Outside the Political Science Department, it was pretty clean. Now, if you take a look over the years, Pentagon funding has declined and funding from the NIH has increased. And I suspect almost everybody understands it. The reason is because the cutting edge of the economy is shifting to biology, away from an electronics-based economy, so you have to rip off the taxpayer in some different fashion. We don’t have a free-market economy. Federal spending, government procurement, and other devices are huge components. Funding is also getting more corporatized. I suspect what is going on here is more corporate funding, and the corporate funding has a general cheapening effect.
Federal funding is long term, it’s nonintrusive, and they just want things to be done. But if big corporations fund something, they’re not interested in the future health of the economy. They want something for themselves. So it means that research becomes more short term, it becomes much more secret. Federal funding is completely open, but a corporation can impose secrecy; they can indicate you’re not going to get refunded unless you keep it quiet. So it does impose secrecy. There are some famous cases that have come out; one big scandal even made the Wall Street Journal.
As long as it stays secret, they can do as they like.
Robert Barsky wrote that during the protests on the MIT campus in the 1960s, you held an extreme position even among the liberal faculty. Basically, you didn’t believe shutting down the labs involved in military research was the solution, but rather, “universities with departments that work on bacterial warfare should do so openly.”[25] What is to be gained by that approach?
These matters came to a head at the Pounds Commission. Its primary concern was the relation of MIT’s academic/research program to the two military laboratories it administered, Lincoln and the Instrumentation Lab (now the Draper Lab). The commission split three ways. One group (call them “conservatives”) favored keeping the labs on campus. A second (“liberals”) favored separating the labs from MIT. A third (“radicals,” I think consisting just of me and the one student representative) agreed with the conservatives, though for different reasons. If the labs were formally separated, nothing much would change in substance: joint seminars and other interactions would continue pretty much as before, but now with formally separate entities. What the labs are doing would disappear as a campus issue. But what they are doing is vastly more important than the appearance of a “clean campus,” and their presence would be a regular focus for education and activism. The liberal view prevailed, and the outcome was much as anticipated—a step backward, I think, for the reasons mentioned.
Pentagon funding was a major device used by the government from the early postwar period to lay the basis for the high-tech economy of the future: computers, the Internet, microelectronics, satellites, etc.—the IT revolution generally. After several decades primarily in the public sector, the results were handed over to private enterprise for commercialization and profit. By the 1970s government funding was shifting from the Pentagon to the biology-related institutions: the NIH and others. The military was a natural funnel for an electronics-based economy. Fifty years ago the small start-ups spinning off from MIT were electronics firms, which, if successful, were bought up by Raytheon and other electronics giants. Today the small start-ups are in genetic engineering, biotechnology, etc., and the campus is surrounded by major installations of pharmaceutical firms and the like.[26] The same dynamics have been duplicated elsewhere.
The Pentagon itself gains little if anything from this, not even prestige. In fact, few even know how the system works. To illustrate, I once wrote an article about a speech to newspaper editors by Alan Greenspan—called “St. Alan” during his day in the sun, and heralded as one of the great economists of all time. He was hailing the marvels of our economy, based on entrepreneurial initiative and consumer choice, the usual oration. He made the mistake, however, of giving examples, each of them textbook illustrations of what I have just described: the role of the dynamic state sector of the economy during the hard part of research and development (along with government procurement and other devices of what amounts to a kind of industrial policy). Greenspan’s illusions are the common picture.[27]
The system as a whole certainly merits critical examination, for one reason, because there is virtually no public input in crucial decision making. But I’ve never seen the force of the argument against employment at a university that is being publicly funded for research, development, and teaching, and it seems of little moment whether the funding technique happens to be via the Pentagon, the NIH, the Department of Energy, or some other formal mechanism.
In general, what matters is what work is being done, not how it’s funded. Biological warfare is no more benign if it’s funded by the NIH or by a private corporation. Universities are parasitic institutions. They don’t (or shouldn’t) be geared to production for the market. If they are to survive, they have to be funded somehow, and there are few options in existing society.
For what it’s worth, while the MIT lab where I was working in the ’60s was 100 percent funded by the armed services (as you can see from formal acknowledgments by publishers), it also happened to be one of the main centers of academic resistance against the Vietnam War, perhaps the main one; not protest, but active resistance.[28] And by the late ’60s MIT probably had the most radical student president of any US campus, with plenty of student support and related activism, which had quite positive and long-lasting effects on campus life.[29]
What are alternative ways of viewing campuses?
A campus is primarily an educational institution. A crucial part of education is coming to understand the world in which we live, and what we can do to make it a better place. Any college, and particularly a research university like MIT, should also be a center of creative and independent thought and inquiry, along with critical evaluation of the directions that such inquiry should pursue, with cooperative participation of the general university community.[30] It should also bring in, as feasible, the outside community. My own courses on social and political issues—which I was teaching on my own time—were usually open to the public, sometimes at night for that reason, others too.
I don’t suggest any of this as an “alternative,” but rather as an ideal, approximated more or less, and a guideline for commitment and choice of action.
3.
Toxicity of War
Laray Polk: We’ve spoken previously about Reagan’s “Star Wars” program as something that developed as a palatable alternative to nuclear stockpiling. Isn’t there also something to be said about the location of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll, a heavily contaminated area as a result of US atomic testing?[31]
Noam Chomsky: I suppose it reflects the prevailing conception that the “unpeople” of the world—to borrow the phrase of British diplomatic historian Mark Curtis—are dispensable.[32]
The level of contamination left from US atomic testing in the Marshall Islands is immensely troubling, but so too is what might be transpiring in Iraq and other areas of the Middle East due to the use of depleted uranium. There seems to be ample evidence that the use of DU in Iraq by the US is causing a catastrophic health crisis. Some have even referred to it as “low-grade nuclear warfare.”[33] Where do you stand on this issue?
26
Nanoscale science and engineering is a rapidly emerging area of federally funded R&D with possible applications in materials, manufacturing, energy, defense, communications, and health care. Funding is administered through the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), and supports fifteen agencies including the DOE, DOD, NSF, and NIH. The agencies comprise an infrastructure of more than ninety major interdisciplinary research and education centers. One of the centers, MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN), works in partnership with the army and industrial collaborators Raytheon, DuPont, and Partners HealthCare. On ISN and Future Force Warrior, see note 2, chap. 5.
27
See Chomsky’s deconstruction of Greenspan’s “miracles of the market”—the Internet, computers, information processing, lasers, satellites, and transistors—in
28
Chomsky’s early technical reports bear the imprint of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. RLE was founded in 1946 as a successor to the Radiation Laboratory (RadLab) developed during wartime. The RadLab produced nearly half of the radar used in World War II; one prototype is on view upon entering the building where Chomsky’s office is located.
29
See Michael Albert,
30
Vera Kistiakowsky, former MIT professor of physics, has expressed similar views: “Universities should not solicit or encourage funding by mission-oriented sources [e.g., Department of Defense] without a faculty consensus that this is desirable. Individual faculty members should take responsibility for foreseen consequences of their research, including those attached to seeking or accepting support from particular sources. Social responsibility should become important among the criteria of excellence at the universities, a factor in promotion and tenure decisions.” “Military Funding of University Research,”
31
In 1969 Henry Kissinger said of the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, “There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?” Quoted in Jane Dibblin,
32
“The principle victims of British policies are Unpeople—those whose lives are deemed worthless, expendable in the pursuit of power and commercial gain. They are the modern equivalent of the ‘savages’ of colonial days, who could be mown down by British guns in virtual secrecy, or else in circumstances where the perpetrators were hailed as the upholders of civilisation.” Mark Curtis,
33
When Dr. Helen Caldicott was asked whether she thought this description was apt, she responded, “I would describe it as nuclear war without the blast, the effects of which will be endless.” E-mail correspondence, February 16, 2012.