Gagging the Latest Gag Rule

MEMBERS OF THE HARVARD COMMUNITY got a first-hand glimpse of the Reagan Administration's rage for secrecy last week when University officials made clear their opposition to the Pentagon's latest gag rule. Daniel Steiner '54, vice president and general counsel, led a chorus of denunciation of the Defense Department's plans to censor the publication of unclassified research and said Harvard would not accept funds governed by such a restriction.

Thus Harvard falls in line behind three other major research universities--MIT. Stanford, and Cal Tech--in opposing the proposed rules, which would amount to a basic subverting of long-standing University commitments to free and open inquiry. The Pentagon proposal would give government officials veto power over the publication of research results funded by the government and deemed to be "sensitive" from a national security perspective--an unacceptable proposition given University norms.

The proposed regulations, for one thing, are highly impractical. The research level is far too early to judge the potential sensitivity of any given information, so the guidelines would be difficult to enforce. Officials would have to use the gag in an arbitrary manner.

But the question is more one of principle than reality. Defense Department officials say that the Pentagon funds compose only a small fraction of University research. Harvard, for instance, only receives about $4 million, a small portion of the more than $100 million the entire federal government doles out here. But the quest for censorship in this area is indicative of the general Administration instinct concerning information--to suppress it.

The Reagan Administration's effort to establish a lifetime censorship system for more than 100,000 federal employees is only the most blatant example of this trend. Reagan has also mounted an assault on the Freedom of Information Act--long a tool for watchdogs of the government--including a request to exempt the CIA from FOIA provisions entirely. He has signed an executive order allowing the CIA and FBI to monitor and infiltrate academic and press institutions. The Pentagon has ordered employees to take lie-detector tests, in an effort to root out news leaks.

And it was the Reagan Administration that blacked the news media out from the Grenada invasion.

The pat explanation for this unprecedented attack on the country's traditions of free and open debate is national security. But, as Lecturer on the Core Program Sissela Bok has observed, such efforts to suppress information usually weaken a democratic society--rather than strengthen it. "Short of turning an open society into a garrison state," she wrote recently in the Crimson, "it will simply not be possible to restrict trade, scholarship, scientific exchanges, publication and news reporting enough to achieve the desired society."

By contrast, the effect of such policies will be the stifling of creativity and the gradual growth of a government unaccountable to its people. As the traditional bastions of free and uninhibited debate in society, universities can not even give the appearance of accepting restrictions on their research. Instead they must fight the trend--loudly and openly. If universities begin to cave in on the principle, other institutions in society surely cannot be far behind.