THE PROFESSORS AND THE PENTAGON

...Bethe has warned...

...those in physics, chemistry, and other physical sciences had the heaviest teaching schedule—nineteen hours...

...Colonel Byrne was unusually frank, but he was only reflecting openly a widely-held view of Pentagon officials...

...The student disclaims belief in or support of "any organization that believes in or teaches the overthrow of the United States government by force...

...The imbalance that begins with involving a university in national military policy also distorts a university's goals and perspectives...

...The long-term answer is to end the arms race and abolish militarism...

...Any critical opinions expressed by a Dr...

...It would be a miracle if this influence were not felt in the universities as well...

...Each college or university would find its own identity, its own specialty, without direction or pressure from the government...

...According to Harold Orlans of Brookings Institution, the universities' own statistics show that the quality of their work is on the downgrade...

...In the future," said the Colonel, "some universities may provide a chair in the military art to which the Army could assign a professional officer...

...By 1962 Federal grants had risen to $1.2 billion, twenty per cent more then the total amount raised in contributions from alumni, friends, foundations, corporations, and religious denominations...

...E. J. Sparling of Roosevelt, there is no final recourse from the menace of military encroachment except to reverse the arms race itself...

...The most shocking result of secrecy in science that I have seen is a press release of June 29, 1962, from Assistant Secretary of Defense Steuart Pitt-man...

...In 1960, 119,000 students signed disclaimers and received loans averaging $495 each...

...He would much rather choose "scientific issues which are more closely related to the world that is part of man's everyday environment, and that have bearing on man's welfare, than does either high-energy physics or manned space travel...

...those in economics, education, English, history, political science, sociology, and speech taught an average of fourteen hours a week...

...As a result, many scientists think only of how to put the problem on the computer...

...Finally, the "scientist in the university, as in other 'organizations, may need whole new laboratories costing millions of dollars and employing hundreds of people...

...Despite the determined efforts of university presidents such as Dr...

...This clearly is not helpful...

...As Chicago's President Beadle points out, "one cannot be free to think unless, at the same time, one is prepared to accept the risk of believing...

...It is extremely difficult for those universities that are not 'members of the club' to get much more than token support for expanding their facilities...

...Perhaps in the McCarthy era the effects were more visible—possibly even more dangerous...

...It insulates one scientist from another, and science in general from "free access" to knowledge...

...All these, however, do not check the spread of the military octopus into every field of endeavor generally, and into the universities in particular...

...Well, I'll eat it,' said Alice, 'and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key...

...If I were advising a science student, I'd definitely tell him not to join the Student Peace Union if he wants to pursue his career without difficulty...

...Similarly the hundreds of millions spent by National Institutes of Health for research on cancer, mental illness, heart disease, and the like, counterbalance some of the ill effects of military support...

...The universities and the military, Byrne believes, must not be distant from each other...

...The interlinking of industry and the Pentagon is such a powerful and widely-cast web that even President Eisenhower expressed grave concern over its growth...

...Weinberg favors an emphasis on research that has a greater "bearing on man's welfare than does either high-energy physics or manned space travel...

...In that year the schools themselves raised $130 million for the same purposes...

...Among the more vital areas he lists are molecular biology—"the synthesizing [of] living material from non-living"—water, atmospheric pollution, chemical contamination...

...A recent study revealed that this relationship has been reversed...

...Big Science," the result of the torrent of government funds, is not necessarily improving science...

...The scientist, increasingly, is becoming a manager...

...An educator commented on the problem of a member of the Student Peace Union who is having trouble passing his security check...

...According to the American Council on Education, the number of academicians requiring "clearance" is growing...

...At liberal arts colleges, scientists, because of their responsibility for laboratory work, still do a little more teaching than professors in the humanities, but the gap continues to narrow...

...But in basic research it has many weaknesses...

...Each month it adds "40,000 new items and parts to our supply systems to support new weapons...

...The university professor who loses touch with his students cannot do as good work in the laboratory as he could if he found it necessary to communicate ideas to undergraduates...

...Seventeen Nobel prize winners made the same charges against secrecy the following year, but secrecy, in the control of the military, continues to impede science...

...Weinberg, "to generate around high energy physics the same popular interest that comes naturally to manned-space travel, I am not persuaded that this is the battleground of choice...

...As Dr...

...Universities are accepting projects that in times preceding the Pentagon influence they would have rejected...

...What, then, is the answer...

...They no longer think of the problem____ They lose the inspiration for further research that came from the intimate contact with every phase of the calculations...

...Behind these statistics lies a drama of stunning proportions...

...Several universities—such as Chicago, Harvard, Yale, and Oberlin—have refused to accept money on this basis...

...But what is significant now is the degree to which the military has woven itself into the fabric of our universities...

...Similarly, students who get loans under the National Defense Education Act of 1958 are required to sign a disclaimer...

...Instead, we ought to allocate a part of the gross national product, say one or two per cent, to science and the universities for non-defense research of their choice...

...But do not take the word of any "expert" who disagrees with us because we have secret information he does not have...

...Eisenhower in his farewell address, "of an immense military establishment and a large armaments industry is new in the American experience...

...Glass, "is that representatives of the military services can make almost any claims they wish without fear of contradiction...

...The scientist is now less a teacher and more a research man...

...This development becomes a teaching handicap as well, Dr...

...The number of scientists and engineers engaged in research and development, both in industry and in the universities, is nearly forty per cent of all scientists and engineers—and the proportion is growing...

...At this point, the scientist simply cannot be a free agent any longer—he must become a sort of scientific organization man...

...and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door—so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care what happens...

...In the release, Pittman warned Americans against "individuals with scientific background" who "challenge the concept that properly designed fallout shelters can save a significant number of lives...

...The Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission have relaxed their requirements if for no other reason than self-preservation...

...Pauling must be put aside...

...One reason for the relaxation is that failure to ease up would have been disastrous to the military effort itself...

...Now that money is relatively plentiful but thought is still scarce, there is a natural rush to spend dollars rather than thought...

...In the short run, however, less total solutions must be proposed...

...Lens, labor leader and author, has written for many publications, including The Yale Review, Harper's, Harvard Business Review, Fellowship, Commonweal, The Virginia Quarterly, and, frequently, The Progressive...

...Let us honor, therefore, such scientists as Linus Pauling, Ralph Lapp, Eugene Rabinowitch, and others who have run the risk of being sometimes egregiously in error in order to dispel the miasma of secrecy that is choking scientific advance...

...The National Science Foundation, which makes grants to science and scientists unrelated to the military effort, is an indication of that awareness...

...The university environment, however, is in practice not always what it is claimed to be in theory...

...Ralph Lapp, the eminent physicist, cited a list of the top scientific discoveries of our period, a significant majority of which came from individual or small group work, rather than from the project system...

...The major corporations' share in defense procurement has soared to $22.7 billion a year...

...Six years ago, Colonel John D. Byrne, a Pentagon officer, wrote in Army magazine: "On the military side, the approach to the universities is necessary because the influence of military affairs is expanding into every phase of national life...

...in general, they bend over backward in favor of academic freedom, and have done a great deal to adapt government methods to the requirements of a university...

...More and more one hears talk of "empire-builders," professors who have a number of projects in their "empire" and delegate work to other scientists...

...Nature does not obediently deposit her secrets at our feet upon payment of a requisite fee...

...One physicist told Brookings: "Federal support during the past fifteen years has set up a chain reaction continually increasing the concentration of high quality staff, students, and equipment at a few schools...

...Leo Szilard, or a Dr...

...Only if you have a real understanding can you transmit to your students all the thought and the steps that go into the solution...

...It is the sober judgment of many of our ablest educators and scientists that if present trends continue, the demands of the military establishments will dig ever deeper chasms in our system of higher education...

...He is the author of a number of books, including The Crisis of American Labor, A World in Revolution, and The Counterfeit Revolution.—The Editors Tn the first chapter of Alice in Won-derland, Alice, who was at the moment only ten inches tall, and locked in a room, encountered a "very small cake, on which the words 'eat me' were beautifully marked in currants...

...The first cyclotron constructed under his direction cost $3,000...

...it was "secret...

...A broader version of this conception is that the government provide annually a substantial fund for higher education as a whole...

...This is not from any wrong intentions on the part of individual agencies...

...The report is now long out of date but it is still classified and still unavailable...

...Arthur Waskow of the Peace Research Institute has observed two instances where history students were given government grants to write their doctorates...

...The inevitable result is the injection of a journalist flavor into Big Science which is fundamentally in conflict with the scientific method...

...The first appeared in the September issue...

...If the leading officials of our government were unable to deal effectively with the vital decisions concerning the life and death of our country . . . because they have less reliable information than a private citizen [my emphasis], this country would indeed be in trouble . . . The American people . . . have no better place to turn than to our President and Secretary of Defense to provide the most authoritative information about the complex effects of a nuclear attack...

...As recently as 1954 the Federal government provided our universities |280 million for research and development projects...

...Bethe observed recently, is generally a boon to science, yet there are many negative results that flow from such largesse...

...Both Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy have expressed opposition to the disclaimer, but it remains the law...

...Almost everyone in academic life agrees that the undergraduate today is neglected in favor of the graduate student...

...Furthermore, Brookings reports, "a majority of faculty agree: research does reduce the time spent on class preparation...

...More important, he may spend a great deal of time in the applied field as a consultant to government or industry...

...There is a tendency to give money to "name" professors already on the highest rungs of the academic ladder and in top ranking universities, rather than to the struggling young genius outside the "establishment...

...For years the liberal establishment fought this encroachment on civil liberties...

...The effect of the prospect of security investigations on college students, particularly those in science and engineering, is difficult to measure...

...Many other scientists are in the same position—they are not required to have clearance, but "it is helpful...

...Glass tells of a document he wrote in 1950-51 which "was so rigorously classified that after it was once handed in I was never able to see it again, since I was not sufficiently cleared to examine such top-secret information...

...Among his proposals was one that the universities should set up "study programs in the military art," much as there are now Russian institutes at Columbia and Harvard...

...Fortunately—unlike Alice—there are people deeply involved who "care what happens," but whether they— or we— can solve the basic problem remains an unanswered question...

...This was three per cent of the total student population of colleges and universities...

...At top-ranking universities, according to Brookings, the teaching schedule in the physical sciences is the lowest—six hours a week, as against 8.3 hours in the humanities...

...A study in 1930-31 of teaching loads at fifty-seven Midwest colleges and universities found that professors of religion and theology had the shortest workload—13.9 hours a week...

...At that stage, the donor would do well to consider the general health of the institution which he is building up, if only in order to protect his investment...

...Until a few years ago, our universities felt themselves to be in the same situation as Alice—ten inches tall, locked in, and frustrated by the beautiful garden of research just beyond the door...

...George W. Beadle, president of the University of Chicago, said recently: "Government-owned laboratories, many of them managed by universities under contract, offer attractive salaries, luxurious research duties—and no teaching duties...

...Bethe noted that he spends about half his time "on things that do not have any direct connection with my science...

...McGeorge Bundy, now a key adviser to President Kennedy and formerly dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard, testified a few years ago that "except in time of all-out war it has been the historic policy of Harvard University to emphasize the importance to the nation of open research in basic subjects...

...Bethe, or a Dr...

...You obviously can't do that if the computer gives the solution...

...Frederick H. Harbison, director of industrial relations at Princeton University, agrees that the university is the best place to carry on basic research...

...Security and clearance are now such an established way of life that few professors fight the system...

...Indeed, according to Dr...

...Each college or university would, under this proposal, receive an amount based on a formula that rewarded it both for the quantity and quality of its students and staff...

...A few might subsidize defense-related research, while most, no doubt, would search for new knowledge in other fields...

...As yet higher education has not been subjected to the program outlined by Colonel Byrne...

...The University of Chicago claims it loses $400,000 a year, much of which it must make up out of its budget...

...Beadle of Chicago, and Dr...

...This conjunction," said Mr...

...The most personally informed scientists in attendance has been dissociated from such work for no less than twelve years...

...In the more sophisticated areas of government and in the universities there is an awareness of this whole problem...

...Of the 2,500 given in fiscal years 1960 and 1961, physical sciences and engineering received little more than a quarter of the total, while social sciences and the humanities received more than half...

...Nathan Pusey of Harvard, Dr...

...It will take several years for the academic base in the military art to influence public and official opinion, and thus to bear upon national policy...

...Lens exploring the impact of the nation's unprecedented peacetime military program on American universities...

...He filled out, he told me, a twenty-page form...

...In polite but meaningful terms a recently published Harvard University report, "Harvard and the Federal Government," dealt with some of the abuses of the present system: "The government now calls on the universities for achievements that depend on the highest qualities of creativity, but sometimes through purchasing procedures that could destroy the environment in which such qualities flourish...

...Since Big Science needs great public support it thrives on publicity...

...There are about one million scientists and engineers in the United States—three times the number only twenty years ago—and within the next decade today's total will double...

...The House Special Subcommittee on Government Information reported in 1958 that "the Federal government has mired the American scientist in a swamp of secrecy...

...Lapp, or a Dr...

...There is some opinion among thoughtful observers that, under present circumstances, the pyramiding quantity of Federal funds available to universities is in inverse proportion to the quality of the teaching, research, the professor, and the student the universities produce...

...That means that a university will make its appointments without regard to some of the things with which a security officer of the government must naturally be concerned...

...This is somewhat worse for older people like me, but even the younger people feel the external pressures to do things other than their scientific work...

...Alice ate the cake and grew nine feet tall—but could not get out of the locked room...

...In a society in which preparation for war is the biggest and richest business, it is inevitable that the military spirit will penetrate, as Colonel Byrne points out, "into every phase of national life...

...Many scholars insist that the increasing divergence between research and teaching hurts both...

...Weinberg puts it: "The big scientific community tends to acquire more and more bosses...

...Unfortunately science dominated by administrators is science understood by administrators, and such science quickly becomes attenuated if not meaningless...

...But if there is any parallel with Alice's experience there are grave doubts that Defense money will open the doors to the garden of opportunity the universities are seeking...

...As a consequence, he may have little time left for basic research...

...Johns Hopkins University ranked sixty-third...

...Alvin M. Weinberg, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, it is "ruining it...

...But a university professor who teaches engineers told me that "they tend to play it safe...

...Nor are the researchers themselves satisfied with their work...

...First of all, teaching takes time, and the scientist may become particularly annoyed with grubby work such as grading papers, attending dull committee meetings, or typing his own letters...

...The quality, they insist, is declining...

...It blamed "the nation's loss in the first lap in the race into space" in large part on the classification of scientific information...

...The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government...

...This, then, is the end result of a process that begins with hardware procurement...

...Now the oath is taken for granted, and thousands of academicians sign it without protest...

...The subject matter, however—in history, remember—was not listed...

...Unhappily such subjects and others that affect man's long-term welfare— including peace—do not rate as high with the sources of funds as do those more closely connected with militarism...

...But this is no cause for despair or delay...

...Last year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ranked forty-first among the top one hundred "corporations" in the value of military contracts—two notches above the Ford Motor Company, and three places above Bethlehem Steel...

...Even if it were possible," writes Dr...

...The emphasis on team research, rather than individual or small group work, deepens this defect...

...The impact of secrecy, imposed by the military, is a corollary to security and probably even more insidious...

...Again and again one hears from university faculty members that teaching is suffering at the expense of research, that its quality is affected adversely, and that the undergraduate is neglected in favor of the graduate student...

...The institutes that are operated by universities set criteria by which they rate their own operations...

...Along with military order goes the military spirit, and eventually that spirit tends to engulf everyone and everything, even the universities...

...In an interview with Donald McDonald, of the Marquette University journalism school, Dr...

...Rigid security checks and clearances would greatly inhibit this expansion...

...It is almost impossible," a newly-appointed professor told me last month, "to get an assignment in a state university without signing a loyalty oath...

...We use it in this laboratory in a day...

...But is this a blueprint of the future of our universities...

...Bentley Glass, professor of biology ai Johns Hopkins, records that at a meeting at Pugwash on the dangers of chemical and biological warfare "no chemists or biologists who had been at all recently associated with such activities could be found to participate...

...The important consideration, however, is whether project research yields more fruit than individual research, whether the mere outpouring of money results in great discoveries...

...The unplanned pouring of billions of dollars into universities by the military has created many imbalances—all adversely affecting university quality...

...Some would put the major emphasis on teaching, some on research...

...The arms race leads inexorably to the garrison state, and a university cannot escape the fate of the society that nurtures it...

...He advocates an exchange of faculty members among the war colleges and the other institutions of higher learning...

...So is the type of fellowships granted by NDEA...

...He recalled that the President of the United States "has taken an oath to do everything he can to protect the American people...

...In current practice, an established scientist applies for a grant from the Pentagon or the Atomic Energy Commission for a group project involving many people...

...The Defense Department, according to Secretary Robert S. McNamara, has "total inventories of real estate, equipment, parts, exceeding $138 billion...

...One of them is that scientists "don't think enough____We used to do all our calculations by hand with a slide rule____Nowadays, people have enormous computing machines costing millions of dollars, and the customary thing is to take a theoretical physics problem and code it for-the computer...

...We cannot tell you the facts, he is saying...

...The institutions would allocate the monies as they and their faculties saw fit...

...They avoid argument as much as possible...

...Samuel Allison of the Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, a scientist who works on nonclassified research, nevertheless signed a non-Communist affidavit so that he can be a consultant to the National Laboratories of the Atomic Energy Commission and have access to classified documents that may help him in his research...

...The consequence of the trend to secrecy, commented Dr...

...But security checks and clearances still loom large in the university world...

...He is also more a publicist, journalist, adminis-trator, and spender of big money...

...Furthermore, secrecy seems to be penetrating the universities even beyond the physical sciences...

...The universities, on the other hand, should welcome the cooperation of the military because, as the civilian educators are well aware, this is an age of total danger and the task of teaching the people to survive transcends the broader missions of American education...

...There is no doubt in my mind that the possibility of some future security clearance is a deterrent to their expressing themselves on social questions...

...for this reason we avoid engagements in secret government research and we do not accept responsibility for the administration of security clearance of any kind...

...The almost frantic competition for the relatively small number of top scholars who remain in academic work accentuates the problem, io\, to increase the attractiveness of the positions, teaching loads—especially at the undergraduate level—are reduced to the vanish-ishing point...

...the sooner the proper educational base for the military art is started, the sooner it will take effect...

...There is, Harold Orlans has observed, "a fundamental incompatibility between the search for unpredictable scientific knowledge and the requirement that the secrets of nature be disclosed in advance to government administrators, that the methods, the costs, and the time of discovery be itemized and subject to prior review...

...A university must concern itself with fundamental questions, and it must be guided in all its decisions by a steady respect for scholarly excellence and total freedom of inquiry...

...Then came the magic cake, in the form of funds provided by the Department of Defense, and the temptation was strong...

...But a relationship based on a short-term grant for specific purposes, which was perfectly sensible when such grants were only a tiny increment to an academic budget, may be self-defeating when the grants have become a major reliance of the university...

...Another possibility," suggested the Colonel, "is the listing of the military art as one of the social sciences...

...The brazenness of Pittman's statement is breathtaking...

...But it refused to participate in the program on the admirable ground that such an affidavit means the student is agreeing "not to think about this subject"—Left-wing politics...

...Weinberg suggests that we stop paying for each individual bit of research on an ad hoc basis...

...Today $3,000 is pin money...

...To subject these men to the criteria that the late Senator Joseph McCarthy and his followers demanded might have removed thousands of scientists from vital war work...

...The current availability of funds, Dr...

...Hans Bethe, one of the nation's pre-eminent nuclear physicists and a frequent consultant to government, records that when he joined the faculty of Cornell University almost three decades ago "it was difficult to get enough money to run the physics department...

...One sees evidence of scientists spending money instead of thought...

...In certain fields, particularly in applied research, the project system is useful...

...In part this is because there has been a marked relaxation in security procedures since the worst of the McCarthy years...

...For the first time in our history the military plays an expanding role in peacetime...

...Industry does the same...

...The availability of "easy" military funds draws the scientist away from teaching to research and administration...