The study, conducted by Creso Sá, Aytaj Pashayeva, Christine Weidenslaufer, and Emily Gong of the University of Toronto, is based on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with 17 administrators across three Canadian research-intensive universities. The researchers set out to answer a deceptively simple question: what actually happens inside universities when national research security mandates arrive on their doorstep? The answer, they argue, is an organizational form they call the embedded advisory model, and its details reveal a great deal about how universities absorb external demands that clash with their core values.

The context matters. Over the past several years, intensifying geopolitical competition, particularly between Western nations and China, has pushed research security to the top of the policy agenda in many countries. Canada has been no exception. The federal government introduced the National Security Guidelines for Research Partnerships in 2023, followed by the Policy on Sensitive Technology Research and Affiliations of Concern, which restricts federal funding for research involving named sensitive technologies when researchers have ties to listed foreign entities. Provincial funders such as Ontario have issued their own research security guidelines, and agencies including the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the National Research Council have published guidance of their own. Universities suddenly found themselves responsible for implementing a dense and evolving web of requirements.

What the University of Toronto team found is that rather than creating new enforcement units, universities located research security within existing administrative infrastructures. Research security professionals were positioned as advisors who help researchers interpret federal and provincial requirements, coordinators who connect scattered offices across the institution, and translators who render dense government policy into workable practice. This design choice is not accidental. Universities are famously loosely coupled organizations, in which central directives often struggle to reach the laboratory bench, and the researchers argue that the embedded advisory model reflects a pragmatic reading of that reality.

The most striking finding concerns legitimacy. Research security introduces considerations that sit uneasily with established norms of academic science, including openness, international collaboration, and researcher autonomy. Security professionals cannot simply order scientists to comply; they must sustain cooperation through trust-building, researcher-oriented communication, and pragmatic support for funding success. In practice, this means framing security requirements not as bureaucratic impositions but as tools that help researchers remain eligible for grants, protect their intellectual property, and keep valuable partnerships alive. The advisors’ authority rests on usefulness rather than coercion.

This dynamic echoes a broader pattern documented in organizational scholarship. Studies of professional support staff in universities have long shown that new administrative functions gain standing with academics only when they demonstrate value to the research enterprise itself. The research security professionals in this study appear to have internalized that lesson. Their work involves what the authors describe as legitimacy-seeking: continuously demonstrating that security review is compatible with, and even supportive of, the scientific mission. Where earlier waves of university professionalization, such as research administration and quality assurance, followed similar trajectories, research security may be the newest member of that family.

The embedded advisory model also has a distinctive technical logic. By embedding security expertise within existing structures such as research services offices, universities avoid the reputational costs of a visible policing function while still ensuring that risk assessments, disclosure reviews, and partnership screenings occur before proposals are submitted. The professionals interviewed for the study described working across the entire lifecycle of a research project, from helping a researcher decide whether a collaboration triggers federal screening requirements to advising on how to document risk mitigation measures for a funding agency. This positions them as what organizational theorists call relational regulators, governing the gap between formal rules and everyday scientific practice through ongoing relationships rather than one-off inspections.

Yet the study is careful to identify the structural limits of this arrangement. The authors point to gaps in policy coverage, meaning that some research activities and funding streams fall outside the reach of current security requirements. They also highlight uneven federal-provincial coordination, since universities must reconcile requirements from multiple levels of government that do not always align. And they flag the risk of inconsistent application, both within and across institutions, when implementation depends heavily on the judgment and relationships of individual advisors rather than standardized procedures. An advisory model built on trust, in other words, may struggle to deliver uniformity.

These findings matter well beyond Canada. Comparable debates are unfolding across the OECD: the European Union has grappled with balancing openness against protectionism, Australia has been urged to make its research security ecosystem work smarter, and American universities have published catalogs of actions taken to address security concerns while scholars document the collateral damage of US-China tensions on scientific collaboration. The Canadian case offers a concrete organizational template, and a cautionary tale, for institutions everywhere that are being asked to securitize research without destroying the openness that makes science productive in the first place.

The study’s broader contribution is to shift the analytical lens from national policy design to administrative practice. Much of the emerging literature on research security focuses on what governments mandate; this paper specifies what universities actually build. In doing so, it speaks to longstanding concerns in higher education scholarship about how universities absorb external mandates and under what conditions new administrative functions gain standing with scientists. The embedded advisory model may be an imperfect compromise between security and academic freedom, but it is the compromise that research-intensive universities have chosen, and understanding it is essential for anyone hoping to predict how the global research system will evolve under continuing geopolitical pressure.

Subject of Research: Implementation of research security mandates through an embedded advisory model at Canadian research-intensive universities

Article Title: Organizing research security: the embedded advisory model in Canadian universities

Article References: Organizing research security: the embedded advisory model in Canadian universities. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01770-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01770-7

Keywords: research security, Canadian universities, higher education, research governance, science policy, academic administration, geopolitical competition, policy implementation, research partnerships, national security, university organization, advisory model

Rice University has received a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to conduct the first national survey designed to quantify the scope and frequency of foreign influence in American higher education. The project will be led by Tam Dao, Rice’s associate vice president of public safety and research security, and Kenny Evans, a fellow in science, technology and innovation policy at Rice’s Baker Institute of Public Policy. They will work in collaboration with Randolph T. Stevenson, the Radoslav Tsanoff Professor of Public Affairs at Rice, and co-principal investigator Claudia Neuhauser, vice president and vice chancellor for research at the University of Houston. Together, the team intends to produce policy recommendations that balance security requirements against the importance of global scientific collaboration.

The project responds directly to a string of well-publicized incidents that have driven a rapid expansion of research security regulation at federal and state levels. Dao brings an unusual perspective to the question: before moving into university administration, he served as the lead FBI special agent on many of the investigations that generated those headlines beginning in 2015. In his view, the regulatory response has outpaced the evidence base. There have been a few high-profile cases that prompted increased requirements for research security on federally and state funded research programs, he noted, but the research community currently lacks an understanding of the actual depth and breadth of the issue, which he argues is essential to forming well-informed, well-reasoned policies.

The policy environment shifted sharply in 2018, when the U.S. Department of Justice launched an initiative to identify undue foreign influence in the academic research enterprise. The initiative produced several prominent prosecutions and prompted universities to adopt new disclosure requirements, export control practices and compliance structures. But a striking feature of the episode, noted by observers across the research policy community, is that very few of the cases involved espionage in any conventional sense. The initiative and the research security policies that followed instead created widespread uncertainty about how researchers could appropriately collaborate with colleagues in other countries. Dao has carried these concerns into the policy arena itself, testifying before two state legislative committees reviewing the implementation of a recently passed research security bill in Texas.

For university research administrators, the uncertainty is not an abstraction. Neuhauser emphasized that universities need clarity in research security policies, and that such clarity can only come from a better understanding of what foreign influence actually looks like in practice. The central empirical question, as she framed it, is whether the country is seeing isolated incidents, indicators of a larger systemic problem, or something in between. Without that baseline, institutions are left calibrating their responses to anecdote and political pressure rather than to measured risk, and the resulting policies may be either too permissive or needlessly restrictive.

Evans pointed to the cumulative cost of that ambiguity for the research system itself. Universities are spending an enormous amount of time and resources working to comply with federal policy, he observed, and the rules continue to change. In his assessment, the research community does not currently understand how new research security policies are affecting the health and competitiveness of the U.S. research enterprise. Research institutions, he argued, need clear guidelines that reflect the scale and scope of research security issues on campuses, because until reliable data exist, no one really knows how big the problem is. That gap between regulation and evidence is precisely what the NSF-funded survey is designed to close.

Methodologically, the project represents a significant departure from previous attempts to assess the issue, which have typically relied on case counts, administrative data or small convenience samples. The Rice-led team will conduct a national survey measuring the frequency with which researchers across American academia have encountered foreign influence tactics. The instrument will probe whether scientists in a range of disciplines have experienced coercion, deception, intellectual property theft or inappropriate rewards, categories drawn from the definitions used in federal research security guidance. Because the survey will ask faculty to disclose potentially sensitive and professionally risky experiences, capturing accurate and representative responses is the central technical challenge of the design.

That challenge is where Stevenson’s expertise becomes central. A political methodologist, he specializes in survey design for contexts in which respondents may be hesitant to answer honestly, a well-recognized problem in research on sensitive topics ranging from electoral fraud to corruption. The Rice survey will be built on a version of the crosswise model developed by Stevenson and his collaborator Yuki Atsusaka in 2021. Crosswise techniques ask respondents to answer a sensitive question jointly with an unrelated question whose prevalence is known, so that no individual response ever reveals a potentially damaging answer while aggregate estimates can still be recovered statistically. The approach is intended to reduce the incentive to misreport that plagues direct questioning about sensitive behavior.

Stevenson described the planned instrument as rigorous, validated and crosscutting, and argued that the survey represents the first step toward developing well-informed research security policies. Because it will be the first serious national measurement of the phenomenon, he said, it is critical that the team use every tool at its disposal to obtain accurate, representative information. If the project succeeds, the resulting estimates will give federal agencies, state legislatures and university administrators something they have never had: a data-driven picture of how often foreign influence tactics actually occur, in which fields, and at what scale.

The stakes extend well beyond a single dataset. Federal agencies have imposed increasingly detailed research security requirements on grant recipients, and states have begun passing their own statutes, creating a patchwork of obligations that institutions must navigate. Proponents of stricter controls argue that even a low-frequency threat can cause disproportionate harm when it targets strategically important technologies. Critics counter that broad restrictions risk chilling legitimate international collaboration, deterring foreign-born scientists and eroding American scientific leadership. The Rice-University of Houston team hopes its findings will allow that debate to proceed from evidence rather than assumption, and the project’s stated aim is to translate rigorous measurement into sensible and effective policy development for a research system that cannot function without global partnership.

News Publication Date: 10-Sep-2026

Web References: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1143520

References: Rice to lead first national research security survey, https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1143520

Subject of Research: The first national survey to quantify the scope and frequency of foreign influence in U.S. higher education research

Article Title: Rice to lead first national research security survey

Article References: Rice to lead first national research security survey. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: research security, foreign influence, Rice University, National Science Foundation, national survey, crosswise model, international collaboration, research policy, higher education, intellectual property, survey methodology, compliance