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Pentagon to Consult Academics on Security
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: June 26th, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/arts/18minerva.html?partne...
The Pentagon has started an ambitious and unusual program to recruit social scientists and direct the nations brainpower to combating security threats like the Chinese military, Iraq, terrorism and religious fundamentalism. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has compared the initiative named Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom (and warriors) to the governments effort to pump up its intellectual capital during the cold war after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957. Although the Pentagon regularly finances science and engineering research, systematic support for the social sciences and humanities has been rare. But if the uncustomary push to engage the nations evolutionary psychologists, demographers, sociologists, historians and anthropologists in security research as well as the prospect of new financial support in lean times has generated excitement among some scholars, it has also aroused opposition from others, who worry that the Defense Department and the academy are getting too cozy. Cooperation between universities and the Pentagon has long been a contentious issue. The Pentagon put out its first requests for proposals last week. Minerva will award $50 million over five years. Another set of grants administered by the National Science Foundation is expected to be announced by the end of this month. [Gates] contacted Robert M. Berdahl, [former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley and] the president of the Association of American Universities which represents 60 of the top research universities in the country in December to help design Minerva.
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