In 1969, the Pentagon and NASA were financing
two MIT laboratories; one (now called Draper)
was working on inertial guidance systems, while the other (Lincoln)
was (to the best of Chomsky's recollection) "engaged in some things
that involved ongoing counterinsurgency" (13 Feb. 1996). Chomsky
maintains that it was impossible at that time for mit and its
researchers to sever ties with the military-industrial complex and
continue to function. What he proposed then he stands by even today:
universities with departments that work on bacterial warfare should do
so openly, by developing departments of death. His intention was to
inform the general population of what was going on so that individuals
could make informed and unencumbered decisions about their
actions. Such thinking was behind his response to the Pounds
Committee, which was formed to defuse the tension that was mushrooming
between the mit administration and a group of students who were
adamantly opposed to the military connection: "The students and I
submitted a dissident report disagreeing with the majority. The way it
broke down was that the right-wing faculty wanted to keep the labs,
the liberal faculty wanted to break the relations (at least formally),
and the radical students and I wanted to keep the labs on campus, on
the principle that what is going to be going on anyway ought to be
open and above board, so that people would know what is happening and
act accordingly" (31 Mar. 1995).
Of course, there was resistance to the report from the majority of
faculty members, "including all the liberal faculty, [who] were
smart enough to understand just what that implied, and wanted what
amounted to a formal administrative change, so that technically the
labs weren't part of the Institute, hence the connections remained
pretty much invisible, though not much changed" (31 Mar. 1995). In
short, Chomsky's position on this issue is that no formal constraints
should be put on research. So at this time he took what he calls "a
pretty extreme position," and indeed "one that might be hard to
defend had anyone ever criticized it," which he describes as
follows:
Nothing should be done to impede people from teaching and doing their
research even if at that very moment it was being used to massacre and
destroy. That was not academic. At the time, the mit political science
department was doing just that (in my opinion), and the issue was very
much alive as Kennedy-Johnson "action intellectuals" started returning
to the universities after Nixon's election. In fact, as a spokesman
for the Rosa Luxemburg collective, I went to see the President of
MIT in 1969 to inform him that we intended to
protest publicly if there turned out to be any truth to the rumours
then circulating that Walt Rostow (who we regarded as a war criminal)
was being denied a position atMIT on political
grounds (claims that were hardly plausible, and turned out to be
utterly false). (13 Feb. 1996)
So, according to Chomsky, no institution should legislate what people
are permitted to work on. Instead, "people have a responsibility
for the foreseeable consequences of their actions, and therefore have
the responsibility of thinking about the research they undertake and
what it might lead to under existing conditions" (13 Feb. 1996).
When berated for accepting a salary from an institution so intimately
involved in the business of death and destruction, Chomsky pointed out
that receiving financing from an institution only limits one's ability
to speak out if that institution is totalitarian in
nature. Interestingly, most of the criticism came from the left,
prompting Chomsky to ask: "Did you ever hear anyone suggest that
Marx shouldn't have worked in the British Museum, the very symbol of
British Imperialism?" (31 Mar. 1995).
Chomsky has also defended his affiliation with MIT in the context of the
hard-sciences-versus-social-sciences debate. Defining the parameters
of that discussion, he writes:
[T]here is a noticeable general difference between the sciences and
mathematics on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on
the other. It's a first approximation, but one that is real. In the
former, the factors of integrity tend to dominate more over the
factors of ideology. It's not that scientists are more honest
people. It's just that nature is a harsh taskmaster. You can lie or
distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like, and
nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry, and it'll be
refuted tomorrow. Fakery in scientific experiment is a very marginal
phenomenon, contrary to what you read in the press, and is quickly
discovered, for a very simple reason: people replicate, and it's their
professional task to check results and the thinking that leads to
them. (22 July 1992)
The natural or "hard" sciences are "driven by internal considerations,
by what can be studied next, what is on the fringes of
understanding" (14 June 1993). Advancement in science progresses in an
incremental fashion, and while a given end may be morally
reprehensible to some, the accidental discoveries made in the process
of attaining that end may be of enormous benefit to many. For example,
although a government might decide to give massive funding to a
researcher who is working on a truth serum so that its agents can
extract information from captured spies, that researcher will be
obliged, in formulating the serum, to analyze how particular drugs
affect the thinking process, and thus be of use to the population at
large in a variety of crucial ways.
Such considerations lead Chomsky to compare Harvard and MIT the institutions within which he has
worked. He describes them as two of the most influential universities
in the world. "Harvard is humanities based: it's the place where
people are trained to rule the world," while " MIT is science-based: it's the place where people are
trained to make the world work" (18 Feb. 1993). Although Chomsky's
linguistic research clearly belongs to the domain of the hard
sciences, it may be consigned to its softer edges as it is still far
from having the depth of mathematics or physics according to his own
definition. It is obvious, however, where his sympathies lie:
For political dissidents, MIT is a far more
friendly place. Virtually all the faculty peace activism in Cambridge,
for example, has come from MIT, with some
drifters occasionally from Harvard. My own experience is typical. If I
walk into the Harvard Faculty Club, you can feel the chill settle,
literally. It's inconceivable that I could be asked to give a talk at
the Kennedy School of Government (ada-style liberalism, in large
measure), unless it's organized by some group they can't control (like
the foreign press, which runs regular programs), in which case they
grit their teeth and bear it. In contrast, I've had a very friendly
and supportive environment at MIT, no matter
what I've been doing. (18 Feb. 1993)
This is a contentious point, for there are, of course, exceptions to
the rule that Chomsky is at pains to illustrate. One such exception is
the case of Elaine Bernard: although she is not a Harvard faculty
member, she finds the atmosphere of that institution reasonably
supportive. Bernard moved from Canada to the United States in
1989. She had been an activist for many years and had served as
president of the British Columbia New Democratic Party. She is now the
executive director of the Harvard Trade Union Program and a member of
the New Politics editorial board. Another is the case of
David Noble, a historian who taught for nine years at MIT and conducted research on how science and
technology develop as products not only of accumulated knowledge and
skills, but also of social power and conflict. Noble, like Chomsky,
is, as well, an activist and social critic who assists rank-and-file
groups in several industries in their struggle with new
technologies. He was the cofounder, with Ralph Nader, of the National
Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest. In 1984, he was
fired by MIT "for his ideas and his actions in
support of those ideas." He subsequently "brought a suit against MIT to obtain and make public the documentary record
of his political firing and on the basis of this record the American
Historical Association subsequently condemned MIT for the firing" (Noble, Progress
165). Chomsky comments: "As for David Noble, it's always hard to make
judgments about such issues, but my own is that it wasn't primarily
his (quite outstanding) dissident work that led to the tenure denial
in a department that considers itself rather to the
left-liberal side, I suppose" (27 June 1995).
The basis of Chomsky's reputation at MIT is his
scientific research. He is acclaimed within the university for being a
valuable contributor to the scientific fields within which he works
not for his actions and writings in the political realm. This
gives him a certain leverage and a freedom from ideological control
that he would not enjoy if he had become attached to a
humanities-based university.
