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Collaboration between US universities and Pentagon raises many questions

The US military is frequently criticized for not doing enough to reduce civilian casualties or to stabilize the places it is fighting to protect. Yet what happens when the outside experts who can offer such advice are condemned for doing exactly that?

Questions about collaboration between soldiers and academics have been around at least since World War II, but they have arisen with particular urgency in recent months at professional meetings, in journals, on campuses and on the Internet over programs related to Afghanistan and Iraq.

At Harvard, some faculty members have been troubled that the university's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy helped revise the counterinsurgency field manual, even though the center's objective was to reduce civilian casualties.

Members of the American Psychological Association have had fervid exchanges over what role, if any, its members should have in military interrogations. And anthropologists have passionately argued over a Pentagon program that uses these social scientists in war zones.

These sorts of controversies have appeared "in various permutations at different times," said David Wippman, a professor at Cornell Law School who worked on humanitarian affairs for the Bill Clinton administration, mentioning similar debates over participation in humanitarian assistance, the Iraqi war crimes tribunal and the proceedings at Guantanamo's detention camp.

In the Harvard dust-up, the worry is that the essential secretiveness of the military will transform the long-cherished openness and transparency of the university, bringing the campus green a bit too close to the parade ground.

"How could Harvard sit there and put the imprimatur of a human rights center on counterinsurgency?" said Tom Hayden, the Vietnam War-era activist, who has complained about the collaboration in The Nation and on the Huffington Post. "It lends an Ivy League cloak of legitimacy to counterinsurgency, which is inherently secret."

For Hayden and Richard Parker, who now teaches at the Kennedy School at Harvard, the Vietnam War is a touchstone in these debates.

"I'm of a generation that is skeptical about this," Parker said. "Universities aren't innocents."

"In the era of Abu Ghraib," he said, such cooperation "does damage to the university's credibility and autonomy."

Participants may think they are immune to being compromised, Cox said, but human nature being what it is, "I'm not confident that a lot of people who think they can humanize the system can prevent themselves from getting carried away," said Harvey Cox Jr, a faculty member of the Harvard Divinity School for more than 40 years.
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