Cold War Universities Engerman

Review Essay

Rethinking Cold War Universities: Some Recent Histories ✣

Noam Chomsky et al., The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years. New York: New Press, 1997. xxvii ⫹ 258 pp. $25.00. Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xii ⫹ 316 pp. $55.00. Ron Robin, Making the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the MilitaryIntellectual Complex. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. xvi ⫹ 277 pp. $45.00. Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War. New York: New Press, 1998. xxxiv ⫹ 273 pp. $27.50.

Many scholars who are deeply critical of American life during the Cold War have found an unlikely muse in President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Invoking Eisenhower’s criticism of the “military-industrial complex” and its impact on universities, recent books on Cold War intellectual history refer to the “Military-Intellectual Complex” or the “Military-Industrial-Academic Complex.”1 Within the texts themselves are references to the “academic-national security complex,” the “military-industrial capture” of scholarly agendas, the “ColdWar annexation of the social sciences,” and the “military-academic complex.”2 All of these variations make the same point: the Cold War reshaped and warped American universities. Few Americans were as well-positioned as Eisenhower to sound that particular alarm. Before his election to the U.S. presidency in 1952, he had led both military and academic institutions. Eisenhower warned about the mili1. Ron Robin, Making the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 2. Christopher Simpson, “Introduction,” in Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. xx; Laura Nader, “The Phantom Factor: Impact of the Cold War on Anthropology,” in Noam Chomsky et al., eds., The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York: The New Press, 1997), p. 139; Allan A. Needell, “Project Troy and the Cold War Annexation of the Social Sciences,” in Simpson, Universities and Empire, pp. 39–56; and Robin, Making of the Cold War Enemy, p. 87. Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 5, No. 3, Summer 2003, pp. 80–95 © 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

80

Cold War Universities

tary-industrial complex in his 1961 farewell address, calling attention to the possibility that military spending would distort American life and especially American thought. Gone were isolated scholars, comfortably detached from the rest of the world, following their own instincts and “tinkering” in their shops. Government funds, Eisenhower worried, had become “virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” The “solitary inventor” had yielded to “task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing ªelds.” These trends turned the university, “historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientiªc discovery,” into an institution dangerously implicated in the everyday life of the world surrounding it.3 Like Eisenhower himself, some critics of the “Cold War University” compare it (usually implicitly) to an idyll that never was: an era in which solitary scholars, appointed solely on the basis of their talents, roamed the groves of academe, enjoying the time and resources to explore a freely chosen subject to their hearts’ content and free to express their results to the scholarly or wider community. The Cold War University, in this narrative, becomes an aberration in the history of American academic life, a crude distortion of an otherwise unfettered pursuit of truth.4 To these critics, the anti-Communist crusade of the late 1940s and early 1950s was an era of political interference that vitiated the sanctity and security of the ivory tower.5 The best of the new books on the Cold War University reject this narrative of pure universities and scholars corrupted by national-security imperatives. They show instead how crucial components of the Cold War University emerged well before the Cold War, often for reasons unrelated to the U.S.Soviet conºict. Demonstrating the tremendous value of historical perspective, these books show that the symptoms of the Cold War University—political interference in faculty appointments, depoliticized social sciences that emphasized the scientiªc over the social, federally sponsored research, and the ascent of faculty members more connected to research communities than to their own institutions—all predated the Cold War. World War II was the watershed moment for the involvement of federal agencies in university-based research. Indeed, the impact of World War II on postwar academic life is hard to overestimate; it provides a constant refrain in the works reviewed here. Al3. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, 17 January 1961, in Public Papers of the President: Dwight D. Eisenhower (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Ofªce, 1960), pp. 1035–1040. 4. Only a handful of works make explicit this idea of a university untrammeled by outside political and economic forces, but many more describe the Cold War University in sharp but implicit contrast to this ideal type. 5. Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). On scientists’ relations with national security organs, see Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

81

Engerman

though many of the trends so often attributed to the Cold War actually predated World War II, the war consolidated the intellectual and institutional networks that made the government-academic relationship into its current form. The titles of the books reviewed here, however, suggest a narrower perspective than the books themselves. Nowhere is the disjuncture between cover and content more evident than in Noam Chomsky’s The Cold War and the University (hereinafter referred to as CWU), one of two sets of collected essays published by The New Press. A blurb from The Nation celebrates the book for what it adds to “the history of Cold War repression.” Many of the book’s essays—mostly autobiographical sketches by prominent academic dissenters—belie this praise. They show how the Cold War’s impact on the academy was multidimensional, complex, and hardly limited to repression—though they do also demonstrate acts of repression at American universities. Biologist Richard C. Lewontin directly addresses the issue of repression at the start of his contribution. He summarizes the “liberal and Left academic” view of the Cold War: “research agendas warped by the ideological fervor and political pressures of foreign policy, and of professional and personal lives ruined” by “anticommunist witch-hunts and pusillanimous academic administrators” (p. 1). The Cold War, in this telling, was a “Time of Troubles” for the American academy, when political pressures and direct interference destroyed academic institutions. The rest of Lewontin’s essay offers careful rebuttals of this view. The same road that took some scholars to their academic “cruciªxions” took far more toward “professional prosperity” (p. 2). Some left-wing scholars did suffer from the anti-Communist fervor of the early Cold War, but Lewontin acknowledges that McCarthyist hysteria “should not be confused with state policy.” Indeed, he continues, “there was a widespread indifference to political ideology in the research” supported by federal agencies (p. 18). He recounts his own experiences with federal grants as an example. Once the Ofªce of Naval Research (ONR) offered him a contract, he heard little more from the agency. ONR’s representatives were equally apathetic about his political views and his research; all that mattered was that he ªled his grant reports on a timely basis (p. 16). Lewontin’s experience was hardly unique, even among dissenting scholars. Indeed, most of the authors in Cold War and the University received funds from one or another component of the Cold War academic apparatus.6 That apparatus grew by leaps and bounds in the decades following World War II. 6. Howard Zinn, “The Politics of History in the Era of the Cold War: Resistance and Repression,” in Chomsky et al., eds., The Cold War and the University, p. 69; Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Unintended

82

Cold War Universities

Natural scientists received the lion’s share of extramural research funds. By the early 1960s the federal government was spending about $1.5 billion per annum on American universities, primarily for sponsored research.7 The National Science Foundation funded basic research, and a host of other institutions, many connected to the Pentagon, offered long-term support for basic and applied research. The largest projects, such as linear accelerators, ultimately required congressional approval.8 University research was not simply a university activity. Social scientists, though competing for much smaller sums of money than their laboratory-based colleagues, launched a variety of interdisciplinary programs with funding from outside sponsors. Although the social sciences received some federal funding, an expanding network of private foundations facilitated the expansion of the social sciences. This was evident with the rise of area-studies programs, a form of academic organization whose life cycle coincides neatly with the Cold War. The ªrst area-studies programs, focusing on the Soviet Union, were set up at prestigious academic institutions in 1946 and 1947; they were initiated and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. In the early 1950s the Ford Foundation supported a large number of university-based centers for the multidisciplinary study of world regions. After the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite in 1957, the U.S. government embarked on its own funding of area-studies programs through Title VI grants. After reaching a peak in the 1960s, many area-studies programs stagnated (perhaps like the USSR itself, and for some of the same reasons) in the 1970s and 1980s. Soon after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, some major benefactors of area studies (the Ford and Mellon Foundations) announced that they would favor studies of global rather than regional trends.9 Immanuel Wallerstein thus has a point when he argues, in his contribution to Chomsky’s The Cold War and the University, that area studies was a Consequences of Cold War Area Studies,” in Chomsky et al., The Cold War and the University, p. 209; and Ray Siever, “Doing Earth Science Research during the Cold War,” in Chomsky et al., eds., The Cold War and the University, pp. 158–159. 7. Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 4th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 40, 53–55; and Roger L. Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 8. For instance, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center wended its way through three funding agencies before receiving congressional authorization in 1961—see W. K. H. Panofsky, “SLAC and Big Science,” in Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly, eds., Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). 9. A forthcoming collection of essays, David L. Szanton, ed., The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, traces the fate of area studies. See especially the introduction by David L. Szanton, “The Origin, Nature, and Challenges of Area Studies in the United States,” available on-line from http://escholarship.cdlib.org/ias/szanton.html.

83

Engerman

creature of the Cold War. As Wallerstein observes, area-studies programs emerged in the aftermath of World War II not as the result of scholars’ proposals but as a “top-down enterprise” promoted by foundations and, later, by government agencies (which he calls, seemingly without irony, “The Establishment”; p. 227). By starting the story in 1947, though, Wallerstein leaves out important innovations in area studies during World War II. The model of multidisciplinary explorations of a modern world region emerged during the war at the Research and Analysis Branch of the Ofªce of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The USSR Division, for instance, brought together economists, sociologists, political scientists, and historians to study the capabilities and intentions of America’s wartime ally. The OSS convened a group of social scientists to study Soviet economic, societal, and political affairs, forming what historian Barry Katz has cleverly termed “social science in one country.” There were some distant analogues to this model of study—for instance, the many interdisciplinary traditions in classics, Oriental studies, and Ottoman studies. The interwar period saw a number of unsuccessful efforts to establish multidisciplinary projects to study the Soviet Union. In addition, the American Council of Learned Societies created its Committee on Slavic Studies in 1938.10 Building on these earlier programs, the OSS model—and many of its personnel—soon took root at major American universities.11 The centrality of area studies in the Cold War University and the controversy stirred by Edward Said’s critique Orientalism have made this ªeld an especially popular one for critical analysis. Vincente Rafael linked area studies to the “Cold War liberal project” and other Cold War imperatives, most notably, the training of Americans to become “skilled managers of foreign and domestic affairs.”12 Historian Bruce Cumings, writing in Universities and Empire, a companion volume to The Cold War and the University, offers even stronger criticisms. He credits the “state/intelligence/ foundation nexus” for the creation of area studies, claiming that the programs and their scholars were an essential component of diplomatic and intelligence work. His evi10. Robert F. Byrnes, “Geroid T. Robinson: Founder of Columbia University’s Russian Institute,” in A History of Russian and East European Studies (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), pp. 202–203; and David C. Engerman, “New Society, New Scholarship: Soviet Studies Programmes in Interwar America,” Minerva, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Spring 1999), pp. 45–64. 11. Barry M. Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Ofªce of Strategic Services, 1942–1945 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1989), ch. 5. On Yale scholars’ connections with the OSS, see Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 (New York: William Morrow, 1987). 12. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1989), pp. 288–93; and Vincente Rafael, “The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States,” Social Text, Vol. 41 No. 1 (Winter 1994), pp. 91, 97.

84

Cold War Universities

dence for this is, necessarily, somewhat sketchy. Asking why “so many . . . leaders of area-studies centers have CIA ties and background,” Cumings insinuates that a grand plot tethered the programs to the intelligence apparatus (p. 167). He focuses on Philip Mosely, the historian and former OSS consultant based at Columbia University. Mosely’s links with foundations, granting organizations, and intelligence agencies has caught Cumings’s critical eye; Cumings alleges that Mosely’s involvement with CIA recruiting proves that Columbia’s Russian Institute was a CIA organ (pp. 167–171). Correcting his earlier and more benign image of the relationship between scholars and intelligence agencies, Cumings castigates himself for committing the “fallacy of insufªcient cynicism” (p. 166). He had, he says, simply not imagined just how close the ties could be. Efforts to overcome the “fallacy of insufªcient cynicism,” however, run the risk of creating new fallacies: those of insufªcient evidence or insufªcient contextualization. There are less sinister explanations for the intelligence backgrounds of area-studies scholars. First and foremost was the World War II experience, especially the research branch of the OSS, the main wartime intelligence organization. Nicknamed the “Chairborne division,” the OSS gathered under its auspices a remarkable storehouse of academic talent, what one journalist called a “veritable galaxy of academic stars.” Among the brightest stars were eight future presidents of the American Historical Association and ªve future presidents of the American Economic Association. The OSS galaxy also had room for its own Marxist Milky Way, including economist Paul Baran and Frankfurt School luminaries Franz Neumann and Herbert Marcuse.13 Second, the CIA hired many students trained by area-studies programs. The agency employed its own staff of Sovietological economists who re-created their own peculiar version of a think tank and remained in close contact with their academic counterparts.14 From the outset the Russian-studies centers at Harvard and Columbia featured two-year master’s programs as well as in-depth training of doctoral candidates, with the explicit aim of sending students to careers in government service.15 CIA staff also sponsored university-based research on the Soviet Union. The economist Walt Rostow, unde13. Stewart Alsop, quoted in Robert A. McCaughey, International Studies and Academic Enterprise: A Chapter in the Enclosure of American Learning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 115; and Katz, Foreign Intelligence, p. 203 n. 15 and ch. 2. 14. Noel E. Firth and James H. Noren, Soviet Defense Spending: A History of CIA Estimates, 1950–1990 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998), chs. 1–2. Specialists on the USSR were far from the only economists employed by the CIA. See Donald P. Steury, “Introduction,” in Donald P. Steury, ed., Sherman Kent and the Board of National Estimates: Collected Essays (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1994). 15. See, for instance, Byrnes, “Geroid T. Robinson,” pp. 214–215.

85

Engerman

terred by his lack of expertise in Soviet studies, wrote The Dynamics of Soviet Society under a CIA contract. But Rostow received his funding through the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an organization with closer and longer-lasting ties to the intelligence establishment than the major Soviet-studies centers had.16 Area-studies programs certainly received a boost from Cold War concerns. But even in the programs most directly engaged in “knowing the enemy”—those focusing on the Soviet Union—a wide variety of viewpoints and approaches received attention.17 True, the range of acceptable views was not inªnite, as professionalizing social scientists sought to exclude extreme perspectives on the right and especially the left; nervous academic administrators worried only about leftists.18 Nonetheless, the leeway for dissenting scholars was far greater than some critiques would lead us to imagine. The issue of area studies is indicative of the internal contradictions in the pair of New Press books. All of the autobiographical essays examine the Cold War’s impact critically but also manage to distinguish between events that happened during the Cold War and events that happened because of that conºict. This nuance is lost, however, in the analytical essays, which suggest a vision of a scholarly idyll destroyed by external intervention. Anthropologist Laura Nader traces the inºuence of “industrial and military powers” on the American university all the way back to the Civil War, celebrating a golden age of higher education in antebellum America where “morals and political economy” got top billing (CWU, p. 140). This romanticized vision of exclusionary, sectarian colleges teaching morality from religious texts but having little if any room for modern languages (not to mention modern politics or economics) represents the extreme edge of a “golden age” argument. A twentieth-century variant on this lapsarian vision appears in Christopher 16. W. W. Rostow with the collaboration of Arthur Levin, The Dynamics of Soviet Society (New York: Norton, 1953). Rostow acknowledged the CIA’s funding in a memoir, “Development: The Political Economy of the Marshallian Long Period,” in Gerald M. Meier and Dudley Sears, eds., Pioneers in Development (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1984), p. 241 n. 23. A recent history by a member of the Center for International Studies offers a judicious assessment of its activities: Donald L. M. Blackmer, The MIT Center for International Studies: The Founding Years, 1951–1969 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for International Studies, 2002). 17. Two articles on early Sovietology offer contradictory criticisms that inadvertently reveal the range of opinion in the ªeld: Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), ch. 1; and Martin Malia, “From under the Rubble, What?” Problems of Communism, Vol. 41 (January–April 1992), pp. 89–106. See also George W. Breslauer, “In Defense of Sovietology,” Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 8, No. 3 (July–September 1992), pp. 197–238. 18. For sharp criticisms of Harvard’s treatment of left-wing dissenters, see Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945–1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), chs. 3–4.

86

Cold War Universities

Simpson’s introduction to Universities and Empire. He asserts that some ªelds (including his own, communications) “could not have evolved in anything like [their] present form without” funds and contracts from Cold War agencies (p. xii). Contrary to his argument, however, some of the major assumptions that undergirded Cold War communications research were well in place before the U.S.-Soviet confrontation began. The advantages of a broader historical context are visible in the rise and fall of Project Camelot in the early 1960s. For Simpson as for other critics, Camelot marks the high point of “national security state-sponsored” interventions into scholarly life (p. xxiv). The Department of the Army funded the project through its Special Operations Research Organization, housed at nearby American University. Public documents unabashedly proclaimed the Project’s relevance to foreign policy because of its emphasis on scholarly models that could “predict and inºuence politically signiªcant aspects of social change in the developing nations of the world.”19 (Camelot was hardly the only effort to link social science to political change in the Third World; from both academic and government posts Walt Rostow developed plans for counterinsurgency that relied heavily on social science theories, mostly his own.20) Focusing on Latin America, Camelot received major funding (as much as six million dollars over three years) and recruited prominent sociologists such as Jessie Bernard and Neil Smelser. But the high hopes for such a visible and well-funded project were soon dashed; one American consultant, seeking to attract participants among Chilean scholars, denied that the army was involved in Camelot. When his false claim was revealed in 1965, it sparked a political scandal in Chile that soon became a diplomatic incident. Although Project Camelot’s sponsorship and aims had never been classiªed, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara cancelled the project as soon as it garnered unwelcome public attention. For many scholars at the time and since, Project Camelot represented a high-water mark of the corruption of social science by Cold War needs. A broader historical frame, however, shows that Project Camelot’s intellectual as well as organizational roots lay not in the Cold War but in World War II. As historian Ellen Herman writes in her essay, “Project Camelot and the Strange Career of Cold War Psychology,” changes in American intellectual 19. Two of the books under review provide good descriptions of Project Camelot. See Ellen Herman, “Project Camelot and the Career of Cold War Psychology,” in Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire, p. 101; and Robin, Making the Cold War Enemy, ch. 10. See also the essays in Irving Louis Horowitz, The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship between Social Science and Practical Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967). 20. On Rostow and counterinsurgency, see especially Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), ch. 5.

87

Engerman

life during the war created the crucial elements for Camelot. The war brought about the blurring of lines between military and civilian research, as well as the rise of behavioralist social science. These innovations, initially proclaimed as wartime necessities, “took on,” as Herman states, “an eerie permanence during the Cold War” (p. 99). Cold War social science, then, was World War II social science with a different enemy. To be sure, this point does not dull the critical edges of Herman’s argument, which examines the ways that the Cold War turned wartime exigencies into a new modus operandi.21 But it does show that the effective examination of Cold War social science requires a broad chronological sweep. In all the books under review, the essays and chapters that examine American intellectual life in the 1950s as connected to prior traditions and institutions—and not as purely a function of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry—provide more effective and more convincing explanations of the impact of the Cold War on American thought. Ron Robin, a proliªc Israeli scholar trained in the United States, roots his discussion of social scientists’ ties to Cold War institutions in the context of scholars’ renewed emphasis on scientiªc pursuits and direct applications.22 Looking back to the 1930s, he ªnds the origins of behavioralism in the work of the political psychologist Harold Lasswell. Robin might also have traced the roots of Lasswell’s own ideas to those of his adviser, Charles Merriam. After initially writing about the history of political theories and institutions, Merriam in the 1920s embarked on ambitious research projects about political behavior, particularly its nonrational elements.23 Lasswell, for his part, regarded public and political decisions as mere displacements of private motives, and he argued that human behavior had little room for rational thought or ideological commitment. Although professional social scientists in the 1930s mocked Lasswell’s work, his ideas took hold as the United States once again mobilized for war. (As one scholar noted regretfully, behavioralism was one of many innovations in political science that came from outside political science departments.24) Lasswell’s growing inºuence also owed much to a social-scientiªc milieu that stressed the scientiªc over the social. Scientism and objectivity came into prominence, whereas descriptive and historical 21. Michael Sherry offers an impressive overview of the ways in which the Cold War perpetuated the patterns of WWII-era America. See Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), chs. 3–4. 22. In the interests of full disclosure: I read a portion of Robin’s manuscript prior to its publication. 23. On Merriam, see Barry D. Karl, Charles E. Merriam and the Study of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); and Mark C. Smith, Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate over Objectivity and Purpose, 1918–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). 24. Charles E. Lindblom, “Political Science in the 1940s and 1950s,” in Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske, eds., American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 244.

88

Cold War Universities

techniques fell out of favor. It was during the war that anthropologist Leslie White warned of “physics envy”—the tendency of social scientists to draw too close an analogy between their work and that of natural scientists.25 Behavioralism combined biological analogies, psychological thinking, mathematical methods, and political implications in an impressive amalgam ideally suited to midcentury America. But what exactly was behavioralism? Straightforward deªnitions could be hard to come by. One Harvard report acknowledged that the ªeld had not yet been adequately deªned—but that, whatever behavioralism was, Harvard should be a part of it because it incorporated “the general values and objectives which Harvard espouses” (quoted in Robin, p. 25). Robin offers an impressive exposition of the main aims of behavioralism: It would be scientiªc, empirical, inclusive (ignoring differences of race and ethnicity), and suitable for direct application; it would focus on the ability of individuals to adapt to their social circumstances; and it would develop tools to promote individual adjustment while also offering insights for those hoping to manage social change. Although the emphasis on the scientiªc aspects of behavioralism certainly helped attract funding—the Ford Foundation alone pumped $43 million into its Behavioral Science project within seven years—Robin points out that scholars with scientiªc pretensions were at least as intent on climbing in the scholarly pecking order as they were on attracting external funding. Before detailing some of the speciªc behavioralist projects connected with the military (culminating in Project Camelot), Robin maps out the institutional terrain that behavioralist scholars inhabited. In addition to establishing new entities within universities—Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, Yale’s Institute of Human Relations, and a succession of centers at the University of Chicago—behavioralists took over think tanks funded by federal agencies and major foundations.26 The government-funded centers combined a single-minded determination to apply social-scientiªc knowledge with a relative lack of concern about the speciªcs of the work (along the lines that Lewontin found). In Robin’s words, federally sponsored centers were typically “haven[s] for unencumbered intellectual curiosity” (p. 40). In the name 25. On the rise of scientiªc thinking in the social sciences, see Edward A. Purcell Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientiªc Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1973), chs. 6 and 10; and Smith, Social Science in the Crucible. White did not use the exact phrase “physics envy”; instead he worried that “the sociologist’s envy of the physicist can be carried too far.” See Leslie A. White, “Sociology, Physics and Mathematics,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 8, No. 3 (August 1943), pp. 373–379. 26. On the rise of the Department of Social Relations, see Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller, Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America’s University (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 217–218; and Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), chs. 2–3

89

Engerman

of interdisciplinary work and scientiªc progress, scholars funded by these institutions were given the freedom to apply their techniques to an extraordinary range of topics. Polymaths such as Thomas Schelling blossomed in this environment; he used economic techniques to study such diverse issues as crime, neighborhood integration, environmentalism, and nuclear strategy. It would be a mistake, of course, to celebrate the freedom of federally sponsored research projects without calling attention to the imposition of methodological and political constraints—as Robin rightly notes (p. 40). At the same time, Robin highlights the wide range of possible topics and agendas that could exist in the very bosom of the military-intellectual complex. Even those who beneªted most from external funding recognized possible dangers. The behavioralist political scientist Gabriel Almond, who testiªed to Congress in the aftermath of Project Camelot, argued that scholars who receive government funding would be apt to set their own constraints on the direction of their work; these, he believed, were more important than externally imposed limits on scholarship. The solution, Almond believed, was to maintain a marketplace of ideas, in which no one funding agency could have undue effects on a discipline (Robin, pp. 208–210). Gabriel Almond also makes a brief appearance in the ªnal book under review, Rebecca Lowen’s Creating the Cold War University. Lowen describes Stanford University’s remarkable metamorphosis from a relatively poor and isolated university into one of the wealthiest, most productive, and most prestigious institutions in the world. In Lowen’s story Almond’s appointment to the political science department in 1963 represented the victory of administrative concerns—prestige and external funding—over departmental prerogatives and priorities (p. 221). This conºict between departments and the central administration is the driving force of Lowen’s impressively researched and well-argued monograph. Arguing explicitly against the “tendency to conºate the 1950s and the Cold War in discussions about culture,” Lowen traces the origins of the Cold War University to an earlier period (p. 5). Universities such as Stanford faced serious ªscal pressures during the Great Depression, as investment income declined, donors scaled back their gifts, and, most important for a tuition-driven institution, enrollments fell drastically. Stanford’s board of trustees, which was not only drawn from but also committed to the private sector, looked warily at any form of government funding. Tuition grants provided through New Deal programs offered one solution. Harvard and Yale refused such grants, unwilling to compromise their independent status. Stanford’s board had no such luxury; it sacriªced anti–New Deal principles for ªscal health. In a token of resistance, though, Stanford administrators refused to reply to the federal questionnaires that accompanied the grants (pp. 31–33). 90

Cold War Universities

Stanford’s leadership also sought research contracts with private corporations, which, as Lowen describes, administrators considered a “more ideologically acceptable source” (p. 41). This effort met with little success. Even the one large corporate contract that Stanford signed, with Sperry Gyroscope, generated more conºict than income. World War II presented Stanford with a new set of problems: further declines in enrollment, faculty departures for government work, and a severe ªnancial crunch. The solution to these problems came in the form of government research contracts. Structured along the same lines as the Sperry agreement—though with fewer restrictions—these grants for projects brought signiªcant cash to the universities while keeping research faculty on campus. By 1942, regulations promulgated by the all-important Ofªce of Scientiªc Research and Development (OSRD) allowed universities to charge not just research expenses but also faculty salaries to government grants. The next step was to create a structure for funneling even more federal dollars to universities for the payment of overhead expenses above and beyond any direct costs incurred by the universities for the contracted research. Some leading institutions were reluctant to accept payments beyond services rendered, but federal policy makers such as science chief Vannevar Bush declared themselves better judges of the universities’ needs and compelled reluctant university administrators to charge “overhead” for contracts. Lowen describes the rise of overhead in helpful, nontechnical language, relishing the ironies of the wartime circumstances. After the initial resistance to charging overhead on federal grants faded, universities began ªercely competing for those funds—an eagerness dampened only slightly by the controversy in the late 1980s about the inappropriate use of overhead money at none other than Stanford. The federal contracts during World War II permanently transformed Stanford. Two years after the war’s end, government grants covered more than twenty-ªve percent of the university’s instructional budget. In some corners of Stanford, such as the School of Engineering, external income exceeded the money provided from university coffers. University administrators sought out ambitious scholars who relished connections with outside funding agencies. Fields with little opportunity for outside research support suffered greatly, as already paltry internal sources for research dried up completely. A new cohort of faculty members oriented more toward the concerns of their disciplines and their sponsors were welcomed by administrators—but soon came into conºict with more university-oriented colleagues. The rise of the externally funded university, in Lowen’s telling, was an alliance forged by these entrepreneurial faculty with an administration determined to improve Stanford’s balance sheet as well as its reputation. Together they battled scholars committed to a collegial institution for undergraduate 91

Cold War Universities

teaching and basic research. Lowen highlights the power of the central administration to shape the terms of battle. The measure of “excellence” no longer revolved around classroom performance; instead it was determined by the ability to attract external attention. This attention, furthermore, was easily quantiªable—in grant dollars. Thus the appointment of Gabriel Almond to the political science department in 1963 represented a victory for one deªnition of excellence. The other scholar contending for the position—and the clear choice of the department itself—was a political theorist active in the antinuclear movement, but the administration’s objection to his appointment had less to do with his politics than with his impact on the bottom line. The administration wanted a scholar whose work had been recognized by external sources—that is, one who had received major research grants. Cold War Universities, as Lowen indicates, were not so much a creature of the Cold War state as energetic promoters of it—for their own beneªt. Colleges and universities once worried about educating young minds. But where, in this Cold War University, were the students? Lowen offers two answers. By relegating her discussion of student life to a short ªnal chapter, she accurately depicts the administrators’ priorities: undergraduates in the new university were almost an afterthought. The chapter, despite its brevity, offers an insightful review of student life in the 1950s and 1960s. Administrators responded to the concerns of undergraduate students—large classes, alienation from professors and from the university as a whole, and academic stress—by treating them as symptoms of a failed adjustment to college life. The solution rested not in reorganizing the university to make it more student friendly, but in establishing new ofªces under deans of student affairs (and thus detached from the research functions of the university) that would ease student adjustments. Student problems such as anxiety and apathy were thus attributed not to the universities, but to the students themselves. The administrators had imbibed the psychologizing ethic of the behavioralists and sought to apply it in their own work.27 Lowen’s book sheds valuable light on the growth of Cold War universities and the scholarship that took place within them. Her book, along with Robin’s, offer important correctives to the widely bruited claim that the Cold War created the American university in its current form. In many ways, as both books point out, the Cold War was made in and by American universities, not the reverse. Administrators desiring external funding for growth lobbied assertively for federal and foundation grants to support all aspects of uni27. Ellen Herman’s monograph, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), offers wide-ranging examples of the rise of psychological thinking in postwar America.

92

Cold War Universities

versity life—medical research, defense-related technology, area-studies programs, and student ªnancial aid. A welter of educational associations came together to build a presence for universities in the halls of government; ªttingly enough, the building in Washington, D.C., that housed many of these organizations quickly earned the nickname “The Education Kremlin.” From this Kremlin on Dupont Circle came proclamations of the universities’ ability to contribute to national security. The desire of ofªcials in the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department to mobilize academics was largely unchallenged in the wake of World War II. Lowen’s long-term perspective shows how the U.S.-Soviet conºict contributed to the ongoing transformation of American intellectual life—but did not single-handedly bring it about. Similarly, Robin’s book highlights the ability of a relatively small band of social scientists to bring an intellectual agenda into the political sphere. Their ideas emerged out of growing concerns about public opinion dating back to World War I and its aftermath. Increasingly convinced that public opinion could not adequately guide the ship of state, interwar thinkers such as Lasswell, his adviser Merriam, and journalist Walter Lippmann painted a gloomy picture of the prospects for democracy.28 Behavioralists in the Cold War promoted this vision and connected it to policy-relevant work. They did so not only because of concerns about the Cold War enemy, but also because of their commitment to a vision of scholarship that married scientiªc analysis to direct application. As Margaret Mead concluded in the late 1960s, the behavioralists had been “deeply committed to putting their skills at the disposal of the federal government” (quoted in Robin, pp. 235–236). Research for the government provided behavioralists with new professional rewards offered by administrators who had redeªned academic excellence in terms of grants and research. These scholars abandoned the solitude of libraries for hands-on work; what began as an effort to study the world rather than theorize about it soon took on the task of changing it. The processes described in all four books under review had effects outlasting the Cold War itself. Clark Kerr, a leading impresario who became the main booster of the Cold War University—what he called the “multiversity”—in his 1963 book, Uses of the University, looked back on his original celebration of the multiversity twenty years later, in a 1983 edition. He was struck, he wrote, by the institutions’ “imperviousness to structural change.”29 Now that another twenty years have passed, we can still marvel at this uniquely American institution, the modern research university. Cutbacks 28. Brett Gary, The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), chs. 2–3. 29. Kerr, Uses of the University, p. 126. In a ªfth edition (2001) Kerr hints that larger changes might be in store, but he concedes that no grand vision has replaced the multiversity he celebrated.

93

Engerman

in federal support for research have not led to major restructuring but have merely intensiªed the competition for government funds while broadening the search to philanthropic foundations and private corporations. Glossy admissions brochures aside, many of these universities have relegated instruction to the margins of professional advancement. Another uniquely American institution—the residential liberal arts college—has increasingly emulated the research orientation of larger institutions. At the wealthiest of these colleges, faculty course loads (a telling nomenclature) have been reduced, and research expectations have been increased. In all sectors American higher education—itself an impressive economic enterprise, one of the largest “service exporters” in the U.S. economy—grows ever more engaged in the world around it.30 Sociologist Daniel Bell’s prediction, made in the heyday of the multiversity, seems all the more prescient today. In a 1966 study of university education, Bell wondered whether it would be “hubris to say that if one were to look back at the present from the year 2000 . . . one would discern in the second half of the twentieth century the transformation of the university into a primary institution of the emerging post-industrial society.”31 As an economic enterprise, an educational institution, and a source of innovation, the multiversity has a well-established place in American society. Perhaps because of the research university’s central role in modern American political and economic life, periodic calls for reform arose from within. The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society depicted the universities as deeply implicated in America’s social problems—but also as the lever to solve those problems.32 Other forms of anti–Cold War sentiment prospered in the university setting. The multiversity produced its own would-be grave diggers. Historian of science Mark Solovey argues suggestively that the public fallout from the Camelot affair gave rise to new concerns about the relationship between political institutions and social scientists—concerns so vividly expressed in the two New Press collections.33 Project Camelot not only was the culmination of longer-term trends in the social sciences but was also at least partly responsible for shaping later (and more critical) views of the social-scientiªc enterprise. 30. Indeed, Harvard’s most recent historians, Keller and Keller, Making Harvard Modern, pt. III, describe Harvard since the 1970s as “the worldly university.” 31. Bell, Reforming of General Education, p. 87, quoted in McCaughey, International Studies, p. 179. 32. Students for a Democratic Society, Port Huron Statement (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishers, 1990; originally pub. in 1962). 33. Mark Solovey, “Project Camelot and the 1960s Epistemological Revolution: Rethinking the Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus,” Social Studies of Science, Vol. 21, No. 2 (April 2001), pp. 171–206.

94

Cold War Universities

Similarly, Immanuel Wallerstein’s essay in The Cold War and the University explains the rise of interdisciplinary programs—that are critical of the university and its society—speciªcally women’s studies and Afro-American studies—as “unintended consequences” of Cold War institutions. Although Wallerstein presents little evidence to support this claim, his own career offers a case study of how the institutions of the multiversity could incorporate radical dissent as well as compliance. The recipient of a Ford Foundation Area Fellowship in African Studies, Wallerstein has emerged as an academic author and entrepreneur extraordinaire. After publishing a number of widely read books on the history of the capitalist world economy, he took on administrative tasks. As the director of the Fernand Braudel Center at an up-and-coming branch of a large public institution (the State University of New York’s Binghamton campus), Wallerstein oversees large research projects funded mainly by extramural grants. Although he has retired from the teaching faculty, he continues to direct the center’s research programs.34 As the volumes reviewed here demonstrate, important critics of Kerr’s multiversity, including Wallerstein, were among its many beneªciaries. The works that consider the postwar American university through a wide historical lens offer those of us affected by this institution—and that includes a wide swath of American society—criticisms worthy of serious consideration.

34. See the biographical data on http://fbc.binghamton.edu.

95