Community of scholars, a 'myth'
KU's profs do military research
(EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is the second of a series of three articles on research at KU and other universities.)
By MARTHA
MANGELSDORF
Kansan Staff Writer
Inside America's universities are atomic stockpiles, lethal gases, mine seeders, H-bombs and other educational tools.
"The idea that the university is a community of scholars is a myth," said James Ridgeway, associate editor of the New Republic, after he had thoroughly studied the universities' involvement with industrial activity.
At KU and across the country, the same question is being asked: Should university professors research classified projects, many of which are designed to improve warfare methods?
"Strictly no classified research projects," is the KU policy, said W. J. Argersinger, Jr., director of KU research. Yet, professors may and do act as consultants for these projects during their off hours, he said.
Policy stands invalid
American universities generally seem to disavow any affiliation with secret projects, but the validity of their policy stands is questionable.
The federal contracts manager at the University of Michigan said, "There is no classified research on this campus." Yet at the same time the University's Willow Run laboratory was working on a classified counterinsurgency project in Thailand.
Grayson Kirk, past president of Columbia, said he was against classified research, then described the secret antisubmarine warfare research performed in the university's Hudson Labs.
Defense money expands
In the spring of 1967, the House Appropriations Committee asked John S.
12 KANSAN May 8 1969
Foster, Jr., director of research and engineering for the Pentagon, whether the universities had tired of their national responsibility and were leaving the defense business.
Foster said as far as he knew only Harvard had a policy against classified work, although the University of Pennsylvania was reducing its involvement because of student protests against a government gas contract.
A year later the assistant secretary of Defense announced the inception of Project Themis, a program to extend university bases for defense research.
Themis objectives were: to develop centers of excellence to solve important defense problems and a wider geographical distribution of Defense Research funds.
KU receives defense money
A defense department bulletin shows KU received a grant under Project Themis. The money came directly through the Advanced Research Project Agency of the Defense Department which one KU professor said was the financier of current applied defense projects.
The project's title came under detection, surveillance, navigation and control as a "Remote Sensing Instrumentation" study.
The universities' war machinery is specialized. MIT and Johns Hopkins run centers which design missiles; Cornell designs more effective bombs for Vietnam; Princeton breaks codes and runs conventions for the CIA. Michigan is first in photo reconnaissance and helps out with counterinsurgency. Pennsylvania and fifty other universities have recently been involved in chemical germ and biological warfare research.
Big Eight universities have contributed to he work done by these meccas of research and technological developments.
KSU and OU involved
Researchers in the chemistry department of Kansas State University have been engaged in an Army-financed project involving the scientific analysis of lethal nerve gases.
The University of Oklahoma has conducted biological warfare systems research aimed at the potential use of biological agents in "remote area conflicts" in situations like Vietnam.
Counterinsurgency studies are another major liaison between the universities and the government.
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KU received another sum for fiscal year 1968, again from the Advanced Research Projects Agency under Project Themis to study Modernization: Social, Political and Economic Development. One professor said the project's results would be applied and useful in certain underdeveloped countries' internal crisis.
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Another phase of military assistance involves the CIA. A recent publication cites numerous instances of professors carrying out programs for the CIA, aimed at influencing governments.
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For example, George Washington and American Universities in Washington, D.C., run two of the Army's centers which deal in different aspects of psychological warfare, and George Washington's Human Resources Research Office is concerned with teaching combat soldiers how to kill more efficiently.
Independence a myth
Tonights lecture on Byzantine art by Byron Tsangadas, professor of history, has been cancelled. Tsangadas, to have spoken at 8 p.m. in 112 Blake.
can be requisitioned, on demand, to serve the interests of the entrenched military.
Cancellation
to be little real interest in the universities in altering their relations with the Defense department. Those who run the universities know, however, that they need to preserve, at all costs, the myth of their independence from government.
Even if the war research for the Pentagon and CIA were not especially important in results, these endeavors demonstrate how comfortable it is for a university and professors to work through a closed system of government. There too, appears
The ideological argument, as one professor put it, is that a government needs to be served by the dispassionate knowledge which only a few experts are capable of dispensing.
But a KU professor on the inside of a Themis project said there seems to be no such thing as dispassionate knowledge that
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