What all of this adds up to is that ARPA and the M.I.T. professors have some powerful reasons for wanting Harvard to participate in the project. An invitation was extended to Harvard during the spring, and in the course of discussions at that time several of Harvard's behavioral scientists expressed a very strong interest in the project. Harvard was unable to make any definite commitments, however; the various faculties and the Corporation have the final say on the possibility of a formal affiliation, and this was to delay a decision until the fall. The M.I.T. offer came, moreover, only a few weeks after Harvard's April strike, and there was obviously a good case to be made for the idea that if Harvard was now to become involved in new links with the Defense establishment, it had best move slowly and quietly.

Proceeding in the knowledge that Harvard social scientists were very interested in the project, and that some kind of relationship to Harvard could probably be worked out, M. I. T. and ARPA put together a second and final draft of the M. I. T. proposal, and in June the Cambridge Project received its initial one- year grant of $1,510,000. Several Harvard professors began receiving support for work during the summer, although all these arrangements were on an individual basis, since Harvard has not yet decided to affiliate with the Project. The Project began holding regular meetings here during the summer, and Professor Mosteller of Harvard's Statistics Department was elected Chairman of the Project's Advisory Board. The weighting of the Project toward Harvard is interpreted by some informed observers here as a further indication of the urgency with which Harvard's participation in the program is regarded by M. I. T. and ARPA. R. G. Leahy, Assistant Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for Resources and Planning, said yesterday that he thought a decision by Harvard not to participate formally in the program would be a serious but not critical blow to the Cambridge Project. A Harvard teacher who has been watching the Project since the spring described ARPA's attitude toward Harvard's decision a little differently this week. "The ARPA people," he said,"are absolutely frantic that Harvard get involved in this."

THE FINAL DRAFT of the M. I. T. proposal begins as follows:

ARPA may properly wish to inquire as to the relevance of what we propose to its program.

The proposed research program is a university based effort and therefore oriented to advance a major field of science. While it is a basic research effort, it is likely to lead to many applications. The potential applications of the advances made- if the project succeeds- may perhaps be better understood by those in public life who will apply the knowledge than by the scientists themselves. Yet it is clear to us that public policy will be aided by advances in the understanding of human interactions and in the prediction of the performance of social systems.

Pool goes on to list examples of current applications of the behavioral sciences in which there are opportunities for research. These include:

the improving of education and training, resolving conflict, and improving of organizational management. These are topics of universal concern. Our urban problems will be better handled if we can teach better, reduce conflicts, and organize our efforts better. Our economy will run better if we can train our manpower better, solve industrial disputes, and improve the efficiency of large organizations. We can reduce the chances of war if we can learn more about foreign peoples, relax tensions, understand the nature of conflict, and build better international organizations. Our national defense stands in need of the same kind of knowledge; for in it too one needs to train people, resolve issues, run large organizations.

The proposal then lists a number of behavioral science topics which are of interest to the Department of Defense, and links several of these with specific methodological tools, which will be developed through the Cambridge Project. The emphasis of this section and of the entire proposal, which runs on for some 82 pages, is on the concrete value to the Department of Defense of "basic research" in social science computer methodology: the document tries to leave no doubt that the project will aid the Defense Department in carrying out what in Pentagonese is vividly referred to as its "mission."

Since the plan does not specify the work that will be carried out under the grant, the M.I.T. proposal offers some specific examples of the type of ongoing work that would be bolstered by approval of the project. These include

Ithiel Pool's ComCom simulation project, which deals with the spread of messages among masses of people during political crises;

William Griffith's research project of Communism, Revisionism and Revolution, whose files contain large amounts of documentary materials on world communism and radical movements;

Pool and Griffith's work with Viet Cong documentary materials, particularly detailed interviews with Viet Cong; and

Cross- national comparisons of the performances of national governments, an area "that bears fairly directly on the problem of stability and disorder."

The M.I.T. proposal also provides a list of the kinds of data collections with which the Cambridge Project will work. These include international armaments expenditures and trends, world- wide election data, the Human Relations Area Files on "cultural patterns of all the tribes and peoples of the world," archives on comparative communism, communications data from various countries (emphasizing Pool's ComCom data on mass communications in the Soviet Union, China, and two or three underdeveloped countries), Chinese provincial statistics, characteristics of Latin American countries since 1810, data on development of underdeveloped countries, data on youth movements, mass unrest and political change, international propaganda output, and peasant behavior and attitudes.

The Cambridge Project, of course, is a "basic" rather than "applied" research project, and Harvard and M. I. T. organizations connected with the project have been laying great emphasis on the fact that it is to be devoted to the development of basic theory rather than to applied problem solving for the Department of Defense. But the language of the actual M. I. T. proposal itself, as distinct from the explanations and clarifications which have been produced for consumption within the Cambridge community, makes it rather obvious that the distinction between basic and applied research in the behavioral sciences is not a terribly meaningful one. The project is sponsored by an operating agency of the U.S. government, on the understanding that the research to be undertaken will eventually serve that agency's operations. It is not true, as one leaflet distributed at Harvard last week charged, that the immediate effect of the Cambridge Project will be to connect Pentagon crisis managers with data banks in Cambridge full of information about revolutionary movements in the rest of the world. But there is every reason to expect that the ultimate result of much of the work that the Cambridge Project will support will indeed be the creation and modernization of Defense Department informational facilities and techniques.