Two months after the secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, publicly sketched a new university-based program to support defense-oriented social science, the Pentagon has made the concept official. In a new announcement, the Department of Defense has invited universities to apply for grants to study topics including terrorist ideologies, the Chinese military, cultural change in the Islamic world, and the records of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Initial proposals are due by July 25, and the first grants are expected to be awarded in December, only weeks before the Bush administration comes to an end. The announcement predicts that $50-million will be distributed over five years, and it suggests that most grants will be $1-million to $1.5-million a year.
The program has drawn some skepticism from social scientists. The president of the American Anthropological Association released a letter last month urging the federal government to finance such research through agencies other than the Department of Defense. And members of the American Sociological Association plan to discuss the program during their annual meeting in August.
Pentagon officials have tried to allay anxieties by consulting with university presidents and the Association of American Universities. The new announcement repeatedly says, “All research and debate will be open and transparent. Research results will be unclassified and open for publication.”
The Minerva program is likely to be closely coordinated with the National Science Foundation, but that relationship has not yet been made formal.
Mark L. Weiss, director of the NSF’s division of behavioral and cognitive sciences, said at a public meeting two weeks ago that the foundation was negotiating a memorandum of understanding with the Pentagon. Grant proposals in the Minerva program, Mr. Weiss said, will probably be evaluated by the foundation’s typical merit-review panels, though Pentagon officials will have some say about who sits on the panels.
A senior Defense official told The Chronicle on Monday that he expected an agreement with the NSF would be signed by the end of June. The announcement does not mention the foundation, but says only that “subject-matter experts who are government employees” will review the proposals. —David Glenn
