The tension between freedom and national security has been felt in America since even before the founding of the United States. As early as 1759, Benjamin Franklin opined in his Historical Review of Pennsylvania, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Nothing in recent years has exacerbated this tension more than the Patriot Act, which was passed by Congress with virtually no debate just 45 days after 9/11.

	Joan Scott and Irving Lerch speaking at the Patriot Act conference. Photo, Stasia Pasela.

Concern about the implications of the Act for the academy nationwide, and for the City University in particular, led the University Faculty Senate executive committee to present a conference, “The Patriot Act and the University,” on November 21 at the Hunter School of Social Work. “We thought we needed to know specifically how the Act could endanger academic freedom,” says the UFS Chair and Trustee Susan O’Malley.

Notable among several experts who spoke were Joan Scott, a distinguished historian now at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Research who has been a longtime member and chair of the AAUP’s Committee on Academic Freedom, which recently published a major report dealing with the Patriot Act. Irving Lerch, Director of International Affairs for the American Physical Society and on the board of the Committee of Concerned Scientists, spoke on the Act’s negative effects on international science. The full AAUP report is online at www.aaup.org/statements/REPORTS/Post9–11.pdf.

“The conference was a great success,” O’Malley says. “More than 100 faculty attended, listening and discussing intently for many hours.” Given what they heard, she adds, “the UFS reactivated its Academic Freedom Committee.”

Reiterating a premise of the AAUP report, Dr. Scott said that “academic freedom is crucial to national security.” Its most disturbing aspect “is that it collapses previously separate powers of law enforcement” and also “reverses the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980.” Of particular academic concern, Scott noted that the Patriot Act “amends the Freedom of Information Act, which many of us have used to do historical work.” Now, she said, “documents will not be released if ‘there is a sound legal basis for refusing the request,” which is usually linked to issues of national security.” Scott also expressed concern at Patriot Act weakening of the Family Education and Privacy Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, as well as gag orders on those, even librarians and booksellers, who supply information to law enforcement officials.

Dr. Lerch expressed serious concern—backed up by a Powerpoint program—about the Patriot Act’s chilling effect on scientific progress and on the movement of students and researchers (about 175,000 visitors come to the U.S. to study science a year).“Students prevented from entering, colleagues unable to pursue major long-term research,” Lerch said, “this is essentially what has happened.”

“In physics, two-thirds of Ph.D.-granting departments and almost half the Master’s-granting departments have reported students unable to attend because of visa problems,” Lerch revealed.

Emphasizing that the best science requires openness, Lerch summed up that “what is happening is not only denigrating the scientific enterprise, but also doing serious damage to the economy and the national security of the U.S.”