Department of Homeland Security and academic labs.

In the June 4, 2007 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (which is behind a paywall accessible only to ACS members and those with institutional subscriptions, I’m afraid) there’s an article on how college and university labs may be impacted by the interim final regulation on chemical security issued recently by the Department of Homeland Security.
In a nutshell, that impact looks like it could involve thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single university to comply with the rules, even if the chemicals they use fall into those specified by DHS as being at the lowest level of risk. As you can imagine, the colleges and universities are kind of freaked out.

You may be interested in checking out the list of “chemicals of interest” to the DHS. They may look exotic to your average citizen, but to people doing science in university labs (including those taking laboratory courses), some of them are pretty mundane. It’s worth noticing that while some of these chemicals are deemed worth tracking only above a certain threshold amount, others are to be tracked in any amount.
That in itself might not be such a challenge but for the fact that universities don’t typically keep all their chemicals in a single secured stockroom, nor do their chemicals all get used in a single secured laboratory. Rather, there are numerous individual labs — recall that each faculty member in a chemistry department generally heads his or her own lab — each of which the DHS rule would treat as a separate facility requiring compliance with the rule (and the attendant paperwork). For example, the C&E News article talked to the senior director for environmental health and safety at Ohio State University, Michael St. Clair, who

estimates that his university possesses about “100 of the chemicals of interest, located in over 900 different buildings and over 2,000 laboratories.”

Compliance with the rule might be easier if universities could somehow reconfigure themselves more like industrial chemical facilities, but that wouldn’t be easy to do given what universities are trying to do:

[Lawrence M.] Gibbs [associate provost for environmental health and safety at Stanford University] points out that “a free and open environment” is a necessary condition for academic institutions to carry out their teaching and research functions. “Colleges and universities can secure the room or area where a significant quantity of a high-risk chemical is located,” he says. But “facility-wide perimeter security, access control, background checks, and the other described security measures are antithetical to institutions of higher education.”

Because the DHS rule looks like it could have a tremendous impact on the ability of colleges and universities to do (or even teach) any science, the Campus Safety, Health & Environmental Management Association‘s (CSHEMA) Government Relations Committee has sent the DHS a response to the rule, including suggestions about how to stay within the spirit of what DHS is trying to achieve without saddling colleges and universities with an impossible compliance task.
DHS has shown signs of being open to revision the rule to minimize the negative impact on academic labs. However, it seems DHS also wants some say in how universities vet teaching assistants and student researchers who would have access to the chemicals on the list. How much fun could that be when you’re making TA assignments, or when graduate students are trying to find research labs?
The feeling from the campuses as reflected in the article seemed to be that for all the cost (in time and money) that it would take to comply with the rule as currently formulated, it would do little to nothing to improve the nation’s chemical security. In the process, of course, that time and money would be diverted away from actual teaching and research.
We’ll see how responsive DHS is to the CSHEMA comments and where the rule ends up.