The University has been engaged in bitter negotiations with the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) for almost a year to determine who will control the operation of the $12 million Cambridge Electron Accelerator (CEA). Although Harvard and the AEC will probably sign a contract within two weeks for $5 million a year to operate the accelerator, neither the Faculty nor the Administration is pleased with the final contract provisions.

University negotiaters refused to sign a contract with what Dean Ford called the "intolerable limitations" originally imposed by the government. But the final settlement will still place unnecessary and unwarranted restrictions on experimental work at the accelerator.

According to L. Gard Wiggins, administrative vice-President, "long hard negotiations have produced a contract that the University can live with." But Wiggins admits that the "independence of Faculty members involved with the CEA will be impaired."

Harvard did not expect to be threatened with government control when it started to build the accelerator, because all work done there is unclassified. The 1956 contract initiating construction of the project made no mention of any Federal control over the CEA, but several Faculty members expressed fear at the time that government involvement could mean government pressure.

Contract Controversy

The present controversy arose last spring when Harvard and AEC officials began negotiating the contract for the CEA's first year operating expenses. To the University's surprise, AEC negotiators presented a contract filled with objectionable requirements which the government labeled "matters of national policy." According to Wiggins, "the AEC was adamant in its demands at the beginning of the negotiations and insisted that no provision of the proposed contract could be changed."

Harvard absolutely refused to sign the contract, and Wiggins says that the University "probably would have refused to operate the accelerator if the government had not backed down." Although the AEC paid for the accelerator and thus technically owns it, Harvard owns the land on which the CEA stands. And only Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are actually empowered to operate the facility. In all probability, the main reason the AEC backed down from its original rigid demands is that it feared the spectacle of a $12 million electron accelerator standing idle in Cambridge.

Much of the problem over the operating contract arose because the AEC paid for the accelerator and considers it, according to Wiggins, "a substantial government facility." Within the past three years, Congress has authorized the AEC to impose various restrictions over projects in which the commission has a "substantial financial interest," whether or not the projects are classified.

It was this question of financial involvement in the accelerator which led the AEC to attempt to impose very severe restrictions on Harvard.

The University's interpretation of the project is, however, completely opposed to the AEC's. According to Wiggins, "the accelerator is considered by Harvard to be just another part of the Physics Department and should not be subject to any more governmental control than the rest of the Department."

Project Unclassified

"Since everyone agreed in 1956 that the project was to be unclassified," Wiggins says, "Harvard believed that the accelerator would be treated like any other University research project." Wiggins admits that Harvard "was perhaps naive in thinking that the question of AEC control of the project would never come up," but stresses that in 1956 "the AEC did not have the specific Congressional authority it has now to classify a project, in which it has substantial financial interest, as a government facility."

The most irritating of the AEC's original restrictions involved so-called "controls in the national interest" which would have given the AEC power to control all exchange of information between the CEA staff and Soviet bloc scientists. The AEC proposal required that no technical information be released to Soviet bloc nations unless a Soviet scientist agreed in advance to release "equally valuable information to the United States." Nobody has yet figured out how to determine "equally valuable information."

According to President Pusey, this demand "irritated the Faculty greatly and would have been a serious abridgement of the right of every Faculty member to do research and speak freely about his results."

After long negotiations the requirement was deleted, but substituted for it was a clause which reads: "Requests for unpublished information from foreign nations may be filled, but, when appropriate, information will be requested in return." Thus Harvard is no longer required to request equally valuable information from Soviet bloc nations, but Wiggins admits that "the ambiguity of the phrase could still hinder exchanges of information between the accelerator and foreign scientists."