Is there a right balance between security and knowledge?

Reading the recent claims that 1,000 United States student visas had been revoked or not renewed, I was reminded of my first trip to Beijing over 30 years ago.

The aim of the visit was to facilitate the processing of student visa applications to Australia. Thousands had piled up in the Australian embassy and its courtyard.

The main concerns were the applicants’ health and their capacity to pay. The first was a tuberculosis check which created a bustling covert market in chest X-rays. The second involved furnishing bank statements with healthy balances, at least on the day of printing.

Statecraft, security possibilities of espionage or intellectual property theft were at best minor interests.

The short game of economic return and cash flow elbowed out strategic and geopolitical concerns. This was the case even though Tiananmen Square had happened just a few months before. Looking back, those early years of the boom in international student mobility now seem innocent, naïve even.

Governments have spied on each other for centuries. Entrepreneurs and adventurers have long stolen ideas, machines and breeding stock. Francis Cabot Lowell in Massachusetts stole textile spinning technology from the English, who stole stained glass making from the Flemish and smuggled rubber tree seeds out of Brazil.

And in the drive for modernisation initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China pursued foreign intellectual property. It did so explicitly through aid and international development programmes, through commercial partnerships and through thousands of citizens studying abroad. This was no secret.

The arrival in the US of the first cohort of Chinese students to pursue Deng’s modernisation programme in late 1978 was recorded in the New York Times, albeit on page 15 of the 10 December edition. Nine of the first 12 students were in Stanford and Berkeley. In 40 years, the number has grown to about 370,000 and there are thousands more in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.

Economic pressure

That is what is different. As the importance of knowledge as a driver of economic growth and productivity has increased, so has the pressure to create, capture and apply that knowledge.

The scale is so much larger and the impact and value of the patents and formulae much greater and more likely to touch the lives of millions of people, be it through iodised salt, better food or faster and more reliable communication. This is starkest in the current pursuit of a COVID-19 vaccine, something vital to everyone, with great economic value and vast strategic import.

Of course, the pursuit and sharing of knowledge is regarded as a noble end by scholars and scientists, without the baggage of economic utility. There are benefits to all from the deeper understanding that comes from cooperative research and participation in diverse teams drawn from the most able.

Collegial exchange and peer review advance the formation of knowledge by sharing findings and methods so they can be tested and hopefully replicated. But this opens doors to plagiarism, theft, commercial exploitation and competitive advantage.

As a result, programmes of academic exchange and cooperation that foster the formation of communities of scholars get caught up in the whirlpools of national security and economic competitiveness.

International student numbers and requirements for entry visas become agenda items in trade disputes. Consular officials pay closer attention to the work histories and affiliations of researchers and graduate students looking to visit or study in laboratories and workshops.

Government funding agencies encourage universities to protect grant applications and pay attention to the involvement of other funders which can include foreign governments and enterprises seeking indirect access to new knowledge. These caveats and other security concerns create an unwelcoming, closed academic environment which runs counter to the climate of openness, academic freedom and intellectual curiosity that has fostered innovation and scientific advancement.

The right balance?

The rival concerns of competitive advantage and cooperative, collegial endeavour need to be reconciled.

Isolationism is not a viable, long-term strategy for knowledge-based societies and knowledge-intensive enterprises.

Similarly, a profligate and cavalier approach to intellectual property and the real value of new ideas and products is not viable, especially when that real value is something as pervasive as the lives saved by a treatment like penicillin.

What is a reasonable level of scrutiny for a student or researcher visa or for a place at a laboratory bench? The recent report of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on security issues in the ‘bioeconomy’ takes nearly 60 pages to conclude that there needs to be “the right balance”, protecting national interests and fostering innovation and growth of the field.

That is not a lot of help for my colleague in educational statistics and research methods who has 40 international graduate students concerned that their visas will be revoked or for the president of a small college in Missouri committed to preparing students to make a difference in the world.

It is a reminder that as nations, institutions and communities have become more connected and interdependent, our opportunities and our choices have become more complicated.

For my colleague and for numerous college presidents who are looking to maintain viable programmes and institutions, uncertainty increases because the visa decisions are made elsewhere using information they do not see.

One certainty is that we will not return to the naivety of the late 1980s. Instead we will have more purposeful academic partnerships. I hope.

Alan Ruby is a senior fellow at the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy in the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education in the United States.