Word: projected
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Pool's idea which was also pushed at M.I.T. by Professor J C. R. Licklider, was clearly just what the behavioral science people at ARPA needed to re-establish themselves with the Pentagon bureaucracy. It was not to be an information gathering project as Camelot had been, but would center instead on developing new ways of using and interpreting behavioral science data. Thus it entailed none of the diplomatic risks that had proved fatal to project Camelot (and almost fatal to the little social science bureaucracy within the Pentagon as well). At the same time the behavioral science officials...
...last spring, Pool and Licklider were working closely with the behavioral sciences branch of ARPA in drawing up a proposal that the ARPA people would be able to sell on behalf of both M.I.T. and themselves. They had a tough job ahead of them: the project that they were working out would have to impress people in the Defense Department who didn't expect to be impressed by anything that the behavioral scientists and their ARPA friends could come up with. Specifically that meant John Foster, the Defense Department's top research official. Foster's scientific work has been concerned...
THERE was something else. An M.I.T. project might have been all right from the viewpoint of the Behavioral Sciences Program, but the Program was really looking for something with a little more novelty than could be offered by yet another M.I.T.- ARPA contract. M.I.T. is the Defense Department's house whore, so although the content of the Pool-Licklider project might have been novel enough, the institutional arrangement could hardly be considered a breakthrough. But if Harvard could be persuaded to join the venture, the project would appear somewhat more new and exciting...
There were three reasons why Harvard was felt to be important to the success of the project. The first was simply the prestige of the Harvard name. A second reason was that Harvard's participation would enable ARPA to simplify and centralize its support of social science research in the Cambridge community...
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...