Word: neutralizer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...prevaliing credo of contemporary social inquiry limits reason to an analysis of those means which will lead most efficiently to given ends; reason is strictly precluded from passing judgment on the ends themselves. The value of the exercise is said to lie in the accumulation of stores of neutral knowledge, useful for whichever ends we intend to employ them. There is no time here to discuss the simplicity of the underlying assumptions of this enterprise, but something must be said about its social consequences...
...militarized, economic bureaucracy that defines established power in this country has no need for cultures, if neutral technology is what it wants, the handmaiden of power but compliant to its ends, what shall we expect the "service-station" university to become but the internalized, refined, and rationalized conception of this barbarism...
What is the moral obligation of the university as a corporate body? It is no use telling us now, as we were told recently by Mr. Hofstadter, that while individual members of the university may voice conviction, the university as a public institution is bound to strict neutrality. Mr. Kerr has demolished that argument for all time. It is no less neutral to oppose society than to support it, to refuse a place to military service than to credit it. Neutrality is only conceivable with isolation...
...finance this research, the group sought a grant from a "neutral" source, to avoid charges that the study was "industry-oriented" or "government-oriented." Approaching the Ford Foundation for a grant, they were given $260,000. A name--The Weapons Acquisition Research Project--and a project head--Paul W. Cherington '40, James J. Hill Professor of Transportation, completed the preparations...
Such benefits are always unequal. No system of law and order has been politically neutral in practice. At the present moment in the United States, law and order protects those who conduct, support, and profit from a war that more and more of us regard as atrociously cruel and strategically stupid. It protects the right of Dow Chemical and similar groups to recruit students for this general purpose. To a vastly lesser extent it also protects those of us who feel outraged by this situation. In effect we are told that we may protest as much as we like...