Grants Resource Center – by Fatoyinbo, Willette B.
As reported in Inside Higher Education, Last week, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley (R) introduced the Protect Our Universities Act of 2019, which would grant the U.S. Department of Homeland Security permission to lead the National Security Technology Task Force aimed to address the “…threat of foreign government influence and threats to academic research integrity on college campuses and for other purposes.”
The bill is meant to address concerns of pressure on international students to share highly sensitive, domestic STEM intellectual property with China, Russia and Iran. The bill advocates for substantial protection against international students with access to classified, federally-funded collegiate research, noting an upward of 300,000 Chinese nationals study at U.S. universities or join the STEM workforce at U.S. based science laboratories, innovation centers, incubators, and think tanks each year.
Protections outlined in the bill include the development and management of a Sensitive Research Topics List; background screening on principal investigators and student researchers; and additional approval or denial of researcher participation.
While recognizing the value of safeguarding U.S.-based academic STEM research, a growing number of higher education advocacy organizations and institutions recently endorsed a different bill coined, the Securing American Science and Technology Act (SASTA) which would create an alliance of federal agencies (led by the Office of the National Science and Technology Council in consultation with the National Security Advisor) aimed to “establish an interagency working group to develop best practices and safety measures to protect federally funded research from foreign interference, cyberattacks, theft, or espionage…”
SASTA proposes the creation of a new ‘‘National Science, Technology, and Security Roundtable” to further explore and identify short and long-term critical threats to academic research. Among the responsibilities bestowed on the guiding body, the roundtable will create effective approaches for communicating such threats; develop best practices for addressing and mitigating risks; and periodically organize workshops and issue publicly available reports on the topics, according to the bill.
GRC will continue to track and share new developments on the direction of bipartisan legislation in support of protecting academic research across the country.