Eager to embrace eggheads and ideas, the US Defense Department started an ambitious and unusual program to recruit social scientists and direct the nation’s brainpower to combating security threats like the Chinese military, Iraq, terrorism and religious fundamentalism.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has compared the initiative — named Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom (and warriors) — to the government’s effort to pump up its intellectual capital during the Cold War after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957.
Although the Pentagon regularly finances science and engineering research, systematic support for the social sciences and humanities has been rare. Minerva is the first systematic effort in this area since the Vietnam War, said Thomas Mahnken, deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy planning, whose office will be overseeing the project.
But if the uncustomary push to engage the US’ evolutionary psychologists, demographers, sociologists, historians and anthropologists in security research — as well as the prospect of new financial support in lean times — has generated excitement among some scholars, it has also aroused opposition from others, who worry that the Defense Department and the academy are getting too cozy.
The Pentagon put out its first requests for proposals last week. Minerva will award US$50 million over five years. Another set of grants administered by the National Science Foundation is expected to be announced by the end of this month.
Gates, a former university president with a degree in Soviet and Russian history, has a particularly personal stake in the program, Mahnken said.
“He was a beneficiary of the investment made by the government during the Cold War,” he said, adding that Gates was determined to repair the “bridges that used to exist between academics and the government that have fallen into the river.”
Cooperation between universities and the Pentagon has long been a contentious issue, and the recent death of Michael Bhatia, the first death of a civilian scholar working with combat troops in Afghanistan, has raised academics’ sensitivities on the issue. Bhatia, a 31-year-old graduate student in political science, was working on a completely different project when he was killed by a roadside bomb last month.
“I am all in favor of having lots of researchers trying to figure out why terrorists want to kill Americans,” said Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist at George Mason University. “But how can you make sure you get a broad spectrum of opinion and find the best people? On both counts, I don’t think the Pentagon is the way to go.”
Gusterson is a founder of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which was created because of a growing unease among scholars about cooperating with the Defense Department.
The American Anthropological Association, an 11,000-member organization, has also told administration officials that while research on these issues is essential, Defense Department money could compromise quality and independence because of the department’s inexperience with social science.
“There was pretty general agreement that this was an issue we should weigh in on,” said Setha Low, the organization’s president, who contacted dozens of anthropologists about it.
In its written call for proposals, the department said Minerva was seeking scholars who can, for example, translate original documents, including those captured in Iraq; study changes in the People’s Liberation Army as China shifts to a more open political system; and explain the resurgence of the Taliban. The department is also looking for computational models that could illuminate how groups make what seem to be irrational decisions, and decipher the way the brain processes social and cultural norms.
Gates has stressed the importance of devoting resources to what he calls “‘soft power,’ the elements of national power beyond the guns and steel of the military.”
Toward that end, he contacted Robert Berdahl, the president of the Association of American Universities — which represents 60 of the top research universities in the country — in December to help design Minerva. A former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and a past president of the University of Texas at Austin, Berdahl knew Gates from when the defense secretary served on the association’s board.
In January, Berdahl and a small group of senior scholars and university administrators met in Washington with Pentagon officials. Also there was Graham Spanier, the president of Penn State University and the association’s chairman. He said the scholars helped refine the guidelines, advising that the research be open and unclassified.
As for the issue of Pentagon financing, Spanier said: “Peer review is a good idea, but there are many different ways to do that.”
He added: “We have pledged to go back and recommend individuals who could help in that process.”
“The beauty of Minerva,” Spanier said, “is that it provides a lot of opportunity for people in the social sciences and humanities to solve national-security-related questions.”
Berdahl said some participants favored having the National Science Foundation or a similar nonmilitary federal organization, rather than the Pentagon, distribute Minerva money.
“It would be a good way to proceed, because they’ve had a lot of experience with social science,” he said.
In a speech to the Association of American Universities in April, Gates said: “The key principle of all components of the Minerva Consortia will be complete openness and rigid adherence to academic freedom and integrity.”
At a time when political campaigns have treated the word “elitist” as an epithet, he quoted the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s statement that the US “must return to the acceptance of eggheads and ideas” to meet national security threats.
“We are interested in furthering our knowledge of these issues and in soliciting diverse points of view, regardless of whether those views are critical of the department’s efforts,” Gates said.
In response to Gates’ speech, the American Anthropological Association sent a letter to administration officials saying that it is of “paramount importance” that anthropologists study the roots of terrorism and violence, but adding, “We are deeply concerned that funding such research through the Pentagon may pose a potential conflict of interest and undermine the practices of peer review.”
Gusterson, who says he is worried that the Pentagon will end up scaring off some voices and limiting the full range of opinion on a subject, said the project was “assigning the recruitment task to the agency that doesn’t know how to do this and ignoring the ones that do.”
“One reason the State Department misread Vietnam so badly in the early 1960s is that the liberal experts on East Asia were purged under McCarthyism,” he said. “I fear that a conversation about the sources of violence and terrorism run under the auspices of the Pentagon might be similarly misshapen.”
John Kelly, chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Chicago, said the research subjects were good.
But he cautioned that by focusing, for example, on military technology, “we might simultaneously misunderstand what’s happening in China and cause the Chinese to feel that we have identified them as a threat.”
Anthropologists have been especially outspoken about the Pentagon’s Human Terrain Teams, a two-year-old program that pairs anthropologists and other social scientists with combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in which Bhatia was participating at the time of his death.
As for Minerva, many scholars said routing the money through the National Science Foundation or a similar institution would go a long way toward easing most of their concerns.
To Spanier of Penn State, the answer to scholars who oppose Pentagon financing is simple: “Those who don’t want to do their research in the context of Department of Defense funding shouldn’t apply.”
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