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<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2014/09/researcher-loses-job-nsf-after-government-questions-her-role-1980s-activist">http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2014/09/researcher-loses-job-nsf-after-government-questions-her-role-1980s-activist</a></small></small></small></b><br>
<h1 class="snews-article__headline">Researcher loses job at NSF
after government questions her role as 1980s activist</h1>
<div class="article-byline"> By
<div class="article-author-list"> <span class="article-author"><a
href="http://news.sciencemag.org/author/jeffrey-mervis">Jeffrey
Mervis</a></span> </div>
<div class="article-author-list"><time
datetime="2014-09-10T05:00:00-04:00">10 September 2014 5:00 am</time></div>
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<div class="snews-article__article-body--full-text">
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<p>Valerie Barr was 22 and living in New York City in 1979 when
she became politically active. A recent graduate of New York
University with a master’s degree in computer science, Barr
handed out leaflets, stood behind tables at rallies, and baked
cookies to support two left-wing groups, the Women’s Committee
Against Genocide and the New Movement in Solidarity with
Puerto Rican Independence. Despite her passion for those
issues, she had a full-time job as a software developer—with
50-plus-hour workweeks and frequent visits to clients around
the country—that took precedence.</p>
<p>After a few years, she found herself devoting even less time
to those causes. By the late 1980s, she had resumed her
pursuit of an academic career. A quarter-century later, she’s
a tenured professor of computer science at Union College in
Schenectady, New York, with a national reputation for her work
improving computing education and attracting more women and
minorities into the field.</p>
<p>That social conscience also led her to decide it was time to
“give something back to the community.” So in August 2013 she
took a leave from Union College to join the National Science
Foundation (NSF) as a program director in its Division of
Undergraduate Education. And that’s when her 3-decade-old
foray into political activism came back to haunt her.</p>
<p>Federal investigators say that Barr lied during a routine
background check about her affiliations with a domestic
terrorist group that had ties to the two organizations to
which she had belonged in the early 1980s. On 27 August, NSF
said that her “dishonest conduct” compelled them to cancel her
temporary assignment immediately, at the end of the first of
what was expected to be a 2-year stint.</p>
<p>Colleagues who decry Barr’s fate worry that the incident
could make other scientists think twice about coming to work
for NSF. In addition, Barr’s case offers a rare glimpse into
the practices of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), an
obscure agency within the White House that wields vast power
over the entire federal bureaucracy through its authority to
vet recently hired workers.</p>
<h6><strong>Giving back</strong></h6>
<p>Barr came to NSF under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act
(IPA), <a
href="http://news.sciencemag.org/policy/2013/10/special-report-can-nsf-put-right-spin-rotators-part-1">a
mechanism</a> that allows the agency to tap the expertise of
the academic community without requiring scientists to leave
their current jobs. As an NSF “rotator” she managed a variety
of programs, including one that provides scholarships for
those studying how to combat cyberterrorism. A colleague, Jane
Prey, recruited Barr and regarded her temporary move as quite
a coup.</p>
<p>“You want to bring in really great people who are capable of
moving the community forward,” says Prey, a computer scientist
and former academic who was a program manager at Microsoft
before returning to NSF in 2012 for her second stint as a
rotator. “Valerie is incredibly talented—she’s a strategic
thinker who writes well and is very dependable. She also has
an independent mind, which is important.”</p>
<p>Prey says she’s known Barr professionally for many years—both
have been active on the Association for Computing Machinery’s
committee on women and its education council, for example—and
that they began to socialize during their joint stint at NSF.
“But she never talked about her political activism in the
1980s,” Prey says. “It just never came up in conversation.”</p>
<h6><strong>Who and what she knew</strong></h6>
<p>Barr describes that activity as being a “worker bee” on
behalf of two groups advocating for women and Puerto Rican
independence. Federal investigators say those groups were
affiliated with a third, <a
href="http://books.google.com/books?id=mr51AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA223&lpg=PA223&dq=May19+COmmunist+Organization&source=bl&ots=rvQZ1-KXHf&sig=Q4bly9WWpkR9xErL-fH_QC4XVu4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=mCYKVIfJGZPJgwSFw4DgBg&ved=0CE0Q6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=May19%20COmmunist%20Organization&f=false">the
May 19 Communist Organization (M19CO)</a>, that carried out
a string of violent acts, including the killing of two police
officers and a security guard during a failed 1981 robbery of
a Brink’s truck near Nyack, New York.</p>
<p>Barr’s first background interview was held in November 2013,
3 months after she began working at NSF. During that session,
Barr answered “no” when asked if she had ever been a member of
an organization “dedicated to the use of violence” to
overthrow the U.S. government or to prevent others from
exercising their constitutional rights.</p>
<p>However, according to an OPM summary report that served as
the basis for NSF’s decision, Barr was being less than
forthright. “You provided no information regarding your
affiliations with subgroups of M19CO—a known terrorist
organization,” the report notes. Her answers during the
interview, it concluded, “constituted a deliberate
misrepresentation, falsification, deceit, or omission of
material fact.”</p>
<p>Five months later, in April, Barr was summoned to a second
interview. This one was conducted by a special agent for the
Federal Investigative Services (FIS), an arm of OPM that
collects information for purposes of both job suitability and
security clearances. (FIS conducted 479,336 such interviews
last year, according to the agency’s <a
href="http://www.opm.gov/investigations/background-investigations/reference/fis-annual-report-for-fiscal-year-2013.pdf">2013
annual report</a>.)</p>
<p>After again being asked if she had been a member of any
organization that espoused violence, Barr was grilled for 4.5
hours about her knowledge of all three organizations and
several individuals with ties to them, including the persons
who tried to rob the Brink’s truck. (Four people were found
guilty of murder in that attack and sentenced to lengthy
prison terms, including Kathy Boudin, who was released in 2003
and is now an adjunct assistant professor of social work at
Columbia University.) “I found out about the Brink’s robbery
by hearing it on the news, and just like everybody else I was
shocked,” she recalls.</p>
<p>But OPM apparently thought otherwise, again citing her
“deliberate misrepresentation” in its report. Relying heavily
on that investigation, NSF handed Barr a letter on 25 July
saying that it planned to terminate her IPA at the end of the
first year because the OPM review had found her to be unfit
for the job. Last year, OPM reports it pursued 8520 cases in
which serious questions about a federal worker’s character and
conduct had been raised; between 100 and 200 of those cases
resulted in a government-wide debarment.</p>
<p>Barr was given a chance to appeal NSF’s decision, and on 11
August she submitted a letter stating that OPM’s summary
report of its investigation “contains many errors or
mischaracterizations of my statements.” (As is standard
practice, agencies receive only a summary of the OPM
investigation, not a full report, and lawyers familiar with
the process say that an agent’s interview notes are typically
destroyed after the report is written.)</p>
<p>Barr maintains that she had been truthful throughout both
interviews, and that “there was no material fact about these
organizations for me to omit.” Barr says she was casually
acquainted with two of the convicted murderers, Judith Clark
and Kuwasi Balagoon (née Donald Weems) but had no prior
knowledge of their criminal activities. Clark remains in a
maximum security prison for women in New York state, and
Balagoon died in 1986 of an AIDS-related illness. (Barr says
she wrote to Balagoon occasionally while he was in prison—“it
would have been reprehensible for me to drop my correspondence
with a dying person,” she explains—and visited him once.)</p>
<h6><strong>An academic life</strong></h6>
<p>Barr says the special agent’s detailed questions during the
second interview caught her by surprise. “I had not thought
back on that period of political activity for several
decades,” she says.</p>
<p>After heading back to school, Barr earned her Ph.D. in 1996
from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and
taught for 9 years at Hofstra University on Long Island in New
York before joining Union College in 2004 as department chair.
There she revamped the computer science curriculum, broadening
its introductory courses to make them more enticing for women
and minorities and strengthening collaborations with other
departments to expose more nonmajors to computer science. “She
completely transformed that department,” says Jennifer
Goodall, a service professor in the informatics department at
the University at Albany, who has worked with Barr on
statewide conferences to promote women and computing.</p>
<p>Goodall says she and her colleagues were very happy that Barr
had decided to work at NSF. “We were excited because she has a
nontraditional computer sciences background,” says Goodall,
who considers Barr a professional role model. “She’s a woman,
a lesbian, and she has a long track record of improving
diversity in computer science.”</p>
<p>Barr expected those achievements to weigh in her favor once
investigators questioned her fitness to work at NSF. Instead,
Barr believes those professional accomplishments may have
counted against her.</p>
<p>In her 11 August response, Barr questioned whether the
special agent who conducted the investigation “can be an
impartial evaluator of academic scientists, or anyone with
liberal political beliefs.” As evidence, she points to a
posting on a blog maintained by the agent, a veteran who
served in Iraq, and his family. The item is a copy of a
popular Internet meme about an incident that supposedly took
place in an introductory college biology course.</p>
<p>According to the story, a “typical liberal college professor
and avowed atheist” declares his intent to prove that there is
no God by giving the creator 15 minutes to strike him from the
podium. A few minutes before the deadline, a Marine “just
released from active duty and newly registered” walks up to
the professor and knocks him out with one punch. When the
professor recovers and asks for an explanation, the Marine
replies, “God was busy. He sent me.”</p>
<h6><strong>OPM calls the shots</strong></h6>
<p>When the federal government needs to screen newly hired
workers, it sends OPM to do the job. Its investigative branch
handles both background checks and security clearances. The
key metric is suitability—which OPM defines as “a person’s
identifiable character traits and conduct sufficient to decide
whether employment or continued employment would or would not
protect the integrity or promote the efficiency of [federal]
service.”</p>
<p><a
href="https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/employee-relations/training/presentationsuitabilitysecurity.pdf">A
PowerPoint presentation on OPM’s website</a> titled “Taking
Adverse Actions Based on Suitability or Security Issues”
explains the process. A ruling of unsuitability must be based
on one or more of eight factors, including criminal conduct,
negligence, and substance abuse. Although using violence
against the U.S. government is one such factor, the
presentation notes that “[m]embership in an organization,
alone, is not disqualifying.” Mitigating circumstances, it
adds, can include the timeliness of the unsuitable
activity—“[t]he more recent the conduct is, the greater the
potential for disqualification.”</p>
<p>The complexity of the process puts OPM in the driver’s seat,
say lawyers who have handled many federal employment cases.
“Suitability is a very amorphous subject, unlike security
clearances, where there are clear rules,” says Sheldon Cohen,
an attorney in Oakton, Virginia, who specializes in security
clearances. In the absence of such guidance, he says,
individual agencies feel they have no choice but to follow
OPM’s advice.</p>
<p>“If OPM recommends that a person is unfit, the agency will
follow that recommendation, period,” Cohen says. “Agencies
have the authority to reject OPM’s recommendation, but they
don’t exercise it, ever.”</p>
<p>An NSF official describes that relationship somewhat
differently, but acknowledges that the end result is the same.
“OPM plays no immediate role in the suitability determination
and does not review individual agency determinations,” says
Judith Sunley, head of NSF’s Division of Human Resource
Management. But, she adds, “agency adjudicative decisions must
be consistent with government-wide standards established by
OPM. Once a determination of lack of suitability is made using
those standards, agencies have very little discretion in their
actions.”</p>
<p>Attorney Joseph Kaplan, of the Washington, D.C., firm Passman
& Kaplan, says that, in his experience, the most common
reasons for a finding of unsuitability are lying about one’s
educational background, one’s employment history, or one’s
criminal record. “If OPM determines that the person has misled
or provided false information,” he says, “they can be declared
unfit for federal service.”</p>
<p>Kaplan says he’s never heard of anyone being drummed out for
political activity that occurred decades ago. At the same
time, he says, the government’s decision is based not on
anything Barr did during the 1980s but on how she explained
those activities to federal investigators after coming to work
at NSF. He also believes that the U.S. government has become
more cautious since the 2001 terrorist attacks. “Ever since
9/11, the government has been much more vigorous in finding
people unfit for service,” Kaplan says.</p>
<p><em>Science</em>Insider was unable to verify that claim. An
OPM representative says the agency “does <strong>not </strong>[OPM’s
emphasis] track data on people found unsuitable for federal
service.” Although NSF keeps its own statistics, it declined
to provide them. However, Sunley suggests that the numbers,
although small, could be rising.</p>
<p>“NSF has been gradually upgrading its personnel security
program for the past 2 years and those doing background
investigations are being held to higher standards as well,”
she says. “Thus, numbers from past years are not good
indicators for the future, although it is safe to say that
they have been, and will likely remain, very small.”</p>
<p>Cohen speculates that the massive leaks by Edward Snowden of
national security secrets, which began in June 2013, could
also have been a factor in NSF’s decision. “If it’s a matter
of weighing the employee’s statement against what the
investigator says he has found, agencies will resolve it in
favor of national security,” Cohen says. “That’s just how it
is, especially after Snowden.”</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, Barr feels such a policy doesn’t do enough
to protect innocent people like herself. Without access to the
evidence that OPM used to make its case against her, she says,
“all I have been able to do is repeatedly assert that I told
the truth.”</p>
<p>Barr says she is thankful that Union College has welcomed her
back with open arms and says she will soon resume her teaching
and research activities. In addition, she regards her year at
NSF as “a very rewarding experience in many ways.” Even so,
she has written to her representatives in Congress and to NSF
Director France Córdova asking them to examine what she labels
an “Orwellian process” for vetting rotators like herself.</p>
<p>“We volunteer to do this,” she wrote Cordova on 29 August.
Until a better process is put in place, Barr says, “NSF runs
the risk that many highly qualified scientists will not even
consider serving as IPAs. That will be a tremendous loss.”</p>
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<p class="field-item"> <span>Posted in </span> <span
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href="http://news.sciencemag.org/category/people-events">People
& Events</a>, <a
href="http://news.sciencemag.org/category/policy">Policy</a></span>
<span class="category-list-inline"><a
href="http://news.sciencemag.org/tags/nsf-rotators">NSF
Rotators</a></span> </p>
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