Sep 08, 2008
America is one country that values academic freedom more than most. Imagine a world where scholars are prohibited from doing research because of government restrictions that prevent travel to certain countries.
We seem to take for granted that students here and across the country can walk into a classroom and hear a professor lecture about how the current government is corrupt and wrong. It is certainly a step up from the era of McCarthyism in the 1950s as well as in other countries today where forced patriotism is the norm. It may surprise some that since 2006, research by public colleges and universities, even if funded fully by private money, has been prohibited in countries listed as terrorism sponsors by Florida statutes, specifically the Travel to Terrorist States Act.
This law aimed to protect our nation by ensuring that public money would not end up in the hands of terrorist states. It also protected national secrets from being exchanged by unauthorized agents traveling solely under the guise of academic purposes.
The law’s prohibitions were misguided, however. They were recently ruled at least partly unconstitutional by a federal judge who ruled that researchers should be able to use private funds for traveling to black-listed countries such as Cuba, North Korea, Sudan and Syria. The state never had any business prohibiting private funds from financing any sort of research.
Moreover, though the possibility misusing these funds exists, much legitimate and important research does go on in these nations, most notably in Cuba.
FIU’s Cuban Research Institute has sent faculty and students to the country for a class on humanities, and the University of South Florida’s Institute for Research in Art has had long-standing academic relations with the island nation that was hindered by the signing of the law.
These projects and others should not be banned over well-intentioned but impractical fears of terrorism. Striking down the portion of the law that prohibited private dollars from conducting research is a step – albeit a small one – in the right direction.
This law should be expanded to re-allow public monies to be used for research in any area academia deems necessary. State universities would not be obligated to spend public dollars on such projects if they were found not relevant enough or legitimate evidence was found that the research could endorse terror. They should not be explicitly prohibited from doing so, either.