Pentagon Funds Campus Left

Accuracy in Academia ^ | January 15, 2010 | Malcolm A. Kline

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Pentagon Funds Campus Left

Malcolm A. Kline, January 15, 2010

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....

[a fool in paradise]

Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn got vilified for pointing out that there was an antiAmerican fifth column working within the State Department and US military. They were told it was wrong to question their patriotism.

Nothing has changed.

The Ft. Hood shooter was permitted to hold his rank despite his communication with terrorists because it was wrong to question his patriotism.