Advocate Summary

Issue:  Student Visas & Laboratory Security
Advocate:  Harvard University – Kevin Casey
Date of Interview: 6/4/02

Basic Background
Okay.  I would say the most intense area that we've been working on since September 11 and will be embroiled in moving forward has to do with border security.  There are several kind of moving parts to the areas of bioterrorism legislation.  Some of them are related to universities and research universities.  They would have to do with student visa immigration policies, which have been controversial over the years and since September 11 there was a heightened interest in "border security" issues with INS.  Wrapped up in all that are concerns for the universities to preserve our ability to attract researchers and scholars and students from around the world with a minimal amount of disruption but with, in this kind of climate, a willingness to do our part.  That's been a challenging set of issues.
Then the bioterrorism legislation which is similar, has aspects that include student visas, but also has some laboratory security issues.  In research universities where people may be working on anthrax research, for example, there are concerns about the security measures that universities are taking to make sure that untoward people don't get access to those kind of agents.  They call them select agents.  The challenge for us there has been, again, to provide some level of accountability and security and preserve the traditional atmosphere of a university, which is the free flowing of information and sharing and collaborative atmosphere that is an academic setting.  Those are challenging sets of issues too, and they're kind of related even though they're on separate pieces of legislation.
Also included in that is the administration, which at the same time is also engaged in a review of these various laboratory security issues, student visa issues.  They are going to be reporting, there's something called a presidential decision directive, which right after September 11 President Bush signed.  That basically instructed the Justice Department and the State Department to report back recommendations on these same areas that I've been talking to, the Congress has been dealing with.  
So there's sort of these three moving parts that have the possibility and still have the possibility of going in directions that could be very problematic to universities, or that could go – and they're certainly going to have an impact on universities.  But our challenge has been to work with the administration and with Congress, demonstrate a willingness to try to provide a level of certainty about security in all these areas but also maintain the traditions of the university sector.  So that's been a set of issues, it's not like one in particular discrete issue.  There's a bunch of issues glommed into that that have been taking up a lot of our time.
	Anti-terrorism is the broad issue and then there are three parts that affect universities, the security issues, the student visa issues – two main parts.  Laboratory security and student visa issues.

Another example of another issue that was wrapped into this whole thing is, part of this presidential directive, what they asked State and Justice to look into was certain people having restricted access to "sensitive areas of study" on campuses.  That's basically as much as it really said.  It created sort of a concern among universities saying, what does that mean?  Are we supposed to monitor people from certain countries, say you can take this part of the curriculum but you can't take that part, you can't take nuclear physics but you can take political science, but you can't change from one to the other.  So there was a little uncertainty about what are we going to be required to do here.  Are they going to go through our curriculum, would there be a requirement that the government certify what your curriculum is and who has access.  Don't forget that a lot of campuses have almost all their stuff on the Web these days.
We have been working with the administration.  John Marburger at the Office of Science and Technology Policy has been an instrumental liaison in that regard.  He was appointed very shortly after – he wasn't in place really when this first PDD-2 was issued.  He hadn't been appointed yet.  He came in afterwards.  He was a former president of SUNY-Stony Brook and ran Brookhaven National Labs.  He has an understanding of these things.  His office has played a liaison role with the university community, very constructive.
They've outlined how they think they're going to work this issue.  They've briefed us on what they believe they're going to propose.  That is that there will be this new panel, there will be a group empanelled that will be representative of all the different government agencies, including the FBI, CIA, counterintelligence and intelligence community, as well as NIH and other folks.  
What they would do, they would review certain visa applicants who were coming from a country – certain people would be flagged if they were planning – certain people would be restricted or would be recommended to be restricted from sensitive areas of study that are uniquely available in the United States.  Meaning that it would be a special subject matter that is somehow available at an institution here in the United States that may not be in United Kingdom or France or something.  That probably narrows down the number of areas that might be.  But this panel would determine on an ongoing basis what areas in their view are unique and sensitive.  
The State Department and INS would flag particular visa holders, if they were from Syria, say.  They probably automatically would be flagged if they were from one of those seven countries.  That application would go to what they're calling the IPASS panel and they would make a recommendation on whether that person should be prohibited from coming, prohibited from studying certain things, certified that they could study political science but not transfer into other areas.  
I'm not quite sure how that would work and we don't quite know.  We know what the basic skeletal structure of this group is supposed to be, but once that group is empanelled, how they view their role, is something we'll have to continue to watch.  As they've described it, it's a process that can be workable and can provide the process that we probably could live with.  But it's still very uncertain how this ultimately will be put in place.
For example, it doesn't have a formal means of liaisoning with the university and research community on an ongoing basis.  What we've been trying to ask for is some sort of advisory role in the ultimate apparatus that they put together.  It's unclear how that will come out.  But we do feel it's important for there to be a connection to this, because it's going to be important.  There should be some scientific connection to this group that's going to be determining sensitive areas of study and the science behind it.  
So that's an ongoing discussion that they've told us they're likely to create this body by executive order, which is not a normal process.  Normally you would be looking at a regulation process where we would be able to comment and all that.  So if it's going to be empanelled by executive order and avoid that kind of process, then it's important that we continue to make the case that there should be some natural informal advisory capacity or something that gives us some connection.  Give the community broadly, not Harvard specifically.  I'm talking about universities of the research community broadly, whether it's the National Science Board or that kind of thing.

There are a few institutions who underwent what they call – we had an audit.  Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General conducted audits – I don't know how many have been done, but at ten universities they plan to audits of how we are implementing the USA Patriot Act.  Any time there's an audit with more than five institutions, Harvard's always one of them that gets audited.  So we had about a six or eight week audit from the Office of Inspector General.  They sent us a list of questions that we had to respond to and then they did onsite visits, inspections, looked into security, made efforts to breach certain security.  
People at the labs where the select agent was at Harvard as well as the ones where we had exempt select agents.  I think they probably went to most of the sixteen or seventeen other labs at Harvard.  There will be a report issued from them at some point, we haven't received it yet.  But they did give us an exit interview and made some recommendations that went from putting cameras in certain places and moving the refrigerators from one place to another, where the actual agents were located, the space they might be in.  
That was interesting because we, in preparation for that, surveyed every lab in the entire university to do an inventory of how many select agents we had and where they were.  There was one envelope we found that was from the 1870s that just said anthrax on it.  It was from the labs of past year, actually, supposedly.  But we don't know what's actually in it, what the current state of it is.  So it's been in a safe.  So they were interested in that.  We just didn't know how to characterize that.  But we did determine all the information about where this stuff was, it was good for us to be able to go through that.  
But the universities who went through that, because we went through that audit were very much engaged with each other down here.  We're part of this group to try to come up with principles, because we're aware of what they were looking at already with the USA Patriot Act and what other things might be coming down the road.  The possible expansion of those lists, which would require a much greater vigilance on campus.  If you included chemicals, then chemistry departments and things like that, you could really provide a huge imposition on campuses.  Right now you can isolate labs where these researchers are doing work on these things.  
A campus could elect to, if somebody's going to do this kind of research, we're going to put them in a segregated area with the knowledge that anybody who is going to be doing that research will have to undergo these background checks that are going to be required under the new law and be certified that they're not a restricted person.  That would provide a more high-level assurance of security, because if this stuff is dangerous, as most people would agree it can be, then that's the way some people might elect to do it.  Then you don't have the disruptions of all other places in a building, if everyone in the building had to be checked.  That's an approach that may be taken at Harvard [inaudible], I'm not sure.  We're still confronting that.
The other thing is that while this has been going on, this is an area of great interest in the press.  That's a similar component to the political strategy and the public relations strategy.  The Boston Globe would call me regularly on the student visa issues.  We'd always have to be very careful with what we would say about them.  Some people if they ask you about Senator Feinstein's moratorium, you can't say we think that's a lousy idea.  You can say some of the reasons we're concerned but we're working with her and want to make sure we can continue to channel the communications.  We just say we're going to continue to work with Senator Feinstein and come up with something that will allow the public a level of trust and a sense of security while maintaining our ability to avail ourselves of this talent from around the world, which has always been a huge strength for the American university system.
But that gets to be a challenge, like that New York Times article.  Those things can come out.  The really interesting thing is the student papers get very engaged in these issues, particularly the immigration and student visa issues.  They can be even more challenging to deal with.  I know on our campus, the Harvard Crimson makes me more nervous almost than any other paper to deal with.  They're on the AP, the wire services read the Crimson every day.  The New York Times and others pick up on what they write.  They generate some of their stories.  
I think that [inaudible] this whole set of post-September 11 issues has been very challenging public relations-wise and this climate.  Just as it has been for everybody on Capitol Hill.  The Democrats and Republicans and the president.  People don't want to be accused of being non-patriotic and this kind of stuff, but there are real issues that need to be sifted through.
So that's clouded almost every other issue this year.  That's why I was thinking that would be the ones I would talk about, because the normal issues that we deal with are proceeding in their normal – we're working to double the National Science Foundation budget over five years and we're making progress there.  Collaborating very much like we do on these with all the other universities and stuff.  NIH funding and charitable giving and tax issues.  Research administration, student financial aid.  But right now in this climate, almost anybody in the university sector would probably think these have been the most challenging.  They kind of cast a shadow over everything else.

Prior Activity on the Issue 
None mentioned.

Advocacy Activities Undertaken
If you start right after September 11, basically one of the first things that was proposed was by Senator Diane Feinstein of California, was basically a complete moratorium on any student visas being issued for the country.  I think her idea was a six-month moratorium.  That comes out of a frustration she had, because basically if you went back to the World Trade Center bombing years ago, there were a number of people involved in that who had expired student visas.  INS has always had difficulty accounting for who's in the country and where they are once they get here and whether or not they've left when they were supposed to leave.  
Diane Feinstein has been involved in that over the years, being from California she has a specific interest in immigration issues and she's on the Judiciary Committee.  They put in a law in 1996, the Illegal Immigration Act of 1996, a requirement of new computerized tracking systems.  INS basically since then has never – it's never come to fruition, that system has never been up and running.  So I think out of that kind of frustration she called for a complete moratorium, which would have been damaging to universities and recruitment and would have had a very negative and chilling effect on people's willingness to actually make decisions to come here.  So that was the context we began in.
The challenge then was to work with her to demonstrate that a moratorium would probably create more harm than good in terms of the overall national needs, but that we would be willing to work with them on other approaches and reporting and requirements, and a willingness to assist in getting this computerized system up and running.  It's supposed to be in place in January 2003 and it's going to be a miracle if it is actually in place.  We were able to work with her through Senator Kennedy and Senator Brownback and others on this Border Security Act, which had these issues relative to student visas.  
Over the course of months, working with those offices and working with other universities around the country and associations, the bill which finally passed a couple weeks ago and was recently signed by President Bush, is something that will require more reporting of the universities, on our side more sort of data sent to INS and the State Department, certain background checks on certain people coming from particular countries.  There are countries on lists that are deemed to be friendly to terrorists, it's a list of seven countries.  Immigrants who want to come from one of those countries to the universities or any place have to go through a certain level of scrutiny.  We worked with them to try to make that process as streamlined and as timely as possible.  In fact, we don't want to be the ones doing background checks.  That's not what universities do.  
In that bill and the bioterrorism bill that had tried to do this in a nonconfusing way, because there are a couple different pieces of legislation, we were able to get the background checks being done prior to the person actually getting to the campus.  Our goal is that once the person actually gets there, that they've got the clean bill of health and they're able to do what we would want them to do and keeps us out of the policing role.  We don't mind recording and all that, but we're not good at doing things like policing.  That would put us in a role that we would not be comfortable in.
So the bill as finally passed very recently is something that we feel we are able to live with.  It will actually, once the computerized tracking system is up and running and once the kinks are worked out, we think that will be beneficial to us too, because then fingers can't be pointed at us so long as we're reporting information we're supposed to report.  If the INS has a problem with the system or the State Department, then it can't be passed back to the universities that we're not doing our part.  
	Typically there's been a problem with everyone acknowledges the INS historically has had trouble maintaining data, making it meaningful, processing it.  It has made users of the community, like universities and others, almost less willing to be encumbered with new requirements when we know that the INS has been unable to keep up with the old requirements.  So we think over time this will benefit everybody, if it is operational as they hope it will be.

What we did actually, Harvard and others working with Senator Kennedy's office, who also introduced legislation similar to Senator Feinstein's but with some other revisions, we worked with their offices on issues like, for example, they would like universities to report when a visa holder comes to the campus.  Once the semester starts, they want within X days the university to validate that that person is actually enrolled and taking the courses they have signed up for, the purpose for which they got the visa.  So we worked with them on the timeframes within which we would be required to do that, to make it something we felt we could do and turn around.  That's just an example.  
Throughout the bill we worked with them on language that we felt we would be able to comply with, with the legislative staff basically.  The University of California schools were working at the same time with Senator Feinstein and her office.  Eventually those bills were merged, so the Kennedy and Feinstein proposals were merged together.  So collectively the university community, having worked with both of them, were able to soften the edges around the legislation, to come up with something which eventually we would not oppose, we would be willing to support.
The same thing with this computer tracking system, it's called the SEVIS system.  I forget what the acronym stands for.  Over the years, we've had a number of concerns with how that would be implemented.  There are fees associated with it and students would have to pay fees and who would collect the fees.  Kind of mechanical issues.  But we wanted to be clear that we weren't in opposition to the tracking system, but we wanted to make sure it was workable.  
In this climate, it's a real challenge to work with legislation and not be perceived as being a drag on – the patriotism, being unwilling to do our role in the anti-terrorism effort.  The public relations side to that is very tricky.  In fact, one of the associations of universities that we work with, the American Council on Education, they had written a letter to INS, I believe it was, sometime over the winter, outlining a few remaining concerns with this computer tracking system as they were currently considering rolling it out.  The New York Times had a front-page article, accused the university community of footdragging.  It was an unfair article, it was inaccurate.  But it portrayed universities in a very unfortunate light, one that we had been trying very carefully not to be trapped in.
Similarly, we took a very similar tack on the bioterrorism legislation that also was proceeding through Congress.  When something major like September 11 occurs, you have different committees have different areas of jurisdiction.  So members who are on committees that have a piece of jurisdiction want to be engaged on these issues.  So typically more than one piece of legislation will emerge out of that.
What happened was, in bioterrorism Senator Kennedy again, as a member of the Judiciary Committee, began to craft legislation on bioterrorism, two pieces of which again were relevant to us.  One on student visas and background checks on people from certain countries, and another on laboratory security measures.  
In laboratory security, traditionally we have been regulated in a way where we have to with hazardous materials and chemicals and these select agents – in the past, it's always been looked at as providing a safe workplace for the people who work in the labs from being harmed by these chemicals.  After September 11, that concern remains but now there's an additional concern that outside forces may go into a laboratory with the intent to access these dangerous chemicals and use them for terrorist activity.  It's a different approach that we and others have not looked at before.  So that's why these laboratory measures were in there.
Issues related to that, how they work is there's a list with the Centers for Disease Control of I think forty-two select agents.  Those are things like anthrax, bubonic plague, other biological agents which in their more virulent forms – smallpox is another example – would be very dangerous.  There are exemptions to that.  You can be working on some smallpox but in a compound that is not as dangerous or at a virulency level that is not of concern.  So you would be working with a select agent that is exempt under the CDC list.  So there aren't a lot of them.  For instance, at Harvard right now there's only one active lab that has a select agent that is not exempt.  There's seventeen labs that have select agents, but of those, sixteen of those labs, those select agents are currently exempt.  
But going forward, this legislation and others also include additional funding to encourage more research into things like vaccines for these dangerous – so there will be more of these agents being worked on in labs.  So the way we approach it is, while we only have one lab at the moment, it's clear that we'll probably have more over time and that list is likely to expand, and perhaps even expand into other things like chemicals that are dangerous.  That CDC list is only biological agents at the moment.  So the impact on a campus may end up being a much larger presence than it currently is.
What they are doing in this legislation, and it will be signed into law shortly.  It passed the House and the Senate and there's a conference committee report.  We've been working with all the parties on it.  There are issues within the legislation that can clash with certain traditions in the university campus.  For example, one of the provisions in the USA Patriot Act, which is law and was passed right after September 11, says that if you have one of these select agents, certain people are restricted from being able to handle those agents at all.  If you're from one of those seven countries I mentioned, you cannot work on any of these select agents.  If you are from – that runs counter to some university policies that run counter to restricting people on the basis of national origin.  
There's a list of seven criteria.  If you've been determined to be at one point in your life a "mental defect," that's a word in the USA Patriot Act, you are not allowed to ever use these, and the university has to take measures to keep these people from having access to the agents.  If you were at one point charged with, I don't believe it says convicted of a crime, that was punishable by a term of two years or more or something at any time in your life, you cannot work with one of these select agents.  There are some places where a drunk driving conviction or charge might meet that standard.  If you have been currently abusing drugs or something like that, there's a couple of other categories.  Have ever been admitted to a mental facility.  
There's no appeal, if you are any of those things, you cannot work on anthrax.  If you won the Nobel Prize last year, that doesn't matter.  So we're currently figuring out how to confront that under the current law, the USA Patriot Act, and these same provisions are incorporated in the new bioterrorism legislation, which will require background checks of any people who are engaged in research on these items.
Again, we're concerned about the timeliness of background checks, who conducts the background checks.  We're hopeful to try to achieve an appeals process maybe, if somebody met one of the criteria, one of these people who was a "restricted person," is what they refer to them under the act.  We were hopeful of getting an appeal process where somebody, if they were dishonorably discharged, which is another category, thirty years ago from the military during the Vietnam War or something.  Could you appeal that this person has been a stellar researcher for the last thirty years and is doing great work on smallpox or something.  
It doesn't look like we're going to be able to get that appeal process in place, but we will be able to get the Justice Department to do the background checks.  Outside agencies.  The people who are currently working on them will be done in a timely fashion and people who are coming to our campuses and will be working on them, they'll be done in a timely fashion.  Once they get to our campus, we won't have an added responsibility to screen them or that kind of thing.
On this issue, we've worked with Senator Frist from Tennessee, through our colleagues at Vanderbilt University and others.  We've worked with Senator Kennedy.  The Michigan schools worked on the House side with Chairman Dingell and Tauzin from Louisiana was another key player.  The way we usually operate, when there are key people in the Congress who are taking the lead on issues like this, we tend to work with the universities who are local to those politicians, if they have similar interests.  We collaborate and work with them.  
Then in a broader way, we work with our associations here in Washington.  We have a couple of main presidential-level associations for universities.  AAU is the main research, Association of American Universities, is the major research university association, and the American Council on Education that I mentioned.  Those two groups have been the key association leadership on both of these sets of issues, the student visa issues and laboratory security measures.
We also have been – the USA Patriot Act and all these pieces of legislation that are going to be passed have no regulations supporting them at the moment.  There's a USA Patriot Act but regulations have not been promulgated on what universities are actually required to do, for example, to keep "restricted persons" from having access to the laboratories.  Does that mean that if there's a laboratory at the Harvard School of Public Health on the fifth floor in a secluded area of a building that we have to validate that every single person in the entire building is not a restricted person, or just those that have access to that laboratory?  And there's key systems and security measures in place that would limit it to that way.  We would hope that it would be a more limited application, but there isn't a regulation or guidance on that yet.  
What we have tried to do is through the AAU and others and working with specialists on our campuses in security and in laboratory, environmental health and safety, who understand the agents, with researchers.  Put some kind of principles together that reflect – we took the bills as they were going through in the various areas that we figured we would be required to do things and said, what would we say to HHS, who's going to be required to promulgate regulations.  If we're required to do this, this is the way we'd prefer as a university for this to be implemented.  So we've been sharing these kinds of principles on these various areas.

We put together an informal paper that we've shared with certain people.  There are administrative laws that restrict agencies who are writing regulations from informal outreach to the stakeholders, they have to do that in formal process.  But we have shared with different people on the Hill and others this document that we put together that lays out our preferable means, and it does so in a very constructive – it shows that these can be done and these can provide the public and others with the level of certainty that these places can be secure.  
We don't want campuses to be in a complete lockdown setting.  We have undergraduate and graduate students, post-docs, researchers.  The Medical School at Harvard is different from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, they're in different cities, for example.  FAS has undergraduates there, Medical School does not.  So it's a different kind of climate, Medical School is much more used to higher levels of security because they have radioactive things, they have all kinds of hazardous materials that are currently regulated.  But FAS is a little more free-flowing. 

Future Advocacy Activities Planned
No specific activities mentioned.

Key Congressional Contact(s)/Champions
On this issue, we've worked with Senator Frist from Tennessee, through our colleagues at Vanderbilt University and others.  We've worked with Senator Kennedy.  The Michigan schools worked on the House side with Chairman Dingell and Tauzin from Louisiana was another key player.  The way we usually operate, when there are key people in the Congress who are taking the lead on issues like this, we tend to work with the universities who are local to those politicians, if they have similar interests.  We collaborate and work with them.  

Targets of Direct Lobbying
None mentioned.

Targets of Grassroots Lobbying
None mentioned.

Coalition Partners: Names/Participants
Then in a broader way, we work with our associations here in Washington.  We have a couple of main presidential-level associations for universities.  AAU is the main research, Association of American Universities, is the major research university association, and the American Council on Education that I mentioned.  Those two groups have been the key association leadership on both of these sets of issues, the student visa issues and laboratory security measures.

We have been working with the administration.  John Marburger at the Office of Science and Technology Policy has been an instrumental liaison in that regard.  

Other Participants in the Issue Debate
Yeah, there's a number of them.  Again, AAU and ACE have been the points for the university piece.  The molecular biologists have an association that has been very engaged.  Because they're the group that represents most of the researchers working with these "select agents," those are all biological agents, they've been sort of the key scientific group that's been engaged both with the folks writing the legislation on the Hill that would impact these people working on this stuff, and with the administration.  We have been working with them.  They've worked with us on these principles that we're trying to hash out among ourselves to have as a document.  We have met regularly together.

-State Department
-HHS
-INS	
-Centers for Disease Control
-different government agencies, including the FBI, CIA, counterintelligence and intelligence community, as well as NIH and other folks.  

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence
I think that the cost argument is not one that we would lead with, because in this sort of climate it would look – I think that public relations-wise, it would not be viable for a place like Harvard to say the cost of implementing that safety measure would be extreme.  There are areas that we work on that cost and regulatory burden are legitimate issues, whether it's in student financial aid programs or other research administration programs.  But in this area, I think that would be an argument that would fall flat.
I think the main argument is practicality and doing something that can provide real return for the investment, that will provide a real sense of security.  One of the things that works in our favor in this climate is that most of the members who are working on this legislation and folks in the administration, like the science advisor, who ran a research university and a national lab, value and view the research component of what the universities do as part of the solution.  Research and technology that come out of universities are going to be very important components in the future, whether it's finding antidotes and vaccines for these potential harmful items or new technologies and sensors and other things that are part of airport security.  Identification and recognition, MIT laboratories are working on very important things.  
So I think they view the value of what universities produce as part of the solution and don't want to have the consequence of diminishing that output.  So it's a balance that they're willing to try to strike.  I said once to the president's science advisor, John Marburger, that the balance is a difficult one.  The presidential decision directive and the bioterrorism legislation on the one hand wants to encourage new research in these areas, entice people to do more work on these select agents.  At the same time, if it went the wrong direction, universities could become reluctant to do that because of some of the things that come with it.  If we had to have huge lockdown facilities, completely stymie the normal flow of information and sharing of information that is what we do as research institutions, then people may make the active decision to avoid doing certain kinds of research, because it would come with it all those bells and whistles.  
So striking the balance is the most important, because the country wants us to do it.  He acknowledged that.  I think people began to understand that.  As matter of fact, the presidential decision directive, PDD-2 it's called, when it first came out it had a thirty-day window for the Justice and State Department to report back their recommendations.  They basically did away with that timeframe, because they understood it was very complicated and they were looking for more input from various stakeholders.

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence
None mentioned.

Targeted Arguments, Targets, and Evidence
None mentioned.

Nature of the Opposition
[Impediment]
I think there's the climate and also a perception among a number of people that universities may have represented a unique weak spot.  If DuPont is working on certain chemicals, corporate security is much different than university security.  I think there's a perception that this kind of laissez-faire, free-flowing climate at universities coupled with the different kinds of chemicals and compounds and biological agents that may be on the campus presented a weakness that needed to be looked at carefully.  So I think some people came right in and said here's a place.  There are many people from around the world, there are foreign students.  It's been proven that, maybe it was just a flight school they were going to, but there are terrorists who have used student visas to get into the country.  If they've done that in the past, they'll also try to gain access to universities with the idea of eventually hijacking a biological agent.  
So I think there was a perception that we were actually a weakness that had to be addressed.  The challenge was to work within that to say we are also a huge asset in terms of the work that we're doing.  You don't want to throw that out.  And we understand it's a new world after September 11 and we think there may be holes in security, a need for a new level of vigilance and we'd love to work with you on that.  We're not at counter-purposes here.  That some of the early knee-jerk ideas might not be the way the country wants to go.  But that's the challenge.  
	It wasn't a vacuum, there was an actual visceral initial reaction that the universities are weak spots.  There are people there that want to do harm, they're culturally not amenable to the normal kind of security that we need to provide in this day and age.  But I think we slowly were able to turn that to a more constructive direction.

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition 
Not applicable. 

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition
Not applicable. 

Targeted Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition (and Targets)
Not applicable. 

Described as a Partisan Issue
No.

Venue(s) of Activity
House and Senate
Senate Judiciary Committee

Action Pending or Taken by Relevant Decision Makers
A number of anti-terrorism bills are still being debated and more are likely to be introduced.

Policy Objective(s) and Support for/Opposition to the Status Quo
[Want to work with administration and Congress to ensure that, while security needs to be tightened in regard to student visas and laboratory security due to anti-terrorism measures, universities do not become “under lock down conditions” or face unrealistic demands for tracking foreign students. ]

Advocate’s Experience: Tenure in Current Job/Previous Experience
I've been here for about fourteen years.  I worked for many years at the Massachusetts state legislature.  Then was the chief of staff for Ed Markey, who's the congressman from just outside Boston, he's actually a very senior member of Congress.  I was his Boston chief of staff for a couple years prior to coming to Harvard.  When I finished with law school, Harvard was going through a reorganization at that time and they hired me to come in and do state relations and a piece of federal relations.  Over the course of every few years I would get more and more jurisdiction.  Eventually I became a director of federal research and then about four years ago I became the senior director in charge of all of our federal and state relations.  So it's sort of crept up the ladder.  But that's why I have my specialty areas, I started to do most of my federal work on the research side, basic research and intellectual property stuff.

Reliance on Research: In-House/External (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
We do sort of a blend [of in-house/external research].  Universities differ in the way they do this too.  There are some universities who use strictly Washington consultants, they don't have a large in-house.  Harvard and a number of schools like us, I think MIT would be the same way, we tend to have most of our government relations operations in-house, but we do periodically engage consultants.  But we are careful that those consultants don't actually go out and lobby directly on our behalf.  They basically write guidance to us and strategic thinking, but we do our own lobbying.  It's our view that most of the issues we work on are supported by members.  Most members like research, want to do it, want it to be fostered.  They view us favorably generally, universities in general, and we're our best own advocates, than sort of a hired K Street lobbyist coming in on behalf of Harvard.  
But we do value guidance.  We have a small Democratic firm that we have on a very modest retainer and we have a Republican outside counsel that is on a similarly modest retainer.  They just as we need them provide certain guidance as to who we might need to see on something, an issue they might hear about that may be of particular interest to Harvard or the community generally.  Could be intellectual property issues, could be somebody grousing about [inaudible] Harvard bans ROTC from being on campus, we're going to pass a law to make them do that or something.  If that happened, let us know.  But they don't do any overt lobbying on our behalf.

Number of Individuals Involved in Advocacy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Three 

Units in Organization Involved in Public Affairs/Policy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Our federation's office is – I run the federation's office.  Susanne Day, who's here.  Susanne Day is sort of the director of federal relations, her specialty is higher education-related issues.  For example, she worked in the Congress for Senator Dodd for many years.  She's on the health committee and wrote a lot language and stuff like that.  But her specialty is student financial aid, educational stuff.  
The area I've always spent most of my time in is research-related issues and intellectual property issues and technology transfer related issues.  Meghan is the legislative analyst and researcher that basically monitors legislation, hearings, policy analysis and overall research as we need it.  That's basically this office, Meghan, Susanne and then another clerical person we're hiring right now, we're going through a staff change.  She used to do tax issues but we've reconstructed it to have our legislative analyst and a senior staff person.  
Then Jane  who's up on campus, has other administrative roles at Harvard but part of what she does for us is health policy issues.  A lot of work done at the Medical School.  For example, right now, and it's another issue we could have talked about that's very interesting and very [inaudible] research issue that we've done a lot of work on.  We've been one of the lead universities in a coalition that was created specifically for advocacy on that issue.  Jane has spent a lot of time working with that coalition.  We provided some of the upfront money to help create it.  A lot of the advocacy groups for the various diseases are very active, like diabetes, Parkinson's, the ones that are very hopeful that that research will be viable for them.  We happen to have a researcher at Harvard who is very prominent in that area and wants to do a lot of research on it.  He actually has a son who has diabetes and he's trying to find a cure before it's too late.  He changed the entire discipline, he's a really interesting guy. 
So we divide the issues up a little bit like a congressional office does.  Student financial aid, charitable giving and tax incentives for charitable giving, basic research funding, intellectual property.  Then there's any number of weird issue that come up, for example Native American Graves Repatriation Act, which is an issue that – it's about tribal artifacts and actual remains that could be hundreds of years old.  A law was passed in 1996 that if you could identify which tribe these artifacts were connected to, then you had to repatriate those items to that tribe.  Harvard University happens to have the largest collection, outside the federal government, in the world  of these artifacts.  Actually are viewed by the tribes as being very responsible, we spent a fortune and have done incredible research to basically track all these things back.  
But a lot of stuff has great research value and there's a new round of issues coming up on this debate are the types of artifacts that must be returned.  It could get into an area that would be hard for us –  non-affiliated items, items where we're unable to determine whether there's a current tribe that has actual provenance to that.  Or multiple tribes, or there's a dispute  on items and 70-90,000 of them are important for research.  That's one of these kinds of weird issues that comes up, that big places like these universities that do broad things .

Advocate’s Outstanding Skills/Assets (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
None mentioned.

Type of Membership: None, Institutions, Individuals, Both (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Membership Size (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Organizational Age (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

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