Word: within
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...years that followed have been increasingly lean ones for the scattering of bureaus within the Pentagon which concern themselves with social science research. The notion that the behavioral sciences could be of much use to the U.S. military has always been regarded 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...
...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 at ARPA also believed that the M.I.T. project might convince the higher levels of the Pentagon research bureaucracy that the behavioral sciences could begin to approach the reliability and "hardness" of the natural sciences. Perhaps computers would work where foreign data...
...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 comfortable positions within University Departments, surrounded by coteries of graduate students and still able to associate with other scientists on an informal basis...
...fact that it is to be devoted to the development of basic theory rather than to applied problem solving for the Department of Defense. But the language of the actual M. I. T. proposal itself, as distinct from the explanations and clarifications which have been produced for consumption within the Cambridge community, makes it rather obvious that the distinction between basic and applied research in the behavioral sciences is not a terribly meaningful one. The project is sponsored by an operating agency of the U.S. government, on the understanding that the research to be undertaken will eventually serve that agency...
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...