"Tainted" money--research money from some sinister branch of the military or intelligence--has assumed a huge importance lately. Foremost in the minds of those who want to establish a joint committee to investigate University complicity in the war in Vietnam are the questions: How many Harvard faculty members have been doing research with this "tainted" money? And, are they helping to prosecute the war with their research?

There is some of this tainted money spread around the University, no doubt about it. At least two Harvard professors--Seymour Lipset and Alex Inkeles--are doing research financed in part by Air Force funds. But the research is only peripherally involved with war-making. And, as Lipset said in an interview recently, "The Air Force gave me my grant merely because my research contributed in a general sort of way to increased knowledge."

The Air Force and other branches of the military seem just as concerned as the Ford Foundation with pure or basic research. The reason for this concern is a matter of history.

In the years immediately following World War II, members of the federal bureaucracy, especially in the Departments of State and Defense, were convinced that the main reason we had won the war was that we had a great jump on the rest of the world in the field of "general knowledge." We just knew more, knew how to handle new situations better.

Advance of theoretic knowledge in the field of nuclear physics was one of the primary reasons for victory, they said. If somehow we had ignored doing basic research in that field we would have been in deep trouble. And the term "general knowledge" was loosely used. It became very clear that out security--militarily and politically--was tied up in education. One way to keep the level of education and general knowledge high was to subsidize pure research.

The Defense Department, it was decided, would be the best channel to disseminate research money. The department had good relations with Congress, and in the huge defense budgets an item like pure research subsidies would be easily obscured.

As Robert E. Gentry, the director of the Harvard Office for Research Contracts explained last week, "They decided simply that the overall defense needs of this country would be helped by supporting basic research."

In the years since the war, the policy has continued. The DOD agencies--the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research--have been "anxious to support research that had as little connection as possible with any governmental activity," Gentry said.

Last year, Harvard received a total of $55.4 million in research grants from the federal government. Of this total, $4.7 million came from the Defense Department. Most of this money went to theoretical projects in the sciences--studies at the observatory, biological investigations, mathematical projects.

Lipset, professor of Government and Social Relations, has received $100,000 from the Air Force over the past five years. He has been an administrator of a large-scale investigation of the role of education in the social and political development of countries throughout the world, focusing primarily on Latin America.

Lipset farms out the money he receives any way he sees fit. He claims that he is given free rein to support any work that he feels is relevant to the project. He said in an interview last week that he is not required to consult the Air Force; all he must tell them is what he told them when he first applied for the money--that his work will increase the general level of knowledge.

He is presently subsidizing nine professors, who in turn supervise graduate research. Each professor is studying the relationship of education and development in a particular country or set of countries. Lipset would not release the names of those people because, he said, he did not want to subject them to student protests.

Critics have been giving Lipset dirty looks recently. Much of his research deals with Latin America, and they see some connection between the research and the U.S. military's concern with suppressing revolution in that continent. But Lipset denies there is any connection.

He concedes that some of the information he is gathering would be useful to people interested in counter-insurgency in Latin America. "But our research is available to both sides," he said. "The only materials that aren't so widely circulated are doctoral theses and the Air Force is not interested in these anyway."

Lipset's work mainly involves integrating and publishing work already done in the field. For example, he recently financed several articles for Daedalus magazine, including "Student Politics in a Chilean University," "Student Political Activism in Latin America," and "British Student Politics."