Purity and Danger in the Modern University

Abstract

No portent by a Republican president is cited with greaterapproval by academics than Dwight Eisenhower’s specterof a “military industrial complex” menacing Americansociety. “Unwarranted influence” and “misplaced power,”Eisenhower counseled, threatened to erode liberty fromwithin. Less often recalled is Eisenhower’s other fear, statedin the same valedictory, about the forces working to subvertthe modern university. Speaking at the height of the coldwar, the President’s eyes were fixed on the impact ofFederal Government disbursements on traditional notionsof scholarship. The thought that Western universities wouldone day accept money from dictators was, in 1961, stillinconceivable. “Today,” he wrote:The solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has beenovershadowed by task forces of scientists in labora-tories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the freeuniversity, historically the fountainhead of free ideasand scientific discovery, has experienced a revolutionin the conduct of research. Partly because of the hugecosts involved, a government contract becomesvirtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. Forevery old blackboard there are now hundreds of newelectronic computers. The prospect of domination ofthe nation’s scholars by Federal employment, projectallocations, and the power of money is ever presentand is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holdingscientific research and discovery in respect, as weshould, we must also be alert to the equal andopposite danger that public policy could itself becomethe captive of a scientific-technological elite. It is thetask of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and tointegrate these and other forces, new and old, withinthe principles of our democratic system—ever aimingtoward the supreme goals of our free society (http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/indust.html).Eisenhower made two separate if related points. The firstwas that Federal projects and government employmentwere corrupting the scientific calling. The second was thatscientists themselves might become an anti-democraticclique. The LSE imbroglio offers a bizarre twist on Ike’sforebodings. Social scientists acting in the name ofdemocracy accepted funds from a despot’s family with theaim of eventually removing that family’s despotism – or atleast believing that such money would help push gently adespot in the direction (somewhere in the vicinity ofNorway) that he was heading anyway. How was that notionpossible? The answer is not to be found in the character ofLord Desai, David Held, Anthony Giddens and others. It lies,more fundamentally, in the entrepreneurial, grant-donorculture of the modern research university, in its accretion ofambitions and, among these ambitions, the commitment ofsocial scientists to use the university as an engine of politicalprogress. The LSE scandal is a sideshow in a larger drama.*****Before the Second World War, it was common foracademics to view state entanglements in the universitywith repugnance or at least suspicion. Private corporationstoo were held at arms length. The sociologist Robert Nisbetrecalled that when, during the 1930s, the Shell OilCompany offered Berkeley a million dollars donation tofound “The Shell Professorship in Chemistry,” the chemis-try department, led by Gilbert Lewis, revolted. In revealinglanguage, Nisbet adds that while money from foundationssuch as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Russell Sage and Rosenwald