In about a year, he expects to publish books on India, Latin America, and Yugoslavia, based on the work done under the Air Force grant.
Inkeles, professor of Sociology, is also working on a project partially supported by Air Force funds and has been given DOD grants in the past. Like Lipset, Inkeles uses both government money and money from private foundations for his work.
"How can you determine which government money is tainted and which isn't," Inkeles said in an interview last week. "There is no difference in the way I described my research to the Air Force and the way I described it to the National Science Foundation, the Rockefeller Institute, or the Department of State's cultural exchange office, all of which have gven me grants. It's been the same work."
Inkeles said that he worked on an Air Force-sponsored project in 1956 on life in the Soviet Union which "completely contradicted the standard Washington line." The study put Soviet society in a favorable light.
His present research, conducted at the Center for International Affairs, deals with "how individuals become modern." He has been financed by various private and government agencies, and "in the late stages of our research" by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
Inkeles has developed what he calls an "overall modernity scale" and has tested the modernity of several sample groups.
Much of his work has been conducted overseas with help from foreign collaborators. "I've ever used Air Force money to pay their salaries, just money from the State Departmne'ts exchange program," he said.
The peasant part of the sample was drawn from the cooperative movement in Pakistan, called Camilla. "We discovered that such people modernized faster, according to our modernization test," he said. "This seems to me to be quite a testimonial to the cooperative movement."
"There has never been any attempt to censor or change any of my publications," Inkeles said. "I have not been supporting anybody's policy."
The large majority of DOD grants to Harvard professors--"over 90 per cent" according to Gentry--are given to professors who seek money for their own projects.
It has been University policy not to permit confidential or classified work to be done for the Defense Department since the so-called Conant Rule was established in 1956.
"Of course, there may be professors who do security work on their own, as private individuals," Gentry said. "But we don't know who's been cleared or who is conducting such work."
Gentry said that the University has "never assumed responsibility for safe-guarding government security materials." He said that Harvard only sanctions research in which all results and data were made public.
M.I.T. has several buildings that are devoted exclusively to classified research for the Defense Department, he said. And in Bedford, M.I.T. conducts DOD work at its Lincoln Laboratories.
"I don't think any university has as strict a rule as Harvard concerning the refusal to do classified work," Gentry said. "We're on one extreme," he said. "M.I.T. and Cal Tech are on the other, and the vast majority of the rest are somewhere in the middle."
Questions of "tainted" money and complicity, it seems, are not so simple