June 17, 2008

Minerva Unveiled: Pentagon Invites Applicants for Social-Science Grants

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

Comments

1. Isn’t it just downright sociological to watch social scientists pretend they don’t realize that their academic colleagues will scramble like F-22’s to intercept any new source of money, as the Chronicle will report next December? If the government announced millions to fund window-washing, it would be swamped with closely argued proposals from the best places. Privately, of course, the Principal Investigators would declaim that clean windows are essential to advancing science and stuff.

   — S. Britchky    Jun 17, 09:38 AM    #

2. As long as the U.S. Government and the DOD perpetuate an “us vs. them” mentality, which the Minerva program is a direct expression of, there is little to no hope of dealing with international problems effectively and peacefully. U.S.-led corporations now wield enormous power at American universities, espeically behind the scenes (e.g. major drug companies influencing medical school curricula and other medical school decision-making), and U.S. government agencies, including the DOD, consist of policymakers who sooner or later, if not sooner, witness Dick Cheney and Halliburton, become corporate patsies
   who will do anything—witness the Blackwater killings of innocent Iraqis, and the subsequent attempted coverup—to make a buck. There is no conscience in Washington because Washington is Wall Street. In such a corporate-government environment one follows orders; one does not ask questions. There are no real leaders; there are no real thinkers; one does things for money. It’s time that the U.S. government and its corporate bedfellows got out of American universities for good, but perhaps this is just wishful thinking on my part that the American university still stands for independent thinking and intellectual integrity—every academic Department I have belonged to over the past twenty years has been run like an efficient little corporate office, the chairs and sub-chairs of which never question directives from above, and who always, I mean always, putting the best lying face on any major departmental problem rather than dealing directly with it—that would take courage. Given this climate, perhaps the Minevera program isn’t such a bad idea for the money-hungry that S. Britchky draws attention to in post #1.

   — DJ    Jun 17, 11:45 AM    #

3. I am a cynic and I see ‘business as usual’ in this program. Social science- any science- marches lockstep with the madness of Washington- nothing new here. What is unsurprising is that we are even talking about the academia-government connection. Witness, for instance, the proliferation of Middle eastern and Chinese language studies. Are we suddenly interested in these peoples? What is the broader agenda, and at whose beckoning? the truth is the studies are only important to the extent that we can mine data to be used for geopolitical strategies and games of domination. We don’t care a hoot about these regions: we just want to subvert them- when the time comes- from the inside. The scramble is on and the justifications will pour in from every corner. Too bad, we have sold to the highest bidder with significant consequences for our practice. For that we can blame none other than the whole academic edifice.

   — jason pawuma    Jun 17, 03:25 PM    #

4. How dare the US government ask the American academy to help the country fight a war. To think that the DoD even suggests that US professors soil their hands in Defense money. Doesn’t the US government know the rules? Just keep the gravy train going for worthless university programs and never ask a professor, who works all of 6 months a year, to lift a finger in America’s defense. Hey folks, during World War II university professors, including anthropologists, not only eagerly produced studies on Imperial Japanese and Nazi Germans, they actually left the ivory tower and fought these bastards on the field.

   — Mark    Jun 17, 04:19 PM    #

5. It is a rarified air that we academics breathe.

   — Fred    Jun 17, 05:21 PM    #

6. This is not WWII. This time we are the aggressors as the Germans and Japanese were, who learned well and paid dearly for their deadly mistakes. The majority of Americans don’t support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for good reason, and don’t support the president who has deceived himself, and tried to deceive us along the way. The only defending we need to do right now is to defend ourselves against our worst economic ambitions and reckless military actions.
   It is polluted air we all breathe.

   — DJ    Jun 17, 05:38 PM    #

7. Obviously Mark doesn’t know university professors very well. Their work may not be as important as they think, but they work all the time. As for Iraq, every political scientist I talked to before the war (and I talked to several) understood very well the problems that would occur after the “victory”. I, knowing that Bush knew more than they did, decided to give the president my full support.

   — David    Jun 17, 06:51 PM    #

8. All govts fund social sciences research for the purpose of gaining insight into societies with competing values. It’s the only way we can hope to predict one another’s future behaviour. Look at all of the area studies programs that have been funded since the late 1940’s. This is national security education at its best!

   — cathedralfolk    Jun 17, 07:56 PM    #

9. What a disgusting program, and how disgraceful that University administrators should cleanse it.
   Among its zillion drawbacks is this one: many researchers receiving such funding will be kept from sources in places in the world that the Pentagon aims to destroy.

   Just think about it: if you received such funds, would you want it revealed?

   — Jesse Lemisch    Jun 17, 09:16 PM    #

10. Remember that Gates was the head of Texas A&M University before he was tapped by Bush, and that Texas A&M is one of the biggest beasts currently slopping at the federal-industrial-military feed trough. Some of the RFP’s mention specifically that historically black institutions are “encouraged” to apply….Ah, what a concept: to get institutions addicted to the crack of federal money, and to cause said institutions to then have a vested interest in squelching any academic dissent about foreign policy.

    The research they need has already been done, including studies that enforced democracy does not work. This program needs to be watched closely, to see if DOD is simply commissioning the results it needs to sell war with, say, Iran.

    — Cynthia Shearer    Jun 18, 11:08 AM    #

11. Poor DJ is careful not to acquire a stain on his white robe.

    At least those who participate in this program have a chance to help solve the problem. It is all too easy to sit back and criticize everything the government does and make the obligatory Nazi references. Come on, do something to help.

    — Snake    Jun 18, 11:35 AM    #

12. don’t get us wrong, we REALLY want the money, but we can’t be recognized taking it from the military types. It would be much more comfortable for us to take the money from the Dept. of State or Education. Thanks again for the $50 mil, we’re secretly very excited about the prospects. I’ll apply—if you could leave the grant money in a plain brown envelope in a trash can at the corner of 5th and Elm streets at 6 pm…

    — himindedsocialscientist    Jun 18, 11:45 AM    #

13. Call me naïve, but looking beyond the current bellicose administration and hopefully to a different tempered executive administration in the near future, setting up a system to gain funds from a practically unlimited piggy-bank (compared to NIA or OJJDP grants for instance) isn’t a totally Faustian deal. As long as academic transparency is respected, colleagues can judge the program and if it turns out to be soul-sucking then they can look elsewhere for funds.

    Good sociological research tends to put a clarified and humanized lens on its subject. Social complexities abound in the “axis of evil”. Perhaps a greater understanding of those complexities could inform internal DOD discourse, steering it away from the current Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper train of thought, which might tap even slightly off course the hulking inertia of the current military industrial complex.

    — Aaron    Jun 18, 07:42 PM    #

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