Military Influence Stirs Campus Debate : ‘Star Wars’ Politicizing Science in U.S.

James R. Melcher surely would not fit anyone’s image of an anti-war protester.

The 50-year-old professor has spent the bulk of his professional life in what is politically the most conservative of scientific disciplines--electrical engineering. For 25 years he has been at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the nation’s biggest defense contractor among universities.

During the 1960s, he was a critic not of the Vietnam War but of the war protesters. Today, as director of a major laboratory at MIT, he is clearly part of America’s scientific establishment.

But lately, Melcher has become something of a campus agitator. He has joined about 8,000 other American scientists in protesting President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as “Star Wars,” and he is making his views known in a wide variety of rallies, seminars and other public forums.

Initially, when the protest began more than two years ago, scientists opposed “Star Wars” largely on technical grounds: A protective “shield” of the kind the President envisioned to keep the country safe from nuclear attack was simply a scientific impossibility, the experts argued.

Later, political objections emerged as well. Last fall, for example, after the Reykjavik summit between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, scientists were as vocal as politicians in expressing alarm that the prospect of halting the nuclear arms race was being jeopardized by Reagan’s insistence on moving forward with a strategic defense plan.

More recently, however, many members of the nation’s research establishment have gone beyond questioning technical and political aspects of just the Strategic Defense Initiative. Perhaps more significant, says William D. Carey, executive director of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, is that scientists have begun to reconsider “the entire scope and thrust of America’s research enterprise.”

Though more restrained and certainly lacking the violence of the political troubles that erupted on campuses during the Vietnam era, the protest of the 1980s is no less significant, Carey said, because of what the scientists themselves believe is at stake: the future of American research.

“There probably has never been so much concern . . . such widespread protest” about any subject affecting American science, said Daniel J. Kevles, a historian of science at Caltech who is writing a book on the history of military spending since World War II.

No matter what becomes of “Star Wars”--whether the American public supports it or rejects it, whether it succeeds or fails--it has already had one undeniable spin-off, Kevles said: the politicizing of American science to an extent that has not occurred since the years immediately after World War II, in response to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The protest is far from one-sided. On some campuses, a counter-protest has begun to emerge among strong advocates of military research. Although fewer in number and less organized than the critics of the defense buildup, the pro-military scientists are expressing support for the nation’s growing defense budget not only on the grounds that it will improve national security but because, they say, it will ultimately benefit science as well.

“Although they are quite well organized and have been quite vocal . . . it would be a mistake to think that these are the views of all American scientists,” said John Kwapisz, director of the Center for Peace and Freedom, a pro-military foundation set up in Washington a little more than a year ago.

To counter the impression that all U.S. scientists oppose the recent thrust of military spending, Kwapisz’s center recently spawned an ad hoc university group of about 100 scientists called the Science and Engineering Committee for a Secure World.

Money Accepted

In reaction to the statements and activities of the anti-”Star Wars” forces, a number of high-ranking government federal officials have also spoken out harshly, accusing university scientists of having abandoned their objectivity as researchers and their loyalty as citizens. The “Star Wars” supporters also note that many researchers, while critical of the government’s programs, are not hesitant about accepting its money.

Certainly there are plenty of takers for “Star Wars” research grants and contracts. According to Maj. David Rigby, a spokesman at the Pentagon for the SDI project, the Defense Department received more than 3,000 unsolicited proposals for basic research last year--10 times the number it could support--and most of them were from university professors.

Much of the debate over “Star Wars” and defense research in general has centered on university campuses. In one regard, this is to be expected because universities have often been at the center of major intellectual and political upheavals. But in other ways, the universities’ involvement in the current debate over military spending is surprising.

For one thing, scientists, at least in many disciplines, are among the most conservative of academicians, according to several surveys of American professors.

The military, furthermore, appears at first glance to have relatively little direct impact on campuses. According to government budget documents, the Department of Defense now accounts for only about 17% of all federal spending for campus research.

Defense Funds Growing

Yet what troubles many university scientists is that the defense budget is one of the few sources of funds, federal or otherwise, that is still growing significantly.

While defense funds to universities rose nearly 14% last year, funds from all other federal agencies combined are estimated by the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science to have grown by less than 1%. And while defense-financed campus research was just $930 million last year, that was up 89% from 1980 and was double the 1975 level, the Council for Economic Priorities said in a report last year entitled “Pentagon Invades Academia.”

What’s more, the report said, the Defense Department’s 17% share of federal campus research masks an almost total dependence by some academic disciplines on defense grants and contracts. More than 50% of all federally financed university research in mathematics and computer science now comes from the Pentagon. In electrical engineering, the Pentagon’s share of university research is now 56.9% and in astronautical engineering it is 81%.

“We are now facing the prospect that defense research in general and ‘Star Wars’ in particular will be the largest source of federal funds likely to be available for at least a decade to come,” said John P. Holdren, professor of energy and resources at UC Berkeley and former chairman of the Federation of American Scientists.

“Since universities do the bulk of the country’s basic research . . . and train the majority of American scientists . . ., we have to ask what that will mean for our universities and the country as a whole,” Holdren said.

It is more than just the size of military support that disturbs American scientists. It is, MIT’s Melcher said, the extent to which the military is both directly and indirectly dictating the nation’s research agenda that is so troubling.

‘Shift in Thinking’

In a recent telephone interview from his laboratory in Cambridge, Melcher contended that a basic “shift in thinking” has occurred in American science in the past few years. Increasingly, he said, the best academic scientists and the best American industries are turning away from research and manufacturing of civilian goods such as airplanes and automobiles, where money is tight and market competition is stiff, and toward military hardware, where research money is plentiful and profits are assured.

Melcher said he is well aware of companies’ obligations to seek maximum investment returns for stockholders. He is also sympathetic with his university colleagues, many of whom believe they would not receive support for their research were it not for potential military applications.

But citing example after example of what he believes are questionable government and business practices that affect his own laboratory and those of his colleagues, he has come to believe that the nation’s priorities are now misguided--headed in a direction no one ever really intended.

Slowly but surely, Melcher has begun to make his views known--and not only to his immediate colleagues. He is taking part in conferences, and has helped organize lectures and other gatherings on the subject of military research.

And last spring, he joined 6,500 university scientists and scientific educators in signing a pledge, organized by professors and students at the University of Illinois and Cornell University, to boycott the “Star Wars” program. A similar petition calling on Congress to curb funding for the strategic defense program was also circulated last spring and signed by 1,600 industrial and government researchers and scientists, some of whom would be directly affected by the very cuts they were demanding.

Impressive List

Together, the two groups account for just a small fraction of the nation’s scientific work force--perhaps 1%, according to critics. Yet by almost any measure, the list of signers is an impressive one. Half of the science and engineering faculty in each of more than 100 research departments pledged to accept no more “Star Wars” money. In the 20 top-ranked departments, including Harvard, Berkeley and Stanford, more than 50% of the combined faculties said they would not participate in the program. Among them were 15 Nobel laureates.

Strong protests have also been lodged in recent months by members of the National Academy of Sciences, the elite organization whose members are generally regarded as the nation’s brightest and most productive researchers. A poll of academy members whose disciplines were deemed relevant to the SDI found that only 9.8% of the respondents supported or strongly supported the program, while nearly 70% opposed or strongly opposed it.

The protest has taken other forms as well.

A dozen or more new scientific societies, specifically focusing on the priorities and ethics of American science, have been established largely in response to the military’s growing share of the total federal research budget. Uneasiness about the military’s role in science also has even been evident in the older and more traditional scientific organizations.

Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of that concern has come from the 10,000-member Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In a recent poll of that conservative scientific organization, one-third of the members surveyed said they considered assignment to non-military work a key factor when changing jobs.

As with most campus protests, students have been at the center of the activity, organizing the petition drives, setting up conferences and handing out information. But, for the most part, the foot soldiers of this protest have not been angry undergraduates or the campus activists involved in protests against South African apartheid or American intervention in Central America. They have been research fellows and graduate students in the sciences, working toward doctorates in such fields as physics and engineering.

Lisbeth Gronlund, for example, is one of the organizers of the nationwide campus boycott. She is a physics Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University who got involved in the movement because of a sense of frustration about her own career options.

Students Not Informed

Graduate students, she said in an interview from her laboratory on campus, simply are not informed about the real purposes of the research on which they work in university laboratories. Nor, she said, do they understand the kind of careers that are likely to be available once they finish school.

The odds are, she said, that most of the next generation of scientists will find openings only in military-related work. And that is also true, she said, for scientists who stay in academe.

“I’ve cut into my (research) career considerably this year by getting involved in this protest,” Gronlund said. “But in a way I have to look at it as a short-term investment in a really long-term problem.”

“A Guide for Young Scientists and Engineers,” prepared by a group at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, reports that one-third of the 600,000 working scientists and engineers in the United States are now employed on military-related projects. Of those 200,000, at least one third--almost 70,000--work on nuclear weapons projects, the report estimated. Although no one knows for certain what the impact will be if military research keeps growing at its current rate, it will surely employ “tens of thousands of new graduates over the next five years,” the study said.

Few of these researchers will have the luxury of doing what a handful of established scientists have done in recent years--that is, voluntarily leave their posts on weapons projects to take up positions in non-military programs.

Growing Misgivings

One such researcher is physicist Thomas Grissom, who two years ago left his job at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, where he had been working to develop neutron generators. For almost 15 years, Grissom said, he was so engrossed in his research that he almost forgot its purpose--to trigger nuclear weapons. Eventually his misgivings about the threat of nuclear war grew so large that he took a dramatic pay cut and went to Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., an institution known far better for its innovative teaching programs than for its scientific discoveries.

Perhaps the most celebrated case of a scientist leaving military research involves the man who invented the laser that helped launch “Star Wars.” In what is generally seen as a severe blow to the strategic defense program, Peter Hagelstein just this winter left Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for MIT, saying that he wanted to leave weapons work for research that “will benefit mankind.” His only connection with Livermore now is as a consultant and only on what he insists will be unclassified, non-military projects. For many, the only alternative to doing weapons-related research may be to leave science altogether, but even those who are sympathetic with the protest contend that this is a dangerous view for scientists to take.

Caltech President Marvin L. Goldberger likens the attitude of many young scientists today to the women of ancient Greece in Aristophanes’ comedy, “Lysistrata.” Like the wives of Athens and Sparta who refused to make love to their husbands until the men stopped making war, so many scientists “want to stop making science until politicians agree to use research only for peaceful, productive purposes.”

“This is a very naive and idealistic point of view,” Goldberger said. “Even if scientists stopped working right now on military things, we’d still be in a hell of a mess. We’d still have 50,000 nuclear weapons. . . . The idea that nirvana would happen is silly.”

Still, many university scientists contend their institutions are facing some very real concerns that should not be overlooked by either policy-makers or taxpayers.

One of the universities’ most pressing issues has to do with the method by which the Pentagon hands out its research money.

Peer-Review Process

Since the end of World War II, the standard method for deciding who will get government grants has been the peer-review process, in which non-government scientists examine the research proposals of their own colleagues and decide on their scientific merit. Although it is not a foolproof system and is periodically accused of having biases, it is an approach that most American scientists believe has been extremely successful.

For the “Star Wars” program, however, Pentagon officials acknowledge that they have begun to circumvent the peer review process in their awards of grants and contracts. The change is necessary, they say, because the old method has tended to favor elite universities that have always captured the bulk of government support for scientific research. The peer review process, the officials say, has failed to provide enough money to scientists with good ideas who are outside the “establishment” and is too conservative and cumbersome for a program such as “Star Wars,” which demands dramatic new approaches to highly technical military problems.

“Look at the list of who is getting most of the ‘Star Wars’ money,” noted one university president, “and you will see it is not the . . . Harvards and Berkeleys. Sure they are getting some. But an awful lot is going to institutions whose reputations are built on their agricultural extension programs and their basketball teams, not their contribution to high-caliber science.”

Doing away with peer review and adopting the Pentagon’s new approach, added MIT’s Melcher, means that research is being judged on the basis of military applicability rather than pure scientific merit.

For universities, that is particularly troublesome, because the whole raison d’etre of a university is to support the free flow of ideas whose ultimate usefulness often cannot be predicted.

Short-Term Emphasis

Indeed, said Franklin A. Long, a noted chemist at Cornell, military research in general and “Star Wars” in particular are antithetical to a university’s basic purpose for two fundamental reasons: In the first place, the Pentagon emphasizes short-term applied projects that have immediate military payoffs. It also requires, for reasons of national security, that much of its research be done in secret.

“Universities do (and in my judgment should) restrict themselves to research programs which are either for basic research or for long-range applied research,” Long wrote in a recent article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. “The central reason for university research is its coupling with advanced training of students, and the teaching process is by its very nature one in which deadlines and time-urgent demands characteristic of development programs do not fit well.

“Equally important,” he said, “is that the teaching process demands open, uninhibited communication. Students and teachers must talk freely with each other; they cannot be bound by a hidden agenda or restrictions imposed from outside.”

The Defense Department, although it has had little to say about its growing emphasis on applied research, has tried to allay fears about secrecy by promising not to retroactively classify any university research project.

Researchers Wary

University researchers, however, continue to be wary. Their concerns, they say, have been borne out in at least one case in which a researcher at a university-administered government lab--Andrew M. Sessler, former director of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory--not only had his research on lasers classified but also had the project taken away from him altogether. Details of the situation have never been made public because of the government’s classification restrictions, but it is generally suspected that the action against Sessler may have come at least partly as a result of his public criticism of SDI.

“The truth is that many faculty members are quite concerned, but for various reasons--fear of reprisals, a sense that (the military) may be their only source of funding--many have opted to remain silent or at least to say less than they might have,” said MIT physicist Vera Kistiakowsky.

Many remember the government’s quick retaliation to university-organized anti-military protests during the Vietnam War. In 1971, President Richard M. Nixon refused to give any National Medals of Science. In 1973, not long after his reelection victory, he announced the abolition of the White House’s Science Advisory Committee and the government’s main research policy body, the Office of Science and Technology.

Nixon also added the names of scientists and university presidents to his famous “enemies list.” And according to high-level sources within the Nixon Administration, the President even tried to cut off funds to MIT because its president at the time had spoken out against the White House’s defense policies.

But it is more than just concern about reprisals that is keeping scientists from speaking out. According to MIT’s Melcher, it is accompanied by a fear of not being taken seriously any longer as a scientist.

Physicist Scorned by Some

Many, for example, point to the experience of Charles Schwartz, an outspoken advocate of the peace movement on the Berkeley campus for many years. Although Schwartz has long been a highly regarded physicist, his activities outside the laboratory have made him an object of scorn in some quarters.

“You can imagine the reaction when he announced (at a meeting last spring of the American Physical Society) that he would not teach most regular physics classes after this year because he no longer wanted to train the physicists and engineers who will become the front-line soldiers in developing new weapons systems,” one longtime Berkeley professor recalled. “People just said, ‘Oh there goes Charlie again.’ No one hears what he’s saying any longer. And that’s too bad. It really is.”

Knowing this kind of reaction at other universities, Melcher is inclined to tread softly at MIT. “You have to ask yourself: Can you walk up and down the halls and still have people’s respect? After all, some of us are saying things that make people very, very uncomfortable.”

Nonetheless, Melcher concluded, “Every institution is being tested right now. I am determined that MIT will not flunk.”

“However you look at it, this is tricky business,” said one president of another prestigious research university, who asked not to be quoted by name. “Let me give you just one example. . . . Look, if the truth be known, I’m sitting on a half-million dollar grant application made by some of my faculty to the ‘Star Wars’ program. Now, I don’t like this program and I don’t like the whole thrust of the military budget today, but just because these are my views does not mean I have the right to jeopardize someone else’s grant proposal.”