Our universities are not safe from the messy realities of spies and geopolitical competition. The most infamous Soviet spy ring in history – the Cambridge Five – was recruited from, obviously, Cambridge University, back in the 1930s. Kim Philby and co. went on to share all sorts of damaging secret information with Britain’s Cold War adversary.
There is an obvious solution
The threat has evolved, and hostile states like China are now targeting academia to steal sensitive research from the UK’s world class universities. UK-based scholars are at the cutting edge of research into things like artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, and synthetic biology, all of which can be dual use – military or civilian – and the line between legitimate and illegitimate can be vanishingly thin.
This week, vice-chancellors of our most research-intensive universities received a rare security briefing. Ken McCallum, the director-general of MI5, and Felicity Oswald, interim chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, explicitly warned that our cutting-edge technologies are being targeted. All this takes place against longer-term warnings of autocracies’ attempts to coerce academics, influence research, and even shape the parameters of classroom debate in humanities and social sciences as well as Stem.
The government will now consult on a raft of measures, from the vetting of academics with access to sensitive research, to beefing up consultation between universities and the security services when universities enter into funding partnerships with foreign institutions. They could even follow Australia’s lead and implement a University Foreign Interference Taskforce.
It is vital to protect the UK’s research and the wider world-leading university sector from foreign interference, and no doubt vice-chancellors take this seriously. As we all should. I do worry though that, as is so often the case, hostile actors end up finding loopholes and everyone else ends up stifled by red tape and overbearing bureaucracy. From diminished funds to visa rules, UK-based academics already work under enough constraints as it is. And those spying for, or working on behalf of, foreign states can now be pursued with recently strengthened legislation anyway.
In welcoming the report, Alicia Kearns, chairwoman of the foreign affairs select committee, could not resist a dig. For too long, she claimed, academia has pretended it has no role to play in our national security. This is decidedly unfair on academics researching these very issues and trying to work with government partners. A quick internet search shows that the British Academy recently awarded three so-called Innovation Fellowships to academics working with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on policy priorities; the University of Southampton signed a ‘strategic relationship agreement’ with the government’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory in 2019. Before them, certain academics worked discreetly with the Foreign Office to counter propaganda during the Cold War. And before them, the famous codebreakers of Bletchley Park included, yes, academics.
This is not the purpose of academia (and there are plenty of academics who deride these partnerships) but let’s be real: researchers have long been British assets, not, as Kearns also put it, a ‘back door to hostile states’. They are not some fifth column in the latest culture war.
Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, recently warned about universities’ reliance on income from overseas; it increases the risk of coercion, undermines academic freedom, and makes us vulnerable to the type of theft MI5 is warning about.
There is an obvious solution though, and one for which academics are screaming. Just fund universities properly. That simple. Unsustainable caps on tuition fees for domestic students force cash-strapped universities to turn to overseas income streams to stay afloat. Fund Stem properly and scholars would not need to turn to questionable partnerships for their cutting-edge research. Fund arts, humanities, and social sciences properly and governments would better understand those states in the first place, where threats come from, and how we have navigated them in the past. Break the morale-crushing reliance on chasing research funding with single-digit success rates and government would decrease the vulnerability of individual scholars – forced to bring in external money, whether they need it or not, for career progression – looking to unorthodox sources for cash.
Sustainable funding will address MI5’s worries. It will resolve the risk of foreign interference. It will make us safer.
Not a secret / How to stop China spying on our universities
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26.04.2024
Our universities are not safe from the messy realities of spies and geopolitical competition. The most infamous Soviet spy ring in history – the Cambridge Five – was recruited from, obviously, Cambridge University, back in the 1930s. Kim Philby and co. went on to share all sorts of damaging secret information with Britain’s Cold War adversary.
There is an obvious solution
The threat has evolved, and hostile states like China are now targeting academia to steal sensitive research from the UK’s world class universities. UK-based scholars are at the cutting edge of research into things like artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, and synthetic biology, all of which can be dual use – military or civilian – and the line between legitimate and illegitimate can be vanishingly thin.
This week, vice-chancellors of our most research-intensive universities received a rare security briefing. Ken McCallum, the director-general of MI5, and Felicity Oswald, interim chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, explicitly warned that our cutting-edge technologies are being targeted. All this takes place against longer-term warnings of........
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