Dartmouth faculty may receive grants for ground-breaking research, but they are not being funded to crack codes for the CIA or work on any other top-secret or highly sensitive project. Official College policy prohibits professors from accepting grants with restrictions on publication, according to physics professor and vice provost for research Martin Wybourne.
"This is a faculty policy, and it really allows us to fulfill our purpose as an educational institution to make sure that we can publish our research findings openly and freely and on a non-discriminatory basis," Wybourne said, noting that the policy was a faculty-made decision.
While Wybourne and other professors told The Dartmouth that the policy does not often affect faculty research, Wybourne pointed to the computer science department as the most often affected.
Computer science research that includes "very sensitive technology or sensitive mathematical codes for computer systems" may have restrictions on publication due to national security, Wybourne said.
Some research projects that require test results furnished by the government or private companies may also face publication restrictions like a pre-publication review, engineering professor George Cybenko said in an interview with The Dartmouth. After such a review, the government or company may censor parts of the paper, Cybenko said.
Publication restrictions are "always negotiable," Cybenko said, so on the rare occasion that an issue does arise, professors are not immediately prohibited from accepting a grant or award. When a faculty member is offered a research opportunity with a clause in the contract restricting publication, Wybourne and his colleagues attempt to negotiate with the agency to remove the clause, Wybourne said.
"The College has been pretty successful at having those restrictions removed," Cybenko said.
If negotiations prove unsuccessful, however, the contract will be rejected and the faculty member cannot accept the grant.
The International Trade in Arms Regulations, which govern export control for certain technologies enforced by the U.S. State Department, may also restrict what is considered acceptable research, Cybenko said. ITAR restricts the export of certain chemical, biological and nuclear technologies, including research in these fields, he said.
Professors, however, generally prefer not to engage in research with ITAR restrictions, Cybenko said.
"In general, because this policy exists [at the College], the faculty know about it and won't apply for certain types of grants that are restricted," Wybourne said.
Many of Dartmouth's peer institutions have similar policies regarding grants for research with restrictions on publication, although the details of the policies vary, Wybourne said. Some universities, including the Johns Hopkins University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have specific laboratories that are allowed to perform classified research, Cybenko said.
JHU's official policy states that "no classified research will be carried out on any academic campus of Johns Hopkins," but classified research does occur at the Applied Physics Laboratory, as the laboratory is "a separate entity from the academic part of the university," according to JHU's Vice Provost for Research Scott Zeger. Classified research at APL is conducted by employees hired specifically for research, not professors, Zeger said.
Cybenko noted that universities like Johns Hopkins have a tradition of performing classified research. The APL, for instance, was founded during World War II to support the federal government in the war effort, Zeger said. Stanford University, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, MIT and the University of Chicago created similar institutes for classified research during this period, he said.
After the war, these universities continued to perform government research, but maintained the institutes as entities separate from academic research, Zeger said.
Johns Hopkins chose to maintain its laboratory out of "national interest," Zeger said.
"But [Johns Hopkins] is at the same time committed to academic freedom for its faculty," Zeger said.
The College lacks a research institute for classified and government research, and hires only a limited number of employees exclusively for research.
"We're an educational university and don't have that much research staff," he said.
Students in the sciences said they support restrictions on research that cannot be published.
"Research isn't worth that much if you can't publish it," Annie Lape '13, a prospective engineering major, said.
Cybenko also said that publication can be crucial for students.
"It would be inappropriate to start doing research students couldn't publish," Cybenko said.
