When MIT President Charles M. Vest stepped to the podium last Friday to address more than 100 researchers and one White House advisor, his mien counterbalanced a series of pat presentations by the fast-talking colleagues who flanked him. Bent over the MIT-crested lectern, he cracked a few self-deprecating jokes in a West Virginia drawl and keyed through some Powerpoint slides bearing droll titles.

But his message was clear and, in some cases, forcibly critical of existing federal policy. Governmental regulations, he said, must work to engender rather than impede the exchange of information on innovative research if science is to contribute fully to national security development.

“Some people might say I’m being too alarmist on these matters, but I don’t think so,” he told the audience of a day-long symposium titled “Homeland and Global Security: Science, Technology, and the Role of the University.”

The affable university president, known to his colleagues as “Chuck,” hardly seemed the most alarmist of the 12 panelists gathered to discuss the future of the nation’s security from international terrorism.

But Vest has been adamantly promoting a series of issues publicly since Sept. 11, when the government began to classify certain projects as “sensitive”—a vaguely defined research category sometimes used to prevent work from being published—and bar foreign researchers from certain countries from participating in sensitive or classified projects.

His concerns mirror those that have preoccupied universities nationwide, including Harvard—concerns that drive to the heart of what it means to be a research institution in a nation working to combat homeland-security threats.

A Tale of Two Committees

Last year, MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on Access to and Disclosure of Scientific Information issued a report titled “In the Public Interest” outlining how the Institute ought to carry out classified research.

The document concluded that classified research at MIT should continue to take place in off-campus facilities that could be more easily secured. It outlined research procedures intended to allow MIT to perform national-security research while upholding its standards of academic freedom.

Vest, who is a member of President Bush’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology, championed this balance at the conference on Friday.

“Research thrives on openness and suffers in isolation,” he explained in his address, urging the government to take a “hands-off” approach to development, harnessing research both from universities and private industry—in effect, to shift the onus of innovation and responsibility as much as possible into the hands of research experts themselves.

Now at Harvard, a similar group of research experts is undertaking a related study. The Provost’s Committee on Biodefense Research and Regulations, assembled last August, will present a report—the result of its deliberations over the course of the year—to University Provost Steven E. Hyman next month.

Unlike MIT, Harvard does not carry out classified research. The committee’s report will instead focus on the University’s research on select biological agents—the branch of national security research that some of its schools do pursue.

The committee has concerned itself specifically with the University’s role in responding to research on so-called “special agents”—a list of 36 biological pathogens deemed a potential threat to national security.

As a result, the Provost’s Committee’s reports will cover subjects that the MIT committee did not address.