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Anthropology Association Urges Government to Tread Cautiously With 'Minerva' Project

In the latest sign of scholars’ anxiety about Pentagon-financed social-science research, the president of the American Anthropological Association has sent a letter to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget expressing concern about the “Minerva consortium,” a program announced last month by Robert M. Gates, the secretary of defense.

The Minerva program, which will offer grants to universities to study topics of interest to the Pentagon, has been condemned by some scholars and praised by others.

In her letter, the association’s president, Setha M. Low, writes that “it is of paramount importance for anthropologists to study the roots of terrorism and other forms of violence.” But Ms. Low, who is a professor of environmental psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, argues that it would be better for such research to be financed by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Endowment for the Humanities because, she says, those agencies are more familiar with anthropology and have established structures for peer review.
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed