Florida Board of Governors: Board joins fight over travel ban

By: Daniella Bacigalupo / Staff Writer
Earlier this month, the Florida Board of Governors agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Faculty Senate of FIU that the Travel to Terrorist States Act – which, among other things, bans university research travel to Cuba – should be reexamined to determine if it has constitutional merit.

“These professors saw this law as a restriction on their ability to meet their obligation as professors in their fields,” said Bill Edmonds, director of communications of the Florida Board of Governors. “We are agreeing that the court needs to look at the issue of non-state dollars [in the act].”

Signed into law by the Florida Legislature in 2006, the Travel to Terrorist States Act forbids the use of university state and non-state funds to travel to countries deemed “sponsors of terrorism” by the U.S. Department of State. The countries deemed “sponsors of terrorism” are Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria and Cuba.

The ACLU, in conjunction with the Faculty Senate of FIU, brought a lawsuit against the state and the Board in 2006, arguing that the travel ban is unconstitutional.

In the latest chapter of the case, in January 2008, the Board filed its own lawsuit against the state declaring the lack of differentiation between state and non-state dollars in the act is unconstitutional.

“We asked the court to look at the question of [whether] the legislature overstepped its authority,” Edmonds said.

According to Brandon Hensley, director of communications for the ACLU, the travel ban manages solely to “hamper academic research” and “displace intellectual capital” from Florida universities since professors and graduate students have moved to other national universities where research travel is not restricted.

“There is an important distinction between aiding terrorist states and conducting research in these states and using state funds and non-state funds,” Hensley said.

Professors believe the University is particularly affected by the ban because a number of the academic research programs at FIU focus their work on Cuba.

“A Cuban institute needs to know what is going on in Cuba and the best way to know is to go there. For serious, scholarly research there is no other way to do it,” said Uva de Aragon, associate director of FIU’s Cuban Research Institute.

Rep. David Rivera, who co-wrote the Travel to Terrorist States Act, insists that travel to these countries, even to conduct field research, serves to aid terrorists by indirectly providing them with monetary resources.

“Any travel to a terrorist country necessarily subsidizes that terrorist regime because money will be spent … in that country … that ultimately goes into the coffers of the terrorist regime,” said Rivera during his April 26, 2006 testimony in front of the Florida Legislature. “So, I don’t believe anything good could come out of [researching in] Cuba, like for example, researching agriculture in Cuba.”

Rivera’s opponents disagree and even suggest the travel ban not only threatens to decrease Florida’s academic output, but also threatens the federal government’s ability to deter terrorism, one aim of the act.

“There are serious implications in national security. We might be in a better position to diffuse the terrorist situation here if we could have better information from these states,” Hensley said.

Though the Florida Board concurs with the ACLU over the issue of using non-state funds and that “it is in the best interest of the state that academic leaders stay current in Cuban affairs,” the Board insists it has not sided completely with ACLU. Rather, the Florida Board insists that the main issue is the struggle to establish authority over the university system.

According to Edmonds, the Florida Board is trying to assert its independence through a lawsuit against the state, claiming the right to raise public university tuition without necessarily having the state’s approval.

Therefore, the Board viewed the travel ban as an opportunity to cement its argument that the state cannot control what is done with non-state money, Edmonds said.

“We did not want to ignore that argument in this [travel ban] lawsuit. We wanted to be consistent in the Board’s expression of its principles,” Edmonds said.

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