How 'Taint' Is Harvard Research Money?

"Tainted" money--research money from some sinister branch of the military or intelligence--has assumed a huge importance lately. Foremost in the minds of those who want to establish a joint committee to investigate University complicity in the war in Vietnam are the questions: How many Harvard faculty members have been doing research with this "tainted" money? And, are they helping to prosecute the war with their research?

There is some of this tainted money spread around the University, no doubt about it. At least two Harvard professors--Seymour Lipset and Alex Inkeles--are doing research financed in part by Air Force funds. But the research is only peripherally involved with war-making. And, as Lipset said in an interview recently, "The Air Force gave me my grant merely because my research contributed in a general sort of way to increased knowledge."

The Air Force and other branches of the military seem just as concerned as the Ford Foundation with pure or basic research. The reason for this concern is a matter of history.

In the years immediately following World War II, members of the federal bureaucracy, especially in the Departments of State and Defense, were convinced that the main reason we had won the war was that we had a great jump on the rest of the world in the field of "general knowledge." We just knew more, knew how to handle new situations better.

Advance of theoretic knowledge in the field of nuclear physics was one of the primary reasons for victory, they said. If somehow we had ignored doing basic research in that field we would have been in deep trouble. And the term "general knowledge" was loosely used. It became very clear that out security--militarily and politically--was tied up in education. One way to keep the level of education and general knowledge high was to subsidize pure research.

The Defense Department, it was decided, would be the best channel to disseminate research money. The department had good relations with Congress, and in the huge defense budgets an item like pure research subsidies would be easily obscured.

As Robert E. Gentry, the director of the Harvard Office for Research Contracts explained last week, "They decided simply that the overall defense needs of this country would be helped by supporting basic research."

In the years since the war, the policy has continued. The DOD agencies--the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research--have been "anxious to support research that had as little connection as possible with any governmental activity," Gentry said.

Last year, Harvard received a total of $55.4 million in research grants from the federal government. Of this total, $4.7 million came from the Defense Department. Most of this money went to theoretical projects in the sciences--studies at the observatory, biological investigations, mathematical projects.

Lipset, professor of Government and Social Relations, has received $100,000 from the Air Force over the past five years. He has been an administrator of a large-scale investigation of the role of education in the social and political development of countries throughout the world, focusing primarily on Latin America.

Lipset farms out the money he receives any way he sees fit. He claims that he is given free rein to support any work that he feels is relevant to the project. He said in an interview last week that he is not required to consult the Air Force; all he must tell them is what he told them when he first applied for the money--that his work will increase the general level of knowledge.

He is presently subsidizing nine professors, who in turn supervise graduate research. Each professor is studying the relationship of education and development in a particular country or set of countries. Lipset would not release the names of those people because, he said, he did not want to subject them to student protests.

Critics have been giving Lipset dirty looks recently. Much of his research deals with Latin America, and they see some connection between the research and the U.S. military's concern with suppressing revolution in that continent. But Lipset denies there is any connection.

He concedes that some of the information he is gathering would be useful to people interested in counter-insurgency in Latin America. "But our research is available to both sides," he said. "The only materials that aren't so widely circulated are doctoral theses and the Air Force is not interested in these anyway."

Lipset's work mainly involves integrating and publishing work already done in the field. For example, he recently financed several articles for Daedalus magazine, including "Student Politics in a Chilean University," "Student Political Activism in Latin America," and "British Student Politics."

In about a year, he expects to publish books on India, Latin America, and Yugoslavia, based on the work done under the Air Force grant.

Inkeles, professor of Sociology, is also working on a project partially supported by Air Force funds and has been given DOD grants in the past. Like Lipset, Inkeles uses both government money and money from private foundations for his work.

"How can you determine which government money is tainted and which isn't," Inkeles said in an interview last week. "There is no difference in the way I described my research to the Air Force and the way I described it to the National Science Foundation, the Rockefeller Institute, or the Department of State's cultural exchange office, all of which have gven me grants. It's been the same work."

Inkeles said that he worked on an Air Force-sponsored project in 1956 on life in the Soviet Union which "completely contradicted the standard Washington line." The study put Soviet society in a favorable light.

His present research, conducted at the Center for International Affairs, deals with "how individuals become modern." He has been financed by various private and government agencies, and "in the late stages of our research" by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Inkeles has developed what he calls an "overall modernity scale" and has tested the modernity of several sample groups.

Much of his work has been conducted overseas with help from foreign collaborators. "I've ever used Air Force money to pay their salaries, just money from the State Departmne'ts exchange program," he said.

The peasant part of the sample was drawn from the cooperative movement in Pakistan, called Camilla. "We discovered that such people modernized faster, according to our modernization test," he said. "This seems to me to be quite a testimonial to the cooperative movement."

"There has never been any attempt to censor or change any of my publications," Inkeles said. "I have not been supporting anybody's policy."

The large majority of DOD grants to Harvard professors--"over 90 per cent" according to Gentry--are given to professors who seek money for their own projects.

It has been University policy not to permit confidential or classified work to be done for the Defense Department since the so-called Conant Rule was established in 1956.

"Of course, there may be professors who do security work on their own, as private individuals," Gentry said. "But we don't know who's been cleared or who is conducting such work."

Gentry said that the University has "never assumed responsibility for safe-guarding government security materials." He said that Harvard only sanctions research in which all results and data were made public.

M.I.T. has several buildings that are devoted exclusively to classified research for the Defense Department, he said. And in Bedford, M.I.T. conducts DOD work at its Lincoln Laboratories.

"I don't think any university has as strict a rule as Harvard concerning the refusal to do classified work," Gentry said. "We're on one extreme," he said. "M.I.T. and Cal Tech are on the other, and the vast majority of the rest are somewhere in the middle."

Questions of "tainted" money and complicity, it seems, are not so simple