ustxtxb_obs_1974_04_26_50_00007-00000_000.pdf

on this campus.” He must have meant physically on the main campus UT was conducting systematic military research a mile from the city at its “Applied Research Laboratories.” Three years before he said what he did, UT scientists were researching for the military in physics, radar, sonar, underwater missiles, the stratosphere under supervision of the White Sands Missile ‘Range, “the sea breeze investigation,” targets, data analysis, and sensors associated with electromagnetic and acoustic waves. The military research report that year said, “There are many close ties between the Defense Research Lab and several of the teaching department.” There was an allegation, based on Department of Defense publications, that UT also had a contract with the Fort Detrick germ warfare center concerning “VX agents” and a contract with Edgewood arsenal, also in Maryland, concerning skin protection against “chemical and/or toxic agents.” There were sixty-eight contracts worth $5 million with the three armed services alone on the UT campus in 1969. THE APPLIED Research Laboratories is the name of the umbrella organization for UT’s military research. By 1970 it had a $26,500 director, a $17,500 director in aerospace, seventeen research engineers at $13,000 to $27,000 each, ten research scientists, thirteen special research associates at $17,000 to $21,000, one hundred forty-four research science associates and assistants, fifty-nine technical staff assistants, fifty-nine lab assistants an editor, a librarian, a computer operator fourteen guards four hundred twenty-seven employees in all, with an annual budget of about $5 million. The same year Hackerman was telling the students that “There is no war machine on this campus,” the university’s military research center was saying in its official publication, “Throughout [our] history, the bulk of the program has been sponsored by Department of Defense agencies and this is likely to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.” The Applied Research Labs were using two underwater sound-lab tanks, a sonar playback system, a computer center, an underwater sound lab built on floating barges at a nearby lake, a C-47 flying lab, a two-man sub, a ten-ton crane, and machine, electronics, and cabinet shops. All this, true, was not “on this campus,” but the ARL identifies itself as “an autonomous department of the University of Texas at Austin” which was reporting directly to the president of UT, Hackerman himself. CHESTER McKinney, the director of the ARL, was associated with Hackerman in founding Tracor, the off-campus Austin company that started out specializing in government contracts and wound up operating in fourteen states, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Hong Kong. Hackerman got one hundred shares of stock for his services to Tracor; McKinney was an original incorporator. When Tracor got its first Department of Defense contract, McKinney, feeling this put him into a conflict of interest, resigned the company, but he kept his stock in it and still has it. He says he sees no conflict in that, remarking that Hackerman held a lot of Tracor stock, too, and “worked for them on a paid basis for quite a period of time.” UT’s radiation safety officer was given authority by the regents recently to consult for Tracor by training its personnel in the safe use of radioactive materials. “I suspect,” McKinney said, “that a good number of professors have consultantships with the Department of Defense or companies that have contracts with the Department of Defense.” However, he said, his ARL handles 99 percent of the military research directly assigned to the university by contract. Most of the work comes in the general categories of undersea sound and the radio sciences. “We stand off here and bounce a pulse of sound off a submarine or an airplane,” he said, illustratively. Had they done any work on sensing in the dark by heat? This is a method by which American equipment finds targets in Vietnamese jungles at night. “We’ve done a little bit that would be useful at night .. . on infrared systems,” he said. There is no method of sensing all the dark effects of military money in a university. At UT in 1968, Air Force money flowed into meterology, electrical engineering, linguistics, the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, physics, mechanical engineering, zoology, aerospace engineering, and math. Winfred Lehmann, director of the Linguistics Research Center, says, “We have some Army, money.” Civilian agencies like AID and USIA are sometimes covers for military projects, so a grarit of seemingly benevolent purpose may be part or all military. Since the university has kept no public list of professors’ outside consultantships, there has been no way to guage the extent to which they are doing military work free-lance. Apart from the ROTC programs, the military also uses universities to train and recruit people. In 1969 military agencies paid $101,000 to UT in registration and tuition fees. The Institute of Latin-American Studies regularly receives students from armed services and other government agencies for training about Latin America. This “includes people who are sponsored by military intelligence. We don’t know their assignments,” said Dr. Stanley Ross when he was the institute’s director. When a pacifist-inclined professor at UT refused to teach a class in which a military officer had enrolled, he was convinced by Dean John Silber that a public university cannot refuse to accept otherwise qualified students on such a basis. NOW CAN you get a feeling, a sensing, of the degree to which a university has been militarized? Well, you can read the minutes of its governing board. At one meeting, in January, 1970, the UT regents approved contracts or modifications of them with the Air Force Systems Command, Edgewood Arsenal Office in Virginia, Army Medical Research and Development Command Command, Navy Purchasing Office, Naval Ordnance Lab, Defense Atomic Support Agency \(“oblique collisionless shock waves consultantships with Tracor \(on “large underwater sound arrays . . . aboard naval were approved. The regents also, in passing, that same meeting, changed the budget so that a,, $26,000-a-year physicist would be paid half his salary with Air Force funds, and they approved six contracts for UT-El Paso with the White Sands Missile Range, ten for UT-Dallas with NASA, and four for UT Medical School-Dallas with the Army Medical Research and Development Command. Hackerman sought to create an impression with the students that the military research was, in some vague way, not classified. Later, at a teach-in, Corwin Johnson of the law faculty, reporting on the faculty group’s cursory inquiry, said that the only test for military work the university requires be met is that the research yield some knowledge that will be Made public “at an early date.” McKinney said there is no requirement that all the results of the research be published. The regents’ minutes show there are “security agreements” with the defense department on classified contracts. Professor Johnson also told the teach-in that UT had thirty-three classified contracts, twenty-three concerning acoustics, primarily sonar, and the others concerning radio waves, ship navigation, very low frequency radio waves, analysis of air-to-air and air-to-ground gunnery control Apri126, 1974 7