Word: hards
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...with considerable skepticism by most ranking officials at the Pentagon, and after the Camelot disaster the job of selling the behavioral sciences was that much more difficult. This meant that such outfits as the Behavioral Science Program of the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) were increasingly hard put to justify their continued existence. What the Behavioral Science Program needed was a new largescale project that would produce usable and interesting results to impress authorities higher up in the Pentagon, and that wouldn't blow up in everyone's face as Camelot had. And so the Cambridge Project...
...proposal that Pool, Licklider and their friends at ARPA were working on last spring was to be an attempt to convince the men who manage the Pentagon's research policies that 1) the behavioral science scould be developed to the status of a "hard" science, and 2' that such development would in turn concretely aid the Defense Department in achieving its goals at home and around the world...
...road to developing a "real" science would be to organize themselvesinto research institutes along the lines of the natural science institutes which are found on many university campuses. Such development, it was felt, would increase interaction between social scientists and thus further the creation of an integrated discipline of "hard" social science. Shortly after this report was released, Licklider joined the ARPA staff and for a year and a half tried from Washington to encourage behavioral scientists to start forming such institutes. He didn't get much of a reaction: the top men in the social sciences still preferred their...
Nevertheless, the notion that the formation of social science institutes within the universities would represent a step toward the solidification of the behavioral sciences as a "hard" discipline appears to survive at the Pentagon, and so the Licklider/Pool/ARPA group had an additional reason for wanting to extend their project to cover all of Cambridge-although this didn't in itself amount to establishing a new center, it would bring large numbers of Cambridge social scientists together for the first time, and thus would be that much more pleasing to the natural scientists back in the Pentagon...
...ideological common denominator among the social scientists who are now gathering around the Cambridge Project. "The world," said Harvard Government professor Karl Dcutsch this week "is more endangered by the ignorance of the American, Soviet and Chinese governments than by any knowledge they could ever have." Deutsch feels that hard social science research into the political systems of both the U.S. and the rest of the nations of the world will show Americans that the politics of other nations are not so mallcable and manipulableas Americans have long believed and that this will make us more inclined to respect...