Pentagon Funds Campus Left

For about a half a century, the U. S. Defense Department has been feeding the hand that bites it. “During the cold war, the patronage of the national security state substantially transformed the American university in ways that have been mapped by a number of recent studies,” Hugh Gusterson writes in the most recent issue of Radical Teacher, “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.”

“Federal funding, especially defense funding, underwrote a massive expansion of American higher education, increasing its capitalization twentyfold from 1946-1991,” Gusterson, a George Mason University anthropologist, writes. “Major research universities such as Stanford, MIT and Johns Hopkins rose to power and prominence on the back of this funding stream, and the new circuitry of funding undergirded the emergence of complex networks tying together university researchers, weapons laboratories, and funding agencies (often staffed by people who had been trained with defense funding by the very academics they then went on to fund.)”

He’s following the money okay. Professors commonly tout their ability to secure government grants as an argument for tenure. Still, the notion that this largesse has turned the professoriate into a bunch of hawks is, at best, questionable.

Be it noted that this funding stream flowed while the anti-war movement on campus flowered, not just among students but eventually among faculty. AIA has reported on the Pentagon’s latest program to the counsel of the so-called best and brightest, on which Gusterson gives new insights.

“Minerva was first announced by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on April 14, 2008, in a speech to the American Association of Universities, where the assembled university presidents reacted with enthusiasm to an initiative that offered $50 million to university researchers,” Gusterson reminds us. “Gates’ speech was soon followed by a Broad Agency Announcement soliciting proposals for funding.”

In this announcement, the Pentagon noted that “In the course of Operation Iraqi Freedom, a vast number of documents and other media came into the possession [italics Gusterson’s] of the Department of Defense,” Gusterson recounts.

“To be precise, 5 million documents,” Gusterson noted. “They were seized by the U. S. military, then given by the Department of Defense to the Iraq Memory Foundation, an organization founded by an Iraqi exile, Kanan Makiya, who had lobbied for the invasion of Iraq.”

“The Iraq Memory Foundation has in turn signed an agreement to transfer these documents to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.” Gusterson is not happy with this arrangement.

“These documents should be returned to Iraq as part of their national patrimony, rather than being exploited as a resource by an occupying army which, in turn, invites scholars to profit from their expatriation,” Gusterson states. “Once they have been returned to Iraq, the Iraqi government can decide who should have access to these documents for what purposes.”

Gusterson postulates that “In the context of an anticipated long war in the Middle East and of other neocolonial projects in Africa and elsewhere, the Penatgon’s long term goal is to develop a cadre of social scientists, particularly in anthropology, who are tied to the military and its projects.” If that were indeed the case, then we can see just from this snapshot that the agency is failing miserably.

“Look at the Pentagon’s research wish list,” Gusterson’s colleague, Brown anthropologist Catherine Lutz, notes. “It does not correspond to the lists most anthropologists would construct of the most important problems, security or otherwise, facing the people of the United States or the world.”

“Their alternative lists would include global warming, inequality, disease, job loss…The lists might contain some problems generated by the Pentagon itself, like the human toll of the current wars or the huge deficit created by military spending.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.