Stop Me Before I Vote Again

An old friend of mine -- my informant, mentioned here before, deeply embedded in the credentialling sector -- passed this along, in salutary defiance of copyright law, from the subscription-only Chronicle Of Higher Education. Why these folks might feel they're in any danger from Napster or whoever is anybody's guess, but that's Academia for you -- the smaller the stakes, the fiercer the struggle.

For subscribers:

http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/07/3644n.htm

Pentagon's New Social-Science Program Stirs Old Anxieties

In September 1965, not long after news reports spotlighted a controversial Pentagon-sponsored program to study social conflict in South America, the Social Science Research Council played host to a meeting on overseas research.

Feelings were raw. Opposition to the Vietnam War was mounting, and many scholars worried that the Pentagon's research on conflict and counterinsurgency would bring all overseas researchers under suspicion as agents of American military power. According to Seymour J. Deitchman's The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy (MIT Press, 1976), a central theme of that 1965 meeting was whether, if the Pentagon really required research on such topics, it "couldn't be obtained by some independent, 'objective' agency, such as the National Science Foundation."

.... In April, Robert M. Gates, the secretary of defense, announced the Minerva Research Initiative, a Pentagon-financed, university-based social-science program whose purpose is to study the Chinese military, cultural dynamics in the Islamic world, and other topics of interest to the military.

... The president of the American Anthropological Association released a statement urging that such research be funded not by the Pentagon, but by agencies with "decades of experience in building an infrastructure of respected peer reviewers" like the National Science Foundation.

...[O]n Monday afternoon, the Pentagon signed an agreement that will facilitate collaborative social-science projects with the National Science Foundation... The anthropologists' wish has been at least partly granted.

The Pentagon has learned a valuable lesson: find the most respectable front you can, and then suborn it. "Peer review"! The holy of holies! The very best whitewash to use, if you've got a really foul sepulchre that needs touching up.

... [T]he program's supporters hope that it will play a... role in rebuilding trust between social scientists and the military. In his speech announcing Minerva, Mr. Gates referred to "academics who felt used and disenchanted after Vietnam, and troops who felt abandoned and unfairly criticized by academia during the same time."

Gates was at least a bit more balanced than his prospective new boss.

In an interview last month, Thomas G. Mahnken, the Defense Department's deputy assistant secretary for policy planning, said... "We believe that the government will benefit and the nation will benefit if we have a larger cadre of scholars who are conversant in primary-source Arabic documents, for example."

Translation: The overburdened CIA needs a sort of ladies' auxiliary.

He added that he hoped the NSF's peer-review process would give the program credibility among scholars.

No doubt his wish will be gratified. Once the holy water of "peer review" has been sprinkled about with a free hand -- what evil spirits could possibly remain? Besides, these people have... money... for grants! Now there, if you like, is some serious holy water.

But the best is yet to come:

Among the most visible skeptics is David H. Price, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Saint Martin's University and the author of a new history of World War II-era anthropology. Mr. Price says that even when the military solicits social scientists' insights, those insights are often ignored.

So let me see if I follow you, David: the problem with giving the Devil advice is that... the Devil doesn't listen?

Mr. Deitchman ended his memoir with a proposition that almost no one in the current Minerva debate is likely to find palatable. After witnessing a decade of angry Congressional hearings and bitter arguments within social-science organizations, he concluded that publicly financed social-science research was hopelessly politicized and that the federal government should, by and large, wash its hands of the entire business.

No matter whether they work for the Defense Department or for less controversial agencies, government-financed social scientists are in danger of swallowing "the values and outlook of the bureaucracy," Mr. Deitchman wrote. But in a new time of war and cross-cultural conflict, it's impossible to imagine that the federal government will follow Mr. Deitchman's advice and retreat from social-science research. The question now, as in 1965, is which agencies will steer that research.

And no doubt the answer will be the same. All the other answers seem to be the same -- or worse. I'm still reeling from Anthony Lake -- Obama's foreign-policy Yoda -- telling us recently that our mistake in Vietnam was leaving too soon.