President's Comments, UAF Faculty Senate Meeting #104, 29 October 2001
Norm Swazo

Donald Kennedy, past president of Stanford University, has
remarked in his book, Academic Duty (Harvard University Press, 1997), "By
nature, universities are controversial places. Their successes and
failures draw intense public scrutiny because they really matter."
Kennedy adds, "As our society needs higher education, so higher education
needs public trust. Thus, we must take the criticism [from the public]
seriously, and ask about its origin". The origin of this criticism,
argues Kennedy, "has much to do with our internal failure to come to grips
with responsibility in the university. Having been given a generous dose
of academic freedom, we haven't taken care of the other side of the
bargain.If we can clarify our perception of duty and gain public
acceptance of it, we will have fulfilled an important obligation to
society that nurtures us. That obligation constitutes the highest
institutional form of academic duty".

Kennedy's remarks are apropos in this moment in which I call
attention to the academic duty of the UAF Faculty Senate. Surely we
concur with Kennedy in his claim that "The very heart of the institution's
academic duty to society is the work of its faculty". It is the work of
the faculty that is central to garnering the public trust. We should
therefore take notice when a member of the public such as local columnist
Dan O'Neill writes (Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Saturday, October 20,
2001) with reference to prospective classified research at UAF, "A culture
of secrecy may be intrinsic to military research, but it is anathema to a
university".

O'Neill's statement signals a public criticism as the work of UAF
faculty meets with public scrutiny. Properly engaged, such criticism
ought to reinforce our need to "clarify our perception of our duty",
specifically our duty to society, as we debate the issue of conducting
classified research at UAF. Whatever the policy recommendation forwarded
in due course by the UAF Faculty Senate, this recommendation must be
advanced as part of our clarification of our academic duty and with a view
to gaining a public acceptance of our perception of that duty. Kennedy
observes that "it is much easier to distrust an institution whose
operations and purposes are obscure", and surely this provides advance
warning as we here at UAF take up the question of classified research that
may inevitably entail "a culture of secrecy" which O'Neill says is
"anathema to a university".

It is essential that we get the right policy in place here at UAF.
The levels of secrecy that characterize classified research are, in my
view, all the more formidable when related to what Kennedy (with reference
to comments made by the German physicist Max Planck) calls "an implacable
law of the economics of knowledge":

Each incremental unit of new knowledge costs more that the last. It's not
hard to explain. We tend to answer the easier questions first; the
answers to those then suggest harder questions. Furthermore, we develop
new tools in the course of our investigations and then apply them to
subsequent work. For a constant increment of gain at the frontier we thus
find ourselves allocating more and more resources.

As the UAF Faculty Senate today formally initiates our discussion
with a view to recommending a policy on classified research, I urge
Senators to do so with all the requisite seriousness that this question
poses for our academic duty to society and to the public trust we must
ever strive to sustain. And, I especially urge Senators to bear in mind
that "implacable law of the economics of knowledge" which is perhaps even
more germane to the conduct of classified research.