In early April, Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby organized a special information and discussion meeting addressing faculty fears that the USA PATRIOT Act and related legislation threatened to stifle their academic freedom.

University President Lawrence H. Summers has also issued a statement affirming the University’s commitment to upholding its standards of academic freedom.

“It would be my pledge that the University will, in the future as in the past, uphold the commitment to academic freedom with all the vigor that we can,” Summers said in the April 8 statement.

Much of the Provost’s Committee’s report will focus on matters pertaining only to the Medical School (HMS) and the School of Public Health, the only schools to pursue research on special-agents and their components. But the Committee’s deliberations encompass concerns that have preoccupied the University as a whole.

And finding solutions for Harvard’s notoriously decentralized community, Adelstein says, represents a unique challenge.

But according to Kevin Casey, Harvard’s senior director of federal and state relations, at least some of the confusion has been cleared up by a Cold War era directive that has resurfaced in the wake of Sept. 11.

The document, issued by the Reagan administration and formally known as State Department Decision Directive 189 (CDS 198), stipulates that all research should either be classified or unclassified—with no gray areas in between.

“Condoleezza Rice and other members of the administration have affirmed that [CDS 189] remains the governing document of the administration,” he says. “What we have been working on is trying to have that affirmation sent down through the chain of command from the administration.”

Members of the administration have also posed the possibility of bringing the document up to date to address present concerns, he says.

But Harvard—and the Provost’s Committee—also face other concerns.

Research on select agents must be undertaken with a certain degree of security. The School of Public Health, the only faculty presently in possession of non-exempt special agents, has undertaken special security measures, Casey says.

The Committee is discussing how to meet the requirements for national-security research on sensitive biological agents on a campus as trafficked as Harvard’s, according to Adelstein.

Difficulty arises in establishing universal standards for research practices that are able to effectively govern all of the diverse work that goes on at each of the University’s distinct schools, says Kathleen M. Buckley, the University’s assistant provost for science policy. She describes “a very big cultural difference” between HMS and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, because of the large number of undergraduates that it includes.

Yet the breadth of issues facing the Provost’s committee only represent the tip of the national-security iceberg—a constellation of interrelated considerations that at once present the opportunity to empower and to impede the nation’s top research universities.

‘People Matter’