http://chronicle.com/article/A-Catch-22/144285/
February 3, 2014 Catch-22: When Government Tells Professors What Not to Teach Teaching a course on intel & national security when your students are legally forbidden to read & discuss materials By Mary Manjikian How do you teach a course when many of your students are legally forbidden to read and discuss the materials? That situation arose recently in a graduate seminar on "Intelligence and National Security." Like many universities, mine draws a portion of its students from the military. We pride ourselves on being "military friendly," and until now it had been simple to adapt to these students' needs. Some take incompletes if they are deployed halfway through a semester. Online students sometimes request accommodations like reading articles instead of downloading video, because of low bandwidth on aircraft carriers or in encampments in Afghanistan. Sometimes students on dangerous missions ask to opt out of class assignments that might require revealing their identities on social media. This year I faced a new dilemma: The U.S. government has explicitly forbidden its employees who hold security clearances to read or discuss materials that are technically classified but now in the public domain thanks to Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning (formerly known as Bradley Manning). The materials include hundreds of thousands of U.S. Embassy cables available on WikiLeaks as well as documents regarding the U.S. intelligence community's budgets, personnel, and procedures. The list of people who may not read, discuss, or even listen to discussion of these materials includes a significant number of my students. In a graduate program in homeland security, it seems only natural to ask students to avail themselves of this information, since it is relevant to our seminars on recruitment, intelligence reform, and intelligence accountability. But by using these materials, I jeopardize my students' future employment and career success. Not only that: If I respect the restrictions and don't cover the material, don't I rob the rest of the class of a valuable educational opportunity? Is it fair to subject my civilian students who don't work for the government to a form of censorship? If I include the material, what about the students who may wish to opt out? Don't they miss out if they do only half the reading or avoid information that might challenge them and their worldviews the most? Where do we draw the line between offering a legitimate accommodation and allowing students to customize a course in such a way that their educational experience is different from that of their peers? Finally, should I really be tailoring my syllabus to conform with national-security policy? If I were teaching in an American-university program abroad and was told by foreign-government officials that my students were not allowed to read certain materials, I would very likely regard such advice as an attempt at censorship and a violation of academic freedom. Iam not alone in asking these questions. Recently I raised them in an online discussion forum known as H-Intel. The forum's members include intelligence analysts and practitioners as well as scholars both military and civilian. The exchange showed that there is little consensus on these matters. At military institutions like the Air Force Institute of Technology, the decision about whether public-domain but classified material can be used in courses is not left up to instructors or students. Those institutions simply do not include it. Marc Warburton, director of the (civilian) Great Plains National Security Education Consortium, at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, has decided not to discuss these materials in his class, either. He notes that "it will be difficult for cleared personnel to even talk about these revelations, as they will probably know something of the programs discussed or know of similar sources and methods that have not been revealed." He also recommends not leaving the decision about what to use up to students themselves. Doing so, he says, "puts them in the uncomfortable spot of choosing between being prepared for class and disregarding Department of Defense policy, which they ought not to do." Glenn Sheffield, an instructor at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, says that "for military personnel--or any DoD personnel--to access that material, on a personal or a government system, violates policy and puts in jeopardy their security clearances and their careers. I make that clear to my students." The University of Maryland University College, a civilian institution that is regarded as very military-friendly, has reached a somewhat innovative solution. In its email newsletter on cybersecurity, material that contains classified information is marked with an asterisk, and it is then up to the individual student to decide whether to keep reading. Peter Oleson, an adjunct associate professor there, says that "it's not a perfect solution, but it seems to balance sensitivity to government concerns and academic freedom." Other academics point to the dangers of allowing government policies to dictate an academic process, including students' future research agendas. James Pfiffner, director of the Ph.D. program at George Mason University's School of Public Policy, says: "Our U.S. students working for our military or intelligence agencies who follow the rules will be at an information disadvantage by not having information that our allies and enemies have." Kristian Gustafson, deputy director of Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, in London, notes that "the UK classification system doesn't offer any of these (perhaps nonsensical) penalties for looking at what everyone else can read in their daily broadsheet." He argues that since foreign scholars are carefully examining these materials (including revelations regarding American spying on allies), the United States should be examining and studying these materials as well. He adds that these materials "inform important moral debates that scholars of intelligence need to engage with." And as Peter Oleson says, "In an academic context, I fear that if the security community can enforce a 'no read' ban on such materials, what else can it decide to ban for whatever reason?" Mark Stout, a lecturer in global-security studies at the Johns Hopkins University, raises a related issue. In some cases, he says, his students might pre-emptively constrain their own reading material. Even before the Snowden revelations, a student might have decided not to look at a terrorist website, for example, out of fear that doing so might jeopardize a security clearance that he or she wanted or might want in the future. Students' avoidance of writing theses or dissertations on potentially controversial topics because of worries about their government-job prospects has implications for the field as a whole. The current situation has, in Stout's word, "flummoxed" many of today's intelligence scholars. But it has also inspired creative workarounds. At George Mason, faculty members--including Gen. Michael V. Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency--have turned to fictional sources like spy novels, films, and television shows to provide examples for discussion. The thinking is that since events being discussed are (in theory) fictional, civilian and military students alike will be able to speculate and discuss at will, without worrying about having violated any security restrictions. Similarly, Rear Adm. Larry Baucom, an adjunct professor at Regent University, suggests that faculty members use sources like autobiographies by members of the intelligence services. Because such sources are vetted before being published, anything potentially compromising has already been removed. Michael Fowler, an assistant professor of military and strategic studies at the U.S. Air Force Academy, advises focusing on the general issues raised by these security leaks without necessarily referring to specific cables or documents. "I find it useful to discuss the ethics involved," he says. "Is there a threshold where leaking government secrets is ethical though illegal? When is it OK to collect intelligence on your allies? Are some collection methods more ethical than others? And what is the appropriate balance between personal privacy and security?" My own feelings are mixed. I'm a former U.S. Foreign Service officer and am married to a retired Army officer. I have taught at both military and civilian institutions, and I believe that all of us, as Americans, have a duty to protect the safety of our troops and the integrity and competitiveness of our military. I know what happens when a powerful state makes academic policies and there is no organized forum for questioning or opposing them. But my earlier academic pursuits focused on the politics of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. And in my most recent book, I described how scientists in China have been affected by state policies regarding the distribution of funding. In other words, I know what happens when a powerful state makes academic policies and there is no organized forum for questioning or opposing them. I also worry about accreditation and how these developments might affect the transfer of credits from military to civilian institutions. Can a military course that knowingly excludes significant parts of the national-security curriculum be considered comparable to a civilian course that does not? Is it wrong to issue students transfer credits in that situation? This is why scholarly organizations such as the International Studies Association and the American Political Science Association need to develop guidelines about the rights and responsibilities of political scientists in adhering to or opposing U.S. national-security directives. We need clear policies about what materials will and will not be published and excerpted in academic journals, and how transfer credits from military universities will be treated when a course differs significantly from that taught in a civilian institution. Scholars need to take the lead in engaging with this debate so that our policies are proactive rather than reactive, as well as fair and reasonable. Mary Manjikian is associate dean of the Robertson School of Government at Regent University. -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. 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