Technology Drain Feared : Some Protest Foreign Students in U.S. Universities

Katsura Hattori pushed a button, and the front page of his newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, appeared on a $40,000 prototype television.

Even the tiny Japanese script was clearly legible on the fine-grained screen, 10 times more detailed than a normal TV.

“Someday,” Hattori said, “this may be how a lot of people read their newspaper in the morning.”

If so, most of the groundwork will have been done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but the first commercial users probably will be Japanese companies. Over the past four years, they have handed MIT millions of dollars and sent top employees such as Hattori to help with the research.

Schools Enriched

MIT, Harvard, Texas A&M; and a handful of other top U.S. schools are getting enriched by foreign grants and bolstered by foreign researchers. But critics say the help carries a high price: Donors are taking ideas and know-how home, draining a national resource.

“I don’t know why we permit it,” said Irwin Freest, an engineer in Massapequa Park, N.Y., who has been campaigning for Congress to send foreign engineering students packing.

“It hurts us, because what they do with their grants, they take the knowledge back and sell us goods which increases our balance of trade deficit,” he said.

Foreign companies and governments sponsor about $5 million of research a year at MIT, which has the highest percentage of foreign students of any U.S. university. One-fifth of its total student body and one-third of its graduate students are non-U.S. citizens.

Two miles up the Charles River at Harvard, foreign sources provide about $11 million a year for research in economics, agriculture, medicine and other fields. About 6% of Harvard’s undergraduates and 17% of its graduate students are foreigners.

Alarmed by such statistics, Freest and others are calling for a kind of academic protectionism--the erection of barriers to the free flow of students and knowledge across borders.

Pressures Elsewhere

They are not alone; similar pressures are building in other countries, according to Dorothy Zinberg, a faculty member at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who is preparing a report on the subject for the National Science Foundation.

“Japan and the Netherlands are today the only two countries that are actively seeking to increase their numbers of foreign students,” she said. “In the U.S., in France, a bit less so in West Germany, people are very concerned about losing ideas.”

Zinberg said some U.S. companies are now attaching strings to their university grants, insisting that no foreigners be allowed to work on the research they support. In France, she said, educators are subtly excluding foreigners from certain schools.

The University of Rochester’s graduate business school rescinded acceptance of an employee of Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd. after concerns were raised by hometown Eastman Kodak Co. It later re-offered admission, but too late.

Dire Threat Seen

Defenders of the open university see a dire threat in this. They note that most leading universities in the United States have policies requiring all campus research to be freely publishable and, therefore, of at least as much benefit to American companies as to foreign ones.

They also say many foreign researchers and graduate students stay in the United States, strengthening the nation’s brainpower.

Most of all, defenders argue that keeping universities open to all, based only on academic qualifications, is part of the universal ethic of science. Insulating ourselves, they say, will make us less competitive, not more.

“It’s generally seen today that American universities are among the best in the world,” said John Shattuck, Harvard’s vice president for public affairs. “Our whole higher education system is very attractive . . . and its availability to foreign students is an asset to American society, because they learn American values and become familiar with Americans, and Americans are enriched by being exposed to them.”

$75-Million Kitty

Nationally, less than 1% of all university research is paid for by foreign money. But five big research institutions--Harvard, MIT, Texas A&M;, Oregon State University and the University of Wisconsin--together receive more than half of all that money, a kitty estimated at about $75 million a year.

Experts say there are about 1 million students circulating from country to country worldwide, and the largest number, about 350,000, are in the United States. More than half are in science and technology, creating extraordinary imbalances, such as the fact that foreigners now earn about 60% of the doctoral degrees granted in engineering by American universities.

Like any protectionist move, however, attempts to restrict foreign students or research projects could be met in kind.

“If we’re not careful,” Zinberg said, “we may one day find our students shut out of foreign universities, because we have shut them out of ours.”

The research that foreigners are supporting on American campuses runs the gamut from studying aircraft turbines at MIT to ocean drilling at Texas A&M; and weather monitoring at the University of Wisconsin.

But much of the pressure to cut back the foreign presence comes from people in a few highly competitive industries, such as electronics and biotechnology.

“Of course, we’d like people to take back skills and knowledge and apply them in their own countries, especially the Third World and countries that aren’t as fortunate as we are,” said Frank Lord, an engineer with GTE in San Carlos, Calif., and chairman of a manpower committee for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.

“But taking valuable technology is another matter, and it’s a hard line to draw.”