He has to wait in longer lines at the airport. He couldn't vote in last year's historic presidential election. But until he took over as president of the Johns Hopkins University in March, Ronald Daniels had never been denied a professional privilege because he is Canadian.
As a Canadian citizen who just received his green card, Daniels cannot obtain security clearance to oversee classified research. And under Hopkins' enormous research umbrella sits the Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel. The lab attracted $845 million in research money last year, about 70 percent of which came from the Department of Defense. Many of those defense contracts involve classified research.
Past Hopkins presidents have obtained a security clearance but have never involved themselves in the details of classified research, say the university and the lab. Nonetheless, university and defense officials spent several months earlier this year negotiating an agreement under which Daniels would have no contact with classified contracts.
The university has created a limited liability corporation to handle its classified research, and oversight has transferred from the president's office to Pamela Flaherty, who chairs the university's board of trustees. Richard T. Roca, director of the lab, is the manager of the LLC and reports to a panel of trustees appointed by Flaherty.
"It effectively creates a wall between the part of the university performing research with access to classified information and the rest of the university," said Hopkins spokesman Dennis O'Shea.
The arrangement has satisfied defense officials, and the government never considered pulling classified contracts from Hopkins, said Defense spokeswoman Kathleen Roberts. But the situation is unusual, she said.
"It is unusual for a university or company doing classified defense work to hire a non-U.S. citizen to fill a leading administrative position," Roberts said. "So this situation rarely occurs. It has not occurred previously in more than 60 years of Johns Hopkins or APL performing research and development for DOD."
The Canadian in question said he's comfortable ceding oversight of classified research to Flaherty.
"With the changes that have been made, I'm confident that the lab and the university will continue to benefit from a strong relationship," Daniels said. "And I look forward to the day when I will have my clearance."
