Word: functional
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...argument about the Khe Sanh strategy will probably continue as long as the Vietnamese war is remembered. Khe Sanh had been a U.S. Special Forces camp, with the task of blocking and monitoring infiltration routes from the North. When the enemy started to besiege the camp, that function was rendered impossible. The U.S. nonetheless poured in troops, building up to some 5,700 U.S. Marines and a 500-man South Vietnamese Ranger battalion. The Marines were not anxious to make a stand there: they sat at the end of a 27-mile supply line on Communist-interdicted Highway...
...episode indicated how the Faculty, practically speaking, can function only as a ratifying body during such a crisis. As one Economics professor recently remarked: "We're all amateurs at parliamentary procedure; we have no caucuses, no ad hoc committees to handle crises, no system of feasible debate...
Unwilling--because, members point out, the Center has always been academic in intent, avoiding political or community entanglements. It functions simply to find scholarly research on an individual basis. (The Center, that is, serves an "umbrella function" for armchair urban scholars...
These stock explanations for the Center's non-involvement are all exaggerated but all partly true. The Center's main function is permissive support of basic research. On a limited scale, it also operates on a contract basis to supply technical assistance to public agencies. What it doesn't do is to initiate the kind of innovative social experimentation that radical and semi-radical activsts would like to see implemented in the ghetto...
...PEOPLE at the Joint Center are quite sympathetic to Roxbury exasperation. But they also defend basic research in utilitarian terms. "In a highly unquotable fashion," comments one Center member, "the function of the Center is to undermine bullshit." Joint Center studies supply data of the sort that, when supplied by the government, is highly unreliable and political. Center members are able to evaluate government programs from a more-or-less neutral position. (The most controversial policy study--The Federal Bulldozer, done by Martin Anderson--was a slashing criticism of the urban renewal program...