For Immediate Release

Office of the Press Secretary

April 14, 2003

MR. RAWLINGS:  Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this morning's session.

Let me just remind all of the presidents that if you would like to add items for this afternoon's open session, open forum, please let either me or Nils Hasselmo know what those items are this morning so that we can put them on the agenda.

We have a very important guest here with us this morning, and a most interesting session, and I know that many of you are eager for this opportunity. So let me introduce Jared Cohon, president of Carnegie Mellon University to introduce our guest.

MR. COHON:  Thank you, Hunter.  It is a great pleasure and honor for me to the one with this task to introduce to you Secretary Tom Ridge.

Let me just say a couple words, though, about what we're about this morning.  We have three sessions.  The first one, of course, starts with Secretary Ridge -- three sessions all devoted to the topic of homeland security, how it affects our institutions and how our institutions can contribute to the security of this nation.

This is certainly a time of great uncertainty, and it's also a time that presents many opportunities to universities like ours.  Our universities are both looked at as a source of solutions because of the science and technology that we do, and also looked at as potential sources of problems.

There are underlying conflicts here that touch on some of our most values, the things that we hold most dearly at our universities -- openness of research and of teaching, the free flow of ideas, access to education by all qualified students.  We know that these things are very important to us, as they are to those responsible for protecting this nation.

The Department of Homeland Security is central to all of these issues, and both sides of it, and therefore it is especially fitting and a wonderful opportunity for us to have with us today Tom Ridge.

 Governor Ridge was sworn in as Secretary of Homeland Security on January 24th of this year after serving for 15 months as Director of the Office of Homeland Security in the White House.

A graduate of Harvard and a recipient of a law degree from Dickinson College, he's also a decorated Army veteran of the Vietnam War.  

 He served six years in Congress, having first been elected in 1982, and he was elected Governor of Pennsylvania in 1994 to serve the first of two terms.  He interrupted his second term to join the White House to respond to the call of this nation's security.

I've had the great pleasure to work closely with him, both in his role as Governor and as Secretary.  In Pennsylvania he had the vision for and created a new kind of partnership, organizations that brought together universities with the private sector and with government.  He called them "greenhouses," and they very much have started to transform the landscape in our state.

That same sense of partnership that drove him to create those greenhouses and had everything to do with his governorship has brought in full force to his role in homeland security as well.

I've had the honor of serving on the President's Homeland Security Advisory Council, which has given me a change to watch Governor Ridge up close in his current assignment.  He's brought his incredible drive and commitment to what everybody calls the hardest job in Washington.  And I think we would all agree it is, indeed, the hardest job in Washington, not just because he's now sort of instantly responsible for 180,000 employees who are part of dozens of separate agencies that had little to do with each other before, but also because he's got the very difficult job where success is measured as the most recent terrorist attack that didn't happen.

This is a job that never ends, a job that ought to keep him up at night, but, in fact, I've seen his incredible spirit he's brought to this.  It's really -- it inspires us all.

The only way that this works, frankly, is exactly the idea that he brought to this job from the very beginning, when he was appointed in October of '01, shortly after the terrorist attacks, and that's that in making America safer, we should also make it better.  It's actually a very profound statement, and it has shaped all he's done in this job.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's my great pleasure to introduce to you Secretary Tom Ridge.  (Applause.)

SECRETARY RIDGE:  Thank you, Jerry, for that kind and very generous introduction.  Thank you for your warm welcome.  Those were great days as governor of a great state like Pennsylvania, with a diversity of people and communities and institutions.

I want to recognize my friend and a participant and one of the architects of our life science and digital greenhouses, Graham Spanier from Penn State.  I'm glad to join Graham as well today, and thank each and every one of you for the opportunity to spend a little time with you this morning.  I think it's a real pleasure and obviously a privilege to speak to the leaders of America's universities as we continue to combat terrorism, which I believe is going to be a permanent -- must be a permanent effort on the part of this government and freedom-loving people around the world.

It's a permanent part of our environment now, whether it's bin Laden and Al Qaeda or any successor leadership or successor organization.  It's not only a threat to our liberty and lives, but it's also a threat to our economic leadership around the world, and a critical part of that economic leadership would be the continued vitality and interaction of the university research community with each other, not just domestically, but internationally.

You are one of the fundamental forces that drives our global economic leadership.  I understand that very, very well and am grateful for the opportunity to spend a little time with you this morning to discuss some matters of mutual interest.

 We have considerable we have to do together, and I look to this as the beginning of not just a dialogue, but, in fact, a relationship, if not a partnership, that will prove beneficial to your institutions and simultaneously benefit our country as well.

Young men and women from across the country and around the world know that America's universities are some of the very, very best.  It's because you do not simply teach science and history and math and the arts, you teach values in a multicultural world, values such as tolerance and fairness, honest achievement, pursuit of truth.  You inspire as well as educate.  You build bridges to the world.  And in doing so I think you project an open, diversified, and freedom-loving country and the values associated with it in America.

As Governor of Pennsylvania, I saw firsthand on my many trade missions the doors our universities open.  And, by the way, I was very pleased on many occasions to take my university presidents with me.  The extraordinary connections that we have in Pennsylvania because of our universities and every chance we had to broaden the connection and strengthen the connection, we took it as an opportunity to not only advance the interest of the institution, but obviously an opportunity to advance the interest of Pennsylvania.

The innovative, creative, and ever-changing global economy bears your stamp, and so does the world-wide movement toward freedom.

Many of you know the words of that scientist and scholar Ben Franklin.  At the end of the Constitutional Convention he was asked what they had just produced, and as you know, he replied, "A republic, if you can keep it."

Universities have truly helped America keep its republic -- not just by imparting knowledge, but by fighting for the basic freedoms that have helped us perfect our democratic experiment, freedoms that simultaneously give hope to oppressed people everywhere.

Our contemporary challenge is even broader.  We must secure our free republic from those who seek to destroy it, who threaten not just our liberties, but also our lives.  And universities can help.

 After the terrorist attacks of September 11th, there were calls to share information between intelligence and law enforcement, to enforce our immigration laws and accurately determine who is visiting our country and why, to protect sensitive information, such as Web sites describing how to make a biological or chemical weapon from anonymous persons and their unknown purposes.

America has rightly answered those calls, but we need to still be searching with the precise response that makes all of us content with how we're dealing with those challenges.

 We each have a primary mission.  Yours is to educate your students and further our understanding of the world.  Ours is to keep your students and all America safe from terrorists armed with the world's most deadly weapons, and in doing so we must and we will act within the law and within our Constitution.  We will not, as Franklin once warned, trade our essential liberties to purchase temporary safety.

We must and we will be careful to respect people's privacy, civil liberties, and reputations, and we will involve the academic and scientific community at every stage.

As you help us strike the proper balance between freedom and security, you will have a great opportunity to use freedom to improve our security.  Knowledge and research will be put to use, not put at risk.  And that's what I want to talk to you about today.

The key to this effort is information.  Terrorists hide among us and use our freedoms against us, but they will find fewer places to hide if we provide accurate, verifiable, and timely information to the people charged with protecting us.

Fear of government abuse of information, like fear of terrorism, is understandable, but we cannot let it stop us from doing what is right and responsible.

 The antidote to this fear, I might add, is an open, fair, and transparent process that guarantees the protection and privacy of that data.

In addition to the federal privacy safeguards already on the books, the Department of Homeland Security will have its own privacy officer, whom we expect to name shortly.  This individual will be involved from the very beginning with every policy initiative and every program initiative that we consider, to ensure that our strategy and our actions are consistent with the individual rights and civil liberties protected by the Constitution.

We'll work together to ensure that our new programs appropriately use information, protect it from misuse, and discard it when it is of no further use.  It is, however, critical that information be accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date.

Now, I've got the distinct pleasure of talking to you about a favorite subject, the SEVIS program.  Like the canary down in the mine, I question whether or not I can survive, but I think I can.  I think I can, if I admit up front that we will have a lot of work to do on this program.

SEVIS is designed to update the federal government on the status of the international exchange students in the United States throughout their stay.  And as you know, about 4500 schools and 1400 exchange programs are now certified and enrolled to use it.

Let me first say that I appreciate the university community's continued support for the system and your hard work to deploy it.  At the very same time, I appreciate and understand, because I've heard it from many of you, your legitimate concerns.  And I'm not here, frankly, ladies and gentlemen, to sugarcoat the problem.  We still have a problems we have to get through in order to make this work for you and for us.

No university official should have to spend countless hours trying to enter the records of one individual student or learn that one of your students' records suddenly popped up on another school's computer.

To universities and to those students, these aren't merely glitches or inconveniences.  Taken together, we understand they threaten your ability to conduct research and obtain funding and attract the best students you possibly can, and they put your students and researchers at risk of severe delays, or even deportation.

We have to work with you to resolve these issues.  I'm going to tell you we have some very good people that have come into this department, who understand our mutual interest in getting the SEVIS system to operate to our mutual benefit.

Mike Garcia heads the new Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which manages SEVIS, and Eduardo Aguirre, as acting director.  One of these days, hopefully, the Senate will confirm him as the Director of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services.  Eduardo is a naturalized citizen.  He knows what it means to be given the opportunity to come to this country, to become educated, and then stay in this country and contribute.

I should tell you that we began to hold weekly conference calls with major education associations to identify and correct the problems.  Already we've fixed several of the technical problems, and we're hard at work on the data-bleeding issue.  We haven't rectified it completely, but I think we made some progress, and we'll continue to work with you to eliminate that problem.

And as we approach the deadline for putting one million student files onto SEVIS, we'll work to get people the training they need to use the system, and just as importantly, teach others how to use it.

This program remains vital to our efforts to improve the quality of information on visitors to this country, and therefore our security as well.

The system we had inherited for tracking students was paper-based, air-filled, and designed only for sporadic requests.  By contract, SEVIS must be capable of regular real time use and constant updates.  It will support our new entry/exit visa system, and its information will be made available to officers at ports of entry as well as our consular offices.

Which brings me to the issue of visas.  The President firmly believes, as he stated in Homeland Security Presidential Directive 2, that "the United States benefits greatly from international students.  We must continue to foster and support them."

We know that your foreign students are indispensable to America's continued leadership in science and in medicine and in technology.  We know that more than 40 percent of doctorates in physical sciences now go to non-U.S. citizens, and we know that nearly half the scientific and medical professionals at the National Institutes of Health are foreign nationals.  And as we secure America from terrorists, we do not want to risk losing the next Enrico Fermi or Albert Einstein.  We would be a far poorer nation in many, many ways.

I note that Einstein didn't just give America one of the world's greatest intellects, he gave President Roosevelt an early warning of Germany's quest to build an atomic bomb and its potentially devastating effects on America's ports and cities.

And at the same time we cannot go back to where we once were, when homeland security was just an afterthought.  As Einstein himself said, "We cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking that we used when we created them."

 With a new purpose, we're working to determine which visitors pose a threat to our safety and provide that information to all levels of law enforcement.  We're providing better information to consular officials so visa procedures reflect these threat assessments. And we are working and will continue to work with you to minimize the impact of these changes on your schools and researchers.

We've set up several different clearance processes, and I'm not going to go into the details, unless you want me to, of the Condor program which checks for terrorist ties and other security violations, or the Mantis program, which screens for individuals who may seek to violate our export laws.  Condor and Mantis, there's probably some kind of evolutionary meaning behind those acronyms, but I can't figure it out.  I'll let you do that.

One of the reasons is the massive number of new referrals under Condor which was implemented last January without significant corresponding revenues.  What has happened in many occasions is, we've received mandates - and I'm not going to blame it on anybody - the Executive Branch of the government, either in response to a congressional mandate or an executive order - to do certain things by a time certain.  

There has been, I think, a notion that we need to do it quickly rather than to do it right, and sometimes you can't do it right in the limited time frame they give it to you.  We can't do anything about the timing that's imposed, but I assure you we're going to try to do a lot better job working with you under the time limits that are imposed to avoid these kind of problems in the future.

I think one of the greatest potential solutions we have in dealing with foreign international students is the IPASS program, which stands for Interagency Panel on Advance Science and Security.  IPASS will have the voices and expertise of scientific experts to the visa approval process, and the end result we hope will be to speed approval or reentry of researchers and students who pose no threat.

Now, I know many of you have complained -- and I've heard some of this anecdotally -- about researchers and students who have managed to come in, pass muster, screening was done, had to return home for personal reasons, returned home for summer vacation, and they had a devil of a time getting back into the country.  And we need to separate -- and apart from SEVIS or IPSS, we need to come up with a mechanism, once they've been through these procedures, that we can expedite their return.  If we don't do that, they'll be less inclined to enroll in universities in the first place, and that's just not something we can afford to let happen.

Another answer may be to take a second look at the subjects listed on the technology alert list.  Again, I've heard from some of my friends in the university community, and while it's subject to regular interagency review, I think you have raised some legitimate concerns about the appropriateness of certain subjects on that list.  So we'll have to work with you to see if landscape architecture and community development rises to the level of security concerns that would require that that subject be included on that list, or if there's a longer list.

I don't pretend to be schooled in the area of science and technology, but the nexus between those and some other subjects with America's security is, if not lost, at least is clouded in my mind.

Let me close with one more issue of importance to you: guidelines for sensitive homeland security information, another red flag.

National Security Decision Directive 189, as you all know - as your colleagues from M.I.T. and Texas A&M related to me through Bob Gates here and Charlie West related to me a couple months ago - states in part that the products of fundamental research should remain unrestricted.  The mechanism for control of information generated during federally-funded fundamental research is classification.

It remains the policy of the administration to this day, although it has been related to me that it is applied from your point of view inconsistently and sometimes differently, even within a civil agency.  If nothing else, we'd like to see a consistent application intra-agency and then work on perhaps an interagency approach across the board.

In addition, you should know that the Homeland Security Act of 2002 calls for us to identify and safeguard homeland security information that is sensitive, but unclassified.  

To develop these guidelines we've engaged in listening sessions with scientists and academics, among others, the American Society for Microbiology, the American Council on Education, and, of course, your organization.  And after hearing your concerns, it is our intention that these guidelines apply to information owned by the federal government.  They would not -- I would say this again -- they would not apply to federally funded grants to universities and other private sector entities.

It is our department's best interest to promote basic as well as applied research.  Who knows what new applications to protect the homeland may result from that creative process?  To quote Einstein once again, "If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?"

Having said that, we do want universities to be highly aware of the potential misuse of this kind of information, and I'm sure you are.

The American Society for Microbiology has pledged to call to the attention of the public or the appropriate authorities misuses of microbiology, including the use of microbes as biological weapons, and we applied their initiative.

Finally, I want to share with you that we have - in the President's '04 budget, there's about $27 billion for basic research, and it's a 14 percent increase from two years ago.  That budget is presently being discussed on the Hill and hopefully passed in a more timely fashion than it was last year, and our effort to resolve these problems before that surge of funding is available to you is a very high priority within our department.

Just as Americans built an arsenal of democracy to win World War II, the challenge now is to design a shield of science for the war on terrorism.  To that end, this year nearly half-a-billion dollars will be transferred to our department's new Science and Technology Directorate.  And I should tell you we've asked for a 43 percent budget increase for science and technology programs for the next fiscal year as well.

In the end, as Jerry Cohon pointed out - and the President and I have had this discussion many, many times - historically, when this country has been confronted with a challenge, and we looked to individual citizens, we looked to the private sector, we looked to our universities, we ended up not only meeting the challenge, but also becoming a safer and stronger and better country in the process.

And I think in the end, as we confront the challenge of international terrorism, we will see some wonderful spin-offs as well.

Surveillance networks to help doctors detect and treat disease.  Whether the microbes are thrown at you by a terrorist or by Mother Nature, the kind of improvements that we think we can generate, and you are in the process of generating, and the science of detection, whether it comes to diagnostics or vaccines or antidotes.  And we may be doing some of that research in order to respond to a particular terrorist threat, but the spin-offs as relating to a safer and healthier country are undeniable.

We're going to help train and equip firefighters to deal with terrorist events.  But at the end of the day, if we train them correctly, they can help us deal with other environmental problems.

Improve our technology to help border agents deal with illegal aliens.  But if we do our job right - and that's part of the mission in the department - we'll do a better job of stopping drug smugglers.

And the list goes on and on, where we have the opportunity, in response to a terrorist threat, to make some changes and focus some resources and do some things that make us an even and stronger country.

But first and foremost, we seek to engage the nation's best and brightest minds in research and development to detect, deter, and defuse weapons of mass destruction, just as important in discovering technologies that can verify that people are who they say they.  Not only will it help us catch the bad guys, it will protect innocent persons, both here and abroad.

Working together with you on this challenge, we will send the message to terrorists that they have not and will not cause us to compromise our freedoms, including our academic freedoms.

The Department of Homeland Security takes seriously its charge to protect our nation's security without hindering the free flow of commerce, but as importantly I might add, the free flow and the free exchange of ideas.

Both are key, as Franklin would say, to keeping our republic, and we can only accomplish it by working together.

I believe that if we regularize our communications and conversations with this organization, as well as your colleagues in other academically-centered organizations, we will be able to meet the challenges that we each have in pursuit of what is a common goal; that is, not only a more secure, but a more prosperous country.

So I thank you for the opportunity to share the time with you this morning and share these thoughts with you and Jerry.  I'd be happy to respond to any questions you might have.  Thank you very much.  (Applause.)