[R-G] Inside the Minerva Consortium

[Anthony Fenton]

June 24, 2008
Inside the Minerva Consortium
Social Science in Harness
By DAVID PRICE
http://counterpunch.org/price06252008.html

     “In Paracelsus’s time the energy of universities resided in the  
conflict between humanism and theology; the energy of the modern  
university lives in the love-affair between government and science,  
and sometimes the two are so close it makes you shudder.”

     --Robertson Davies The Rebel Angels

 From the 1930s into the 1960s, Trofim Lysenko’s crackpot biological  
theories provided the Soviet Union’s leadership with scientific  
justifications for the forced collectivization of farms and other  
centralized policy dreams.  Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics and  
Darwinian models of natural selection in favor of Lamarkian notions of  
inheritability of acquired characteristics, and for decades all Soviet  
biologists needed to work in ways that did not challenge Lysenko’s  
doctrine.  Lysenko’s claim that changes occurring in an individual  
during their lifetime could be passed on to their offspring seemed to  
offer scientific proof supporting the Soviet dream that rapid  
revolutionary formations could transform not just society, but nature  
itself.  So powerful was Lysenko’s impact that the bogus experimental  
data he produced to justify his work stood unchallenged for decades as  
valid empirical work.

Soviet biologists learned to align their work with the state’s  
conception of the world, and the career’s of those dissidents who  
would not so align their views fell by the wayside.

The demands of conforming scientific knowledge with the ideological  
positions of a powerful state stunted the development of Soviet  
biology for decades.  But today, American social science faces new  
forms of ideologically controlled funding that stand to transform our  
universities’ production of knowledge in ways reminiscent of the  
Soviet Union’s ideological control over scientific interpretations.   
As non-directed independent funding for American social scientists  
decreases, there are steady increases in new directed funding programs  
such as the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, the National  
Security Education Program, Intelligence Community Scholars Program;  
these programs leave our universities increasingly ready to produce  
knowledge and scholars aligned with the ideological assumptions of the  
Defense Department.

The latest step along this trajectory came with Secretary of Defense  
Gate’s announcement on April 14th of the formation of the Minerva  
Consortium, a Defense Department program designed to further link  
universities to Defense’s prescribed views and analysis.  Gates  
announced Minerva in a speech to presidents of research universities  
assembled at a meeting of the Association of American Universities.   
The comments of these university presidents in the press found them  
pleased beyond the mere measure of the paltry proportion of funds that  
Gates promised.

Gates' initial proposal only offered his audience funds “in the  
millions, not tens of millions;” sums that once dispersed across  
several universities would only be table scraps is most university  
budgets.  But these university presidents realize the great potential  
for future feasts of funds if they can corral their faculty to think  
in ways aligned with Minerva.  Gates’ announcement came three weeks  
before California’s Governor Schwarzenegger announced that the  
University of California’s flagship East Asian Studies program would  
be cutting its offerings in class due to $40 million in budget cuts.   
Gates’ silence on these larger systemic issues while pulling the  
academy in towards a program designed to produce limited, directed  
knowledge speaks volumes.  And these hard times for university budgets  
will likewise make universities less able to pass on whatever crumbs  
the Pentagon from its lavishly stocked table.

Gates envisions that the Minerva initiative will consist of “a  
consortia of universities that will promote research in specific  
areas. These consortia could also be repositories of open-source  
documentary archives. The Department of Defense, perhaps in  
conjunction with other government agencies, could provide the funding  
for these projects.”  Minerva has now issued a request for proposals,  
their initial interests consist of projects working on: “Chinese  
Military and Technology Research and Archive Programs,” “Studies of  
the strategic impact of religious and cultural changes within the  
Islamic World,” an “Iraqi Perspectives Project,””Studies of Terrorist  
Organization and Ideologies,” and “New approaches to understanding  
dimensions of national security, conflict and cooperation.”  All of  
these are important topics of critical study, but ideological  
narrowness of the Defense Department’s approach to and presuppositions  
of these topics will necessarily warp project outcomes in much the  
same ways that Lysenko warped the development of Soviet biology.   
Broken institutions can’t repair themselves, and agencies bound to neo- 
imperial desires of occupation and subjugation will not be receptive  
to scholarly work seeking to correct this national blunder.

Because of the narrowness of scope and assumptions about the causes of  
problems facing America, Gates’ Minerva plan will harm America’s  
strategic capabilities as it will inevitably fund scholars willing to  
think in the narrow ways already acceptable to the Defense  
Department.   If Gates really wants to better inform American policy,  
intelligence and military decisions, he should focus his power and  
energies on increasing the dwindling generalized social science, area  
study centers (though these have since their WWII inception have  
always had a Lysenkoian glow of state directed purpose), and language  
training programs.  But Gates is instead supportive of the world that  
brought us secretive “pay-back” programs locking students into  
national security servitude in their most formative years; with  
Minerva extend his reach into universities more general social science  
community.

It’s not that the U.S. government has historically funded all social  
sciences approaches equally.  It hasn’t, and this has historically  
created its own problems.  To pick one obvious example, the funding of  
American social science during the 1940s and 50s finds a lack of  
funding for scholars openly engaging in Marxist or even explicitly  
materialist much less class-based analysis; but during the fruitful  
years of the 1960s and 70s, the US government shifted to a model of  
funding that cast financial seeds broadly, with expectations that  
general funding would produce knowledge and scholars of use to the  
needs of state.  And that it did, even though it funded critics of  
American policies openly studying critical theory, dependency theory,  
the culture of poverty, and stratification of race, class and gender  
just as it funded modernization theory, development, and other  
theories linked with sustaining the status quo.   This open model of  
funding was productive for all, and the extent to which it produced  
plenty of scholars who thought in ways aligned with the needs of  
state: the U.S. government got a good return for its investment  
whether they realized it or not.

In my field, anthropology, there is an overwhelming disciplinary  
amnesia of the extent to which research has been directed by the  
Pentagon and intelligence agencies in the past.  But there has been a  
broad spectrum of overt and covert control over this funding control,  
with the full range running from the rampant secret directing of  
funding of unwitting scholars doing research of interest to the CIA  
and others, to the open, massive funding of a full spectrum of social  
science and language projects through agencies like the NSF or  
Fulbright Programs.

In efforts to find middle ground, the leadership of the American  
Anthropological Association (AAA) recently suggested that rather than  
running the selection and management of Minerva through the Department  
of Defense, that this program be run through “external” agencies such  
as the National Science Foundation (NSF) (disclosure: which funded my  
1989-90 Egyptian dissertation fieldwork).  The AAA argues that it is  
“deeply concerned that funding such research through the Pentagon may  
pose a potential conflict of interest and undermine the practices of  
peer review.”

Unfortunately, Minerva’s recent request for proposals indicates  
Defense ignored modest suggestions that proposal be vetted through  
external agencies.  I am glad the AAA and others are raising these  
concerns, but I think the critique of Minerva can be pushed further.   
Anthropologist Hugh Gusterson, a founding member of the Network of  
Concerned Anthropologists, recently wrote in the Bulletin of Atomic  
Scientists: “When research that could be funded by neutral civilian  
agencies is instead funded by the military, knowledge is subtly  
militarized and bent in the way a tree is bent by a prevailing wind.  
The public comes to accept that basic academic research on religion  
and violence "belongs" to the military; scholars who never saw  
themselves as doing military research now do; maybe they wonder if  
their access to future funding is best secured by not criticizing U.S.  
foreign policy; a discipline whose independence from military and  
corporate funding fueled the kind of critical thinking a democracy  
needs is now compromised; and the priorities of the military further  
define the basic terms of public and academic debate.”

Minerva seeks to increase the military’s understanding of other  
cultures.  This is a different project than the Cold War funding  
programs that openly sought to increase policy makers understanding of  
other cultures. The Bush Doctrine’s proximity to Minerva suggests a  
program designed to give the tools of culture to those in the military  
who will be told where to invade and occupy, not to those who might be  
asked of the wisdom of such actions.  As legions of troop supporting  
SUV drivers with affixed magnetic yellow ribbons insist on reminding  
us: the troops don’t pick the wars they fights, they follows orders.

Beyond existential questions of desertion, this is certainly true; and  
anthropologists adding to the military’s cultural repertoire in ways  
that Minerva will pay anthropologists and others to do, will likewise  
follow order to produce specific knowledge.  What’s next, will  
academics be driving gas guzzling SUVs with Harris Tweed magnetic  
ribbons proclaiming: “support the anthropologists (they don’t decide  
when we go to war and who we fight)”?  Social scientists cannot ignore  
the political context in which their knowledge will be used in limited  
ways by those wishing to fund it, and Minerva’s mission does not seek  
to alter the basic uses to which this knowledge will be put.  Minerva  
seeks to increase the efficiency of implementing the Bush Doctrine,  
not the questioning of it.

Minerva doesn’t appear to be funding projects designed to tell Defense  
why the US shouldn’t invade and occupy other countries; its programs  
are more concerned with the nuts and bolts of counterinsurgency, and  
answering specific questions related to the occupation and  
streamlining the problems of empire.  This sort of Soviet model of  
directed social science funding will make America’s critical  
perspective more narrow precisely at an historical moment when we need  
a new breadth of knowledge and perspective.

Gates and others at Defense need to hear from independent,  
unindentured critical scholars who will tell them that  
counterinsurgency won’t work the way that the current social science  
salesmen pitching it to the Pentagon and the think tanks of Dupont  
Circle’s hegemony row would have them believe; and the Minerva  
Consortium will not take social science in this needed critical  
direction.

The problem with Gate’s Minerva vision is the problem with Soviet  
science: ideologically dependent science’s purse strings cannot lead  
to good results.  If Gates really wanted good social science, not  
social science that tastes good (and familiar to the Pentagon’s  
limited palate), he would be lobbying congress to increase the funding  
of generalized social science—including dissident social science—not  
pushing to Sovietize the social sciences.
David Price is a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists.   
He is the author of Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and  
Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, just  
published by Duke University Press. He can be reached at dprice at stmartin.edu