The Globe’s Sunday story on MIT’s love/hate relationship with the Department of Defense feels like a reach. There’s a lot of love there and a few hackers loosely linked to the Wikileaks release of Pentagon documents will likely have little impact.
Still, interesting to ponder.
MIT’s longstanding ties to the military — and its money — helped hone its reputation as one of the elite modern research universities. It was the single largest wartime research and development contractor during World War II and Department of Defense dollars made up more than 90 percent of its research funding during the Cold War.
To this day, MIT draws more than $750 million a year in Defense Department funding, including on-campus research as well as classified work on national security at its Lexington-based Lincoln Laboratory. That figure accounts for more than half of all MIT research and makes it one of the top five universities funded by the Department of Defense.
“Universities should not be in the offensive weapons business, but in terms of providing the kind of technologies that can help secure the nation, that’s something we should be doing,‘’ said Claude Canizares, a physics professor and vice president who oversees MIT’s research activity and policy.
The institute’s academic enterprise and Defense Department backing have not always coexisted peacefully. As antiwar protests roiled college campuses across the nation in the late 1960s, faculty and student activists at MIT objected to the militarization of university research.