Conflict of Ideology

Universities are not only hotbeds of military activity, they are adversely affected by the ethical compromises and threats to academic freedom that accompany a Department of Defense presence. The dream of the University as a place of disinterested, pure learning and research is far from reality as scientists and administrators from across the country are paid directly by the military to sit on Department of Defense scientific advisory boards and perform other research.

It is naïve to think that an abundance of funding from the military does not affect the projects chosen to be worthy of scientific inquiry. University research is not the result of objective decisions made in the spirit of an enlightened quest for knowledge; rather, these scientists' agendas are determined by the bloodthirsty architects of military strategy.

At times, the area of research is not the only thing determined by Pentagon policy" so is the result of the research. Just ask Theodore Postol, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, what he thinks military money does to academic freedom. Postol, a leading critic of the military's missile defense testing program has accused the Pentagon of trying to silence him and intimidate MIT with threats of revoking the Institute's management of the Lincoln Laboratory at Hanscom Air Force Base in Lexington, Massachusetts.

The threat came after Postol released a report alleging the military fabricated data to defend missile defense technology. (Dr. Postol, who in the 1990s successfully debunked the reported effectiveness of Patriot missiles in the Persian Gulf War, analyzed a Lincoln Laboratory report and published his conclusion that the lab had distorted data to make it appear that available technology for National Missile Defense could reliably distinguish warheads from decoys. Postol says that kind of technology does not exist.)

But retaliation or silencing by the Pentagon is only one of the threats to academic freedom. Secret research of any kind threatens the academic integrity of an institution and compromises democracy on campus. Secret research is the antithesis of free and open inquiry the University system is supposedly founded on. It denies students and faculty the ability to question and oppose the work being carried out in their name, circumventing all possibility for democratic debate. Additionally, secret research is of little or no benefit to students as they are unlikely to have the security clearances required to be a part of the process or see the results.

Sad, and more important than the threat to academic freedom posed by military-academic ties is the direct contribution of University research to death and destruction throughout the world. Iraq was the tip of the iceberg, and the problem is only growing worse: from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War the army was deployed 16 times. Between the end of the Cold War and today, the army has been deployed 60 times. With the "war on terrorism", these numbers are sure to increase rapidly.

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