keen to work with industry body representatives to understand and reduce barriers to the movement of careers from academia to industry and vice versa. This porosity of career is needed for both innovation and rapid business adoption of innovative ideas. For this porosity to support innovation and growth we also need to enhance engagement from the industry to support researchers throughout a changing career.
While this work is delivered by the concordat strategy group, the concordat is collectively owned by the sector and continued engagement is needed to ensure the concordat is fit for purpose. Given this, we are looking for engagement in future work, more details about which can be found on the concordat webpage. I look forward to working with higher education institutions, industry, funders, the Researcher Development Concordat Strategy Group, and individuals to deliver our collective commitments.
The Researcher Development Concordat Strategy Group secretariat is jointly funded through funding bodies from the four nations: Research England, the Scottish Funding Council, Medr (previously HEFCW), and the Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland. I thank them for their continued support.
