Word: dod
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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News of the unusual activity at Menlo Park reached the Department of Defense, and investigators were soon on the scene. One of them was Ray Hyman, a psychology professor from the University of Oregon who is used frequently by DOD as a consultant. Another was George Lawrence, DOD projects manager for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). He was accompanied to SRI by Robert Van de Castle, a University of Virginia psychologist and longtime researcher in parapsychology. Van de Castle decided that Geller was "an interesting subject for further study," but neither Lawrence nor Hyman was impressed. After spending...
...funding proposal documents further uses of computer techniques for DOD problems...
...Defense Department could hire its own computer experts or contract the problems out to private "think-tanks" like RAND. But for social science techniques the DOD needs what universities--Harvard and MIT in particular--have to offer: a first-rate community of behavioral scientist. The DOD's own such scientist don't know what they are doing, two of the Project's leading participants say; and the behavioral scientists of think-tank staffs number fewer than those at a single leading university. Cambridge offers an unusually large and diverse social science community...
...best the Cambridge Project can be seen as a serendipitous harmony of interests: the DOD needs the methods, the academics need funds for research they find intrinsically interesting. Probably many of the professors involved are not concerned with the DOD's use of their techniques. They would justify their work as pure research for the advancement of science with openly available results for anyone to use. The Cambridge Project as go-between helps them ignore the implications of the DOD funding. "Money is cleansed when it changes hands," a common rationalization goes. As a member of the Project's Policy...
...ironic that while the Project's methodological research is more useful to the DOD than specific counter-insurgency studies would have been, the "value-neutral" nature of this research protects the Project from becoming a political target again. There is not much danger of renewed political controversy arising around it, for it has quite effectively slipped from public view. But for those who remember the Project, "academic freedom" is a powerful justification for its existence. An increasing number of people here, it seems, find the abstract principle of academic freedom more important than the predictable misuse of "value-neutral" research