One hot afternoon last July, a handful of OU faculty found an unusual email in their inboxes with the subject line “Government Investigators, Auditors and Agents on Campus.” Though dense in legal syntax, the message was clear: Federal agents are investigating conflicts of interest, and they may want to speak to you without notifying the university. Don’t let them.
A federal investigation into widespread theft of protected research involving as many as 77 universities nationwide has prompted University of Oklahoma officials to replace a nearly decade-old conflict of interest policy.
The proposed changes come after FBI agents visited the Norman campus over the summer, amid “increased review of college and university activities, particularly those related to grants and contracts, controlled research, and interactions with international institutions and researchers,” according to an email from the office of legal counsel.
While the FBI “doesn’t confirm or deny the existence of any investigation regarding any matter,” according to a spokesperson earlier this month, the FBI “maintains a presence on various campuses to engage in a myriad of law enforcement activity.”
OU General Counsel Anil Gollahalli says the increased scrutiny shouldn’t come as a surprise.
“If you've been watching what's going on in the national stage, the federal government has become much more interested in disclosures of conflicts of interest because of what the federal government sees as undue influence by foreign nations on our research base,” said Gollahalli. “We want to make sure that we're in step with the best practice with where the federal government is, and disclosing conflicts,” he said.
The new policy, which is scheduled for votes next week by the Faculty and Staff Senates as well as governance groups at the OU Health Sciences Center, establishes a central committee made up of faculty and staff to review and manage conflicts of interest. Previously, oversight was left to individual departments, leading to wide variations in enforcement across campus. The policy will be presented at the Board of Regents meeting on Oct. 23 for final approval.
“We can't be sure that we're managing conflicts appropriately if we don't have a good policy that mandates their disclosure, right?” said Gollahalli. “What we're doing is trying to set forth a good, solid baseline, and we've got to educate our faculty.”
“I think we should have had this policy in place 20 years ago,” said Amy Cerato, who serves as secretary of the Faculty Senate and as an OU researcher.
“With the federal government making sure that we are not being influenced by international governments in terms of selling state secrets, I think the university decided that we needed to have a state-of-the-art, state of the practice conflict of interest form in place to protect faculty and staff from any overreach from other entities,” she said.
Last month, a federal grand jury indicted a Chinese researcher from the University of Kansas on charges of lying to KU officials about a contract with a Chinese university. Earlier this summer, Chinese researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Emory University in Atlanta were dismissed for failing to disclose ties to China.
In Chicago, a 28-year-old Illinois Institute of Technology graduate student is being held in the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center pending trial on charges of spying for the Peoples Republic of China. He is among more than 2,600 Chinese nationals who claim to work for two U.S. companies that do not exist, according to court records.
There are a number of researchers, both at OU and the Health Sciences Center, with dual appointments with Chinese universities. This in and of itself is not necessarily nefarious, according to Gollahalli, but needs to be disclosed and monitored.
Universities across the country were put on alert by the National Institutes of Health more than a year ago about the threat of foreign agents stealing research.
In April, the director of the NIH told Congress his department has been working with the FBI to investigate 55 institutions for conflicts of interest.
One program under particular scrutiny is China’s Thousand Talents program, which is an initiative sponsored by the Chinese government to recruit ethnically Chinese researchers who work or study overseas. While the program itself is far from secret, American intelligence officials say the program’s clandestine mission is to facilitate the transfer of technology back to China.
There are currently researchers affiliated with the program working at OU.
The focus on ethnically Chinese researchers has bred accusations of racist profiling at other institutions that have been investigated. Most notably, researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Center accused administrators there of racial bias following firings for undisclosed ties to China.
The threat isn’t limited to universities. Last December, a Chinese-educated researcher working for Philips 66 in Bartlesville was arrested on charges of stealing trade secrets worth an estimated $1 billion.
