“Scientists are worse than other professors”: Industrial Patronage of Academic Research in the Early Cold War

The quote in the title is courtesy of Robert Maynard Hutchins, the young, imperious president of the University of Chicago, who oversaw the development of the university’s scientific research infrastructure after World War II. Hutchins considered scientists to be eminently susceptible to the corrupting influence of funders’ interests. It seems surprising, then, that he championed a plan to fund the university’s Institutes for Basic Research (IBRs) by appeal to industrial patrons, to the exclusion of federal support. Why did Hutchins and his science faculty—otherwise often at loggerheads—agree that industrial patronage offered a better possibility of academic freedom? And why was industry so willing to give liberally to the IBRs, even in the absence of the promise of any specific benefits? Through this and other examples— notably the Phoenix Project at the University of Michigan, a peaceful nuclear research programme that doubled as a war memorial—this talk examines the unexpected ideological alignments among university administrators, academic scientists, and industrial patrons, that shaped the development of critical research infrastructure in early Cold War America.

Joseph D. Martin is a teaching associate at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and the incoming editor-in-chief of Physics in Perspective. He earned his PhD in the history of science and technology at the University of Minnesota in 2013. Before coming to Cambridge, he taught at Colby College and Michigan State University and held a National Science Foundation research fellowship at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. His research addresses the history of the science of materials, through which he confronts questions about how the institutions that control the flow of scientific knowledge formed and evolved. His book, Solid State Insurrection: How the Science of Substance Made American Physics Matter appears this September from the University of Pittsburgh Press.