Effects of War, Sequel Part 3 | 1964–1969: Universities, War and the Uses of Science

On 2 July 1964, the Civil Rights Act established a rule with direct implications for publicly assisted education. Title VI prohibited exclusion, denial of benefits and discrimination on grounds of race, colour or national origin in programmes receiving federal financial assistance. Federal support carried an obligation concerning the treatment of people within the supported activity. ^[1]

The law provided ways to enforce that obligation. Under prescribed procedures, an agency could terminate or refuse assistance after a finding of non-compliance, an opportunity for a hearing and unsuccessful efforts to obtain voluntary compliance. The statute also provided for judicial review. Its authority therefore involved decisions, records and procedures through which a recipient could be held to account. ^[1]

Implementation required continuing work. The Office of Education’s report for fiscal 1966 described revised desegregation guidance, compliance assurances and enforcement proceedings in school districts. These were administrative activities undertaken after enactment, within a particular part of the educational system. ^[2]

The obligation deserves a place in this history on its own terms. A person’s claim to fair treatment does not depend on a prediction of future scientific usefulness. If opportunity is defended only because an excluded student might make a discovery, the argument leaves everyone else’s rights contingent on an estimate of their productivity. A public educational system must be judged by how it treats people as well as by the work it eventually produces.

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Approved on 8 November 1965, the Higher Education Act authorised Educational Opportunity Grants for undergraduates of exceptional financial need. Participating institutions selected recipients and determined payments within statutory conditions. Eligibility included students already attending in good standing, as well as those accepted for enrolment. ^[3]

Congress authorised $70 million for initial-year awards in fiscal 1966 and the same amount in each of the next two fiscal years. Following the loan arrangements discussed in the preceding chapter, this introduced a further form of assistance. ^[3]

Such an arrangement placed a practical judgment inside the institution. Someone had to assess need, relate assistance to the costs of attendance and communicate a decision to the student. The question of access therefore extended beyond the admissions offer. A place that a student could not afford to occupy remained an incomplete opportunity.

There was also a difference between helping a person enter and enabling that person to continue. Educational commitments unfold through terms and years, while financial decisions can arrive in separate cycles. The value of assistance has to be understood within that longer course of study.

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The fiscal 1966 report gives the grant programme a more definite scale. For fiscal 1966, Congress appropriated $58 million. The Office of Education reported awards totalling $57,919,229 to 1,419 colleges and universities for use in the 1966–67 academic year. It estimated that the allocations would support approximately 134,000 student grants, averaging $432. Institutions selected recipients and paid them directly. ^[2]

An appropriation and an award answered different questions. The former supplied money for the programme; the latter committed resources to institutions. Students could benefit when those institutions translated allocations into individual grants.

Financial support and additional university places could reinforce one another. Their effects would meet in the experience of a person trying to study. Across the Atlantic, the new university at Bochum was beginning to discover how the places it had prepared would be used.

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Ruhr-Universität Bochum held its ceremonial opening on 30 June 1965. Teaching began on 2 November, initially in the humanities, social sciences and some natural-science departments. The institution whose appointments and preparations appeared in the previous chapter now had classes to conduct. The opening did not mean that every planned subject and building was already in operation. ^[4]

The university archive’s account records 2,000 places created for winter 1965/66, of which 1,036 were occupied by the registration deadline. Two-thirds of the students enrolled in 1965 were advanced students transferring from other universities. The first intake therefore included people continuing an existing education in a new setting. Their arrival cannot be counted simply as an equal number of first entries into higher education. ^[5]

Demand soon altered the picture. In summer 1966, student numbers almost trebled, with a substantial influx into economics and crowded lecture halls in that department. The same archival account thus records initially unfilled capacity and subsequent pressure within a short period. ^[5]

The contrast mattered for planning. Teachers, rooms and courses had to meet demand within particular subjects. Bochum’s early terms show why creating places was only one stage of the work: after students arrived, provision still had to respond to their choices.

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On 19 April 1967, a sit-in in the Henry Ford Building at the Freie Universität in West Berlin protested a ban on publishing course reviews and announced disciplinary action against members of Kommune I and the Socialist German Student Union, the SDS. The dispute concerned students’ freedom to publish and the university’s authority to discipline them. ^[6]

These disputes belonged to a wider conflict. The university archive places the late-1960s crisis amid demands for democratisation, debate over the preceding generation’s responsibility for National Socialism and opposition to the Vietnam War. The dominance of full professors within university government became a particular target of criticism. Occupations, interruptions to teaching and police interventions also affected the institution’s ability to work. ^[7]

Students’ experience had become a question of university government.

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The 1969 reform changed the Freie Universität’s governing arrangements. Staff and students gained stronger participation; professors lost their absolute majority in university bodies; an elected presidency replaced the rectorship. The institution was reorganised into departments and central institutes. These were changes to the formal distribution of authority, extending beyond a statement that criticism would be heard. ^[6]

On 24 November 1969, the transition council elected the physicist and sociologist Rolf Kreibich as the university’s first president. ^[6] He was a thirty-year-old research assistant. The university’s later profile describes how he had pursued reform at the sociology institute and how his election polarised the wider institution. His position made the change in university leadership unusually concrete. ^[8]

Participation and agreement are separate achievements. Giving additional groups a formal role can change which experiences enter deliberation while leaving substantial disagreement about the decision itself. Indeed, an arrangement that exposes disagreements may be doing something valuable: making visible interests that an earlier procedure allowed a narrower group to settle.

The institutional question then becomes how those interests are weighed. Expertise remains necessary for academic decisions, but expertise alone does not determine every legitimate claim on a university. Students and staff also experience the consequences of timetables, appointments, disciplinary procedures and research commitments.

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At CERN, Georges Charpak, R. Bouclier, T. Bressani, J. Favier and Č. Zupančič investigated how to locate charged particles with planes of detector wires, each connected to an amplifier. Their 1968 paper described how a particle’s passage ionised the gas, producing signals associated with particular wires. ^[9]

The authors tested localisation, timing and counting performance, including measurements with particles from CERN’s Synchro-cyclotron. Their acknowledgements made further work visible: G. Muratori and his group demonstrated the possibility of producing the chambers on a large scale, while G. Amato and J. P. Papis helped develop inexpensive amplifiers. The instrument’s usefulness depended on that combination of experimental design, construction and electronics. ^[9]

The next step was to put the new arrangement to work in experiments.

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The June 1969 CERN Courier record provides a concrete endpoint. Its associated apparatus descriptions show a multiwire proportional chamber in use in a Synchro-cyclotron experiment. Another describes the chamber recording the profile of a secondary beam from the Proton Synchrotron in two perpendicular directions. The illustrated burst contained 50,000 particles and lasted 100 milliseconds. ^[10]

That second use concerned the beam itself. An accelerator experiment requires knowledge of the material entering the experiment, including its distribution. A device that helps establish those conditions contributes to the reliability of the investigation even when its record is not the final result the physicists seek. Scientific work includes measurements made so that other measurements can be understood.

This makes adoption a useful part of the story. The 1968 paper had presented tests of an arrangement; the 1969 record showed it performing tasks within the laboratory. The connection between the two was a working instrument, placed where researchers needed information.

The example also widens the meaning of cooperation. Shared research requires agreements and access, but it is carried out through equipment that people can build, operate and interpret together. At that scale, the strength of an institution appears in the connections among different kinds of work.

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The demanding work of a large programme could also expose grave failures. On 27 January 1967, a fire during an Apollo ground test killed Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee. The test preceded the programme’s planned first crewed flight. Their deaths confronted NASA with the safety of a system that had not yet carried its crew into space. ^[11]

The Apollo 204 Review Board did not conclusively identify a single ignition source. It did identify conditions that made the accident catastrophic: combustible material, the pressurised oxygen environment and inadequate means of escape. The inner hatch could not be opened against the pressure inside the cabin. The board also found that the organisations responsible had failed to recognise the test as hazardous and had not prepared adequately for fire escape and rescue. ^[12]

The loss should retain its human meaning within the history of the programme. A later successful mission cannot compensate the three men or their families. What the investigation could do was establish conditions that demanded correction and make the continuation of the programme answerable to those findings.

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The review’s practical force lay partly in the distinction between an unresolved detail and an established danger. Uncertainty about the exact ignition source did not remove the evidence about the cabin environment or the difficulty of escape. The board recommended changes addressing combustible materials and the time and operations required for egress. ^[12]

NASA’s subsequent changes included a unified hatch that opened outwards, tighter controls on flammable materials, improved protection for wiring and fire-resistant suits. Organisational arrangements changed as well. At the Manned Spacecraft Center, a Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance Office reported independently to the centre director, separately from the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office. ^[11]

A hatch and a reporting relationship operate at different points in a programme. One alters what can be done in a physical emergency. The other alters how a concern can reach a person with authority before an emergency occurs. Both belong in an account of engineering because the design of a vehicle depends on decisions about evidence, acceptance and readiness.

Independence in reporting creates an opportunity to challenge a decision; people still have to use it. For that reason, the record of a completed modification and the record of a new office answer different questions. Together they show a response that reached the apparatus and the organisation responsible for it.

Other demanding work continued alongside these changes. Apollo’s software had to turn intended operations into instructions that could be tested, revised and relied upon during flight.

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Margaret Hamilton led the Software Engineering Division of MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory. The familiar 1969 photograph of her beside a tall stack of program listings records the scale of software produced by her team for Apollo’s command and lunar modules. It gives a visible form to work that otherwise disappears behind the operation of the machine. ^[13]

The responsibilities were distributed. MIT’s collection of participant recollections identifies James E. Kernan as supervisor of the lunar-module programming and test group and Dan Lickly as director of mission program development. Hamilton’s own retrospective account describes the extended process of designing, developing, revising and observing the software with colleagues. The achievement belonged to organised professional work over time. ^[14]

Writing instructions for a flight demands decisions about circumstances as well as calculations. What should the system do first when several tasks compete? Which information must be preserved? How should it behave when an expected sequence is interrupted? Such questions connect an abstract description of a mission to the limited time and resources available within the equipment.

They also make communication part of the technical problem. People responsible for different parts of a system need a shared understanding of what each part assumes. A local improvement can create a difficulty elsewhere if those assumptions change unnoticed. The team’s work therefore required more than individual ingenuity. It required a way to settle requirements, examine changes and establish which version was ready to fly.

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NASA’s history of Apollo computing describes the difficulty of controlling a growing body of software while requirements continued to change. In 1967, a Software Configuration Control Board was established to govern changes. The acceptance process linked specifications, coding and testing, validation, release for manufacture of the fixed core-rope memory, and flight-readiness review. A program had to pass through a sequence of judgments before becoming part of the flight system. ^[15]

This work raises a problem familiar to any complex undertaking: a change can be desirable in itself and still be costly to introduce at a particular moment. Its effect depends on what has already been tested, what other components expect and how much opportunity remains to examine the revised whole. A deadline makes those relationships harder to ignore.

Control of changes consequently has an intellectual purpose. It preserves a connection between a claim about a system and the particular system for which that claim has been examined. If the software changes after a test, the previous result may no longer answer the relevant question. Someone must decide what evidence remains applicable and what needs to be checked again.

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During Apollo 11’s descent on 20 July 1969, five computer alarms presented an immediate problem. The mission report identified them as executive-overflow alarms: the guidance computer could not complete all the processing requested within its available cycle. Unexpected activity from the rendezvous-radar interface consumed computer time. The system issued alarms and initiated software restarts; the report found that guidance and control performance remained intact. ^[16]

The software’s response and the decision to continue were connected tasks. Ground personnel had to interpret what the alarms meant for the descent. NASA’s computing history identifies Steven Bales and John Garman in the assessment that supported continuing, while the crew remained responsible for operating the spacecraft. ^[15]

The episode brings together the work described in the preceding sections. Design supplied a response to overload; preparation supplied people able to interpret the system; operational authority supplied a decision. None of these roles could simply absorb the others. Reliability emerged through their coordination at a moment when time for further explanation was limited.

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Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin landed the lunar module in the Sea of Tranquillity on 20 July 1969. Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit in the command module. The surface work included collecting material and deploying scientific experiments. ^[16] The three astronauts returned to Earth on 24 July, completing the mission that had launched on 16 July. ^[17]

The return gives the achievement its proper boundary. The objective set earlier in the decade included bringing the crew safely home. Reaching a destination was one stage of an obligation extending through departure, reunion and recovery. A history organised only around the first arrival would leave that obligation unfinished.

Apollo 11 had achieved the flight objective. It also returned something whose significance depended on work still to be done: lunar material that could be examined with instruments and methods on Earth. The mission’s end became the beginning of further investigations. Its scientific value would develop through access to those samples, careful handling and arguments about what the observations could establish.

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On 17 September 1969, distribution of Apollo 11 material began at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory of the Manned Spacecraft Center. Daniel H. Anderson, curator of lunar samples, supervised the allocation of approximately eighteen pounds to 142 principal investigators in the United States and eight other countries. The allocations followed prior agreements, enabling researchers to examine material at their home institutions. ^[18]

Custody and distribution were part of the scientific undertaking. A sample had to reach an appropriate investigation while remaining connected to its identity and collection history. Different experiments could ask different questions of a limited quantity of material. Deciding what to release, how to handle it and what to preserve affected the work that could follow.

The 1969 Apollo 11 Preliminary Science Report already distinguished crystalline rocks of igneous origin from breccias, rocks made from fragments with more complex histories. The initial examination interpreted some crystalline material as originating in lava flows, subsequently broken and redeposited, and reported evidence of impact effects. Its discussion also explained the immediate purpose of characterising samples so that investigators could select material for more specialised studies. ^[19]

The distinction gave researchers a more definite set of questions. Different structures and compositions could be compared; proposed histories could be tested against additional measurements. The material came from a particular landing site, making its location part of the meaning of the result. A small collection could open a large inquiry without representing every part of the Moon.

Here international participation took the form of allocated material and work at separate institutions. The dramatic concentration of effort required for the flight was followed by a distribution of scientific tasks. A sample curator, laboratory investigators and the people maintaining the records all belonged to the achievement’s continuing life.

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Earlier that same year, before the lunar landing, MIT had become a meeting place for a direct examination of research and public responsibility. On 3 and 4 March 1969, talks and panel discussions brought science’s relationship with government and society into debate. Faculty members of the Union of Concerned Scientists and students in the Social Action Coordinating Committee organised the events, which formed part of a teach-in and a strike against research. The Vietnam War, the arms race and defence work were among the concerns. ^[20]

One participant, the linguist Noam Chomsky, argued that intellectuals had to consider the foreseeable consequences of their actions and their failures to act. His address challenged the acceptance of existing power through professional participation or passivity. He directed attention to policies that expertise helped make possible and to the people who suffered their consequences. This was a stated position in a public argument about responsibility. ^[21]

The question reached beyond whether an investigation had been competently performed. Work can meet a demanding technical standard while serving a purpose that deserves challenge. To ask about that purpose is to extend inquiry into the decision that selected the task.

The relationship with Apollo makes the issue especially clear. The accomplishments of the Instrumentation Laboratory’s civilian flight work could be described and valued in their own right. Assessing other commitments still required attention to their particular purposes and consequences. An institution’s reputation for technical excellence could make that examination more consequential.

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On 25 April 1969, MIT president Howard W. Johnson appointed a panel chaired by William F. Pounds to examine Lincoln Laboratory and the Instrumentation Laboratory. Its first report was submitted on 31 May; the final volume appeared in October. ^[22]

It recommended continued defence research, a broader civilian programme, closer educational connections and fewer classification barriers. An advisory committee would include faculty, students, administrators and laboratory staff. The panel judged Poseidon’s current development stage inappropriate for MIT sponsorship and asked MIT to review future commitments while honouring existing contracts. ^[22]

Technical quality and educational suitability were separate judgments. The inquiry asked which work belonged within a university and how its community could participate in that choice. Its recommendations still needed decisions about implementation.

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Congress acted through a different form of authority. Section 203 of Public Law 91-121, approved on 19 November 1969, restricted research projects and studies financed with funds authorised by that Act. Such work had to have a direct and apparent relationship to a specific military function or operation. The provision concerned a defence authorisation for fiscal 1970. Its scope was the money covered by that legislation. ^[23]

The condition made purpose a requirement that expenditure had to satisfy. An advocate seeking support from those funds now needed to connect the proposed research to an identifiable military function. This changed the terms of justification within the covered programme. It left open the separate question of how other agencies and institutions should support investigations with different purposes.

The contemporary GAO Review identifies Senator Mike Mansfield as the provision’s sponsor. It records that on 6 December 1969 he told the Senate he had requested guidelines and machinery from the General Accounting Office to assess the restriction’s effectiveness. The Department of Defense indicated that it would cooperate. ^[24]

That request made implementation an explicit next task. Applying a purpose test requires an account of what a project actually does and how its connection to the permitted purpose is judged. A statutory phrase can direct those judgments, but administrators still have to make and explain them. At the end of 1969, the record shows a restriction enacted and an assessment requested. It leaves the later results of that assessment for the history that follows.

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These episodes bring several kinds of responsibility into view. An educational institution had obligations to those seeking entry and to those already studying. A laboratory had obligations concerning the reliability and consequences of its work. A public agency had to connect expenditure to an authorised purpose. The responsibilities met within the same scientific world, while operating through different decisions.

The comparison suggests why accomplishment alone is an incomplete measure of institutional strength. An organisation can become highly effective at a task without providing an adequate way to question the choice of task. It can create opportunities while leaving some people unable to use them. It can invite criticism without giving that criticism a route to decisions. These are distinct problems, each requiring attention to how authority is exercised.

Scientific competence remains indispensable. A detector must produce interpretable records; a flight system must perform under demanding conditions. The case for public scrutiny becomes stronger when those capabilities grow, because capable institutions can produce larger consequences. The people affected by a decision have interests that extend beyond the question of whether the decision’s technical objective was achieved.

This is one way to understand war’s continuing place in the history. Military purposes, public expenditure and the uses of expertise could become subjects of argument within institutions that also carried out civilian research and education. Following particular projects allows their contributions and consequences to be assessed with greater precision. It also gives the people doing the work a place within the account, alongside those who authorised or challenged it.

By the end of 1969, the chapter’s institutions had undertaken real work and made consequential changes. They entered the next decade with further responsibilities: to sustain opportunities, examine the purposes of support and give continuing effect to the scrutiny already begun. The next stage of the history must follow what those arrangements enabled people to do, and how the institutions responded when their promises were tested again. Continue with Access, Evidence and Scientific Cooperation, 1970–1975.

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