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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Monday, May 9, 2005

Navy not pressing UH on $50M deal

By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Education Writer

The U.S. Navy said it is up to the University of Hawai'i to decide whether it wants to move forward on a controversial research center contract with the military and that although the Navy is willing to work out a timetable, the offer won't last indefinitely.

"I can't tell you we'll wait forever," said Patricia Dolan, deputy director for congressional and public affairs at the Naval Sea Systems Command, the Navy's contracting agency.

Dolan said there is still no contract in place, and a date released by the Navy calling for a contract by next month for a University Affiliated Research Center is an "internal planning milestone" subject to change.

"It's up to the university to go through their process to determine if they want to go through with it," she said. "It really is dependent on the UH meeting their own milestones they've agreed to with the Board of Regents. We're not marching to a certain point in time for a contract award."

Although a seven-day sit-in at UH interim president David McClain's Bachman Hall office ended on Wednesday, the debate over whether a Navy research center should be established at UH is far from over.

In the next two weeks, McClain will meet with Navy UARC opponents who object to the possibility the research could involve development of military weapons. They hope to work out guidelines for a continuing dialogue, including a full-scale public hearing before the Board of Regents in October. But opponents have promised more civil disobedience if they feel the consultations and agreements made are not going forth as promised.

To opponents, an agreement with the Navy represents a stronger military presence and more military funding at the university, the university's potential involvement in the development of weapons for war, further "militarization" of Hawai'i and a clash with the university's core value as a Hawaiian place of learning.

For the university, it means $50 million over five years — a hefty boost in research money, including funding for some classified research — and a chance to become one of the best research institutions in the country.

"You cannot become a big-time research university without doing classified research, but you can still be a great state university," said John Butler, director of the University of Texas-Austin's IC2 research institute. "We do lots of classified research here at UT. It's just what major research universities, like Michigan and Wisconsin, do."

Yet California's Stanford University receives more than $400 million in government research contracts, according to figures on its Web site, and has had a firm position against accepting classified research since the late 1960s.

If the UH Board of Regents approves the proposal for the school to become a Navy UARC, the university would join four other Mainland institutions with that status that together receive almost $900 million a year in military contracts: the University of Texas; Johns Hopkins in Baltimore; Penn State in University Park, Pa.; and the University of Washington in Seattle. They've developed everything from missile-defense guidance systems at Hopkins to life-saving, portable, hand-held ultrasound devices at UW.

The concept of dual-use technologies was strengthened in the late 1990s under then-President Bill Clinton, who launched the "technology reinvestment program" to develop new technologies for multiple purposes — both civilian and military.

Legacy of World War II

But Navy UARCs go back to the 1940s and the American war effort against Germany and Japan. The first was established at Carnegie-Mellon University with a team of physicists, other scientists and naval officers trying to develop a "proximity fuse'" that would make it easier to shoot down enemy aircraft even without a direct hit.

"They were able to develop it, but when it came time to go into development full-time, Carnegie was not able to handle such a large task, so Johns Hopkins University took it over," said Dee Reese, head of public affairs for the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins.

In the 1950s, the Applied Physics Lab moved to Laurel, Md., about 25 miles from the Johns Hopkins campus, and has since grown to cover 360 fenced acres with 3,800 staff, 68 percent of whom are engineers and scientists.

With $600 million in government or military funding for research annually, Johns Hopkins is doing some heavy lifting for U.S. defense, such as building satellites for NASA, working on air and missile defense programs that include testing missile guidance systems for the Navy, and working on projects for undersea warfare to help submarines become less detectable while improving their ability to locate enemy subs.

Despite the amount of military work done at Johns Hopkins, much of it is not classified, Reese said. "The work we do on standard missiles is not classified. How far and how fast it can fly, now that would be classified."

There are occasional protests at the Applied Physics Lab. Reese said police sometimes ask protesters to disperse, "and if they don't leave, the police will arrest them."

While Johns Hopkins is by far the largest Navy UARC, Penn State runs second, with expertise in acoustics, guidance and control, thermal energy systems, hydrodynamics, hydroacoustics, propulsion, navigation, GPS and communications. The University of Texas-Austin is third, with $115 million of Department of Defense money and expertise in acoustics that involves sonar research and mine detection, electromagnetics involving target tracking and GPS, and information technology.

Penn State received $138.7 million last year from Department of Defense grants and contracts, according to Bill Mahon, assistant vice president for university relations and director of public information at the university. Mahon said that while the Applied Research Laboratory, established in 1945, receives a portion of classified research, the majority is not classified. Nonetheless, he said, Penn State has a "very strong connection with the military" that goes back to the university's founding "and we remain proud of that connection."

Smaller scale at UH

The Navy UARC contemplated for UH would be closest to the model at the University of Washington, although without a facility of its own. While UW receives approximately $1 billion in federal research grants and contracts annually, the Applied Physics Lab receives $40 million of that, with much of it going to the medical school, according to William Bakamis, associate director of the UW Applied Physics Laboratory, who is also serving as a consultant to UH. Only about 5 percent of the work is classified.

Bakamis said the work includes radiology, imaging, telemedicine, oceanography, acoustics, medical and industrial ultrasound, polar science, climate modeling, engineering and ocean engineering. Besides a hand-held ultrasound device, the facility has developed a high-definition sonar that can "see" underwater, and is now at work on developing an ultrasound device capable of stopping bleeding at accident sites.

"These devices have been used in Iraq," Bakamis said. "But if it's an accident, it makes no difference if it happened in a truck rolling over in Iraq or on the H-1. A lot of this improves your quality of life."

UH officials said their UARC — the first proposed in 58 years — would be different from the others in that UH would not have its own separate facility.

"The model here is that task orders will come in and faculty can either accept or decline," said Gary Ostrander, vice chancellor for research at Manoa. "If a task order were to propose a weapon of mass destruction, we would turn it down."

The Associated Press contributed to this report. Reach Beverly Creamer at bcreamer@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8013.