The academy and the military would seem to be radically different institutions. Militaries are fundamentally hierarchical: at the end of the day, orders must be obeyed. At least in principle—and the emphasis here is on principle, since anyone who has lived within the academy knows how far reality departs from this purported ideal—academic disciplines prize the questioning of presuppositions and foster an antiauthoritarian culture. In military units, individuals must sublimate themselves to the group. Scholarship, at least in the humanities and social sciences, is often a lonely enterprise, whose costs are borne by and whose rewards accrue to individuals. The contemporary US officer corps disproportionately identifies with the Republican Party, while academics tend to identify with Democrats, and sometimes farther to the left. Samuel Huntington (in)famously saw as inherent and necessary the cultural divergences between military and civilian life.Footnote 1 This would all the more powerfully seem to apply to the armed forces and the academy, to uniform and gown.
Michael Mosser's provocative article argues that this contrast is overblown. Scholars sometimes (though not as commonly as Mosser would like) serve in government, including the Department of Defense, while officers acquire academic degrees. Some officers, notably General David Petraeus—unquestionably the military man most admired in Washington today—seem sincerely to value intellectual inquiry and debate, not merely for their own sake, but because they are valuable to the development of military science and as essential to the cultivation of the effective officer. The modern university, Mosser further rightly points out, not only underpins postwar American prosperity, but is also a product of Cold War imperatives—even if academics conveniently forget the Cold War roots of area studies centers and fellowship programs. Mosser launches a full-blown defense of the Minerva initiative, which has come in for so much criticism among scholars who fear its effects on researchers' agendas and credibility. And he fascinatingly describes a remarkable set of military programs that—if they really work as Mosser describes them—interrogate even foundational assumptions.
Mosser's essay courageously challenges the necessity of the divide between uniform and gown, and I admire his call for more engagement. Just because scholars seek to speak truth to power does not mean that they must, or even should, do so only from the hallowed halls of the ivory tower. There should be no taint associated with short-term service in Foggy Bottom, the Pentagon, or even Langley. However, from the vantage point of my own field of international relations, it seems to me that Mosser's essay goes astray in several ways. First, Mosser understates—actually, he utterly ignores—the potential costs to scholarship of the sort of deep institutional intertwining he recommends. Second, he understates how commonly scholars, specifically of international relations, seek to be “relevant.” His article therefore in part seeks to remedy a problem that does not really exist, while he turns a blind eye to the costs of scholars' quest for “impact.” Third, were Mosser's recommendations to be taken seriously, they might well erode the productive division of labor between the scholarly and policy communities. Mosser is right that the public interest suffers when too high a wall is erected between the two. But one must be careful not to develop a remedy that is worse than the disease.
The Dangers of Deep Engagement
Mosser does not sufficiently acknowledge the dangers that deep engagement with the state poses to scholarship. He seems far more concerned about the benefits of his policy initiatives for the military than about the potential costs for scholarship and the academic community. The military can make good use of civilian-generated knowledge and approaches for its own purposes and, Mosser claims, it increasingly does so. The problem, Mosser suggests, lies with an academy that has been reflexively opposed to the state, and especially the military, since Vietnam. Mosser never asks what effects such engagement might have on the academy. He seems entirely untroubled by the question.
But the concern is a serious one, for the academy's capacity to generate relevant knowledge—an article of faith for Mosser—rests on its enjoying a substantial zone of autonomy and thus on the state's tolerance. This goes beyond minimal academic freedom, which ensures that scholars need not fear retribution for the expression of unpopular ideas. Academic freedom, more broadly conceived, seeks to free scholars from self-censorship as well, which can result not only from the fear of sticks but also from the lure of carrots. More broadly still, academic freedom regards the very ways in which research agendas are constituted. To intertwine more deeply the world of scholarship with the world of the military, and with the state as a whole, can give scholars reasons to pull their punches; more dangerously still, it can render them unaware that there are punches to be pulled, and it can potentially limit and pervert research agendas so that certain questions are never asked. Where scholars look to the state and its concerns to guide their research agendas, the result is to impoverish scholarship—and ultimately the public sphere as well. Mosser's proposals do not seem likely to engender utter scholarly subservience to the state, but the danger is one against which one must always stand guard. Mosser's failure even to ask the question makes clear where his priorities lie.
It is revealing that the changes Mosser calls for rest largely, if not entirely, with the academy. “Ideas that actually get translated into policy should not be the academic equivalent of a scarlet letter,” he writes; “the academic community should not punish scholars who choose to pursue fellowship or short-term research opportunities with the military or government service.”Footnote 2 At least in the field of international relations, however, the charge has little validity. Just look at the list of past Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellows; many former fellows are at the top of the discipline, in the very best departments. More importantly, some of Mosser's proposals would degrade the quality of scholarship. He suggests that “works published in journals that appeal more to practitioners than to the academic community should be given greater credence in tenure decisions.” This is hardly objectionable—except for the fact that I cannot think of a single journal of international affairs or security or even strategic studies that has a substantial policy-community readership that operates on the basis of peer review. Peer review certainly has its problems, but it is, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the worst of all systems for ensuring scholarly quality—except for all the others.
None of this is to deny that scholars should be concerned with the public good. They should, and they have a responsibility to participate in public debate insofar as their scholarly expertise has bearing on the issues of the day. Mosser takes insufficient account of the substantial incentives that already impel scholars to do policy-relevant work, and he vastly underestimates their desire to shape larger debates and bring their expertise to bear. It is for this reason, especially in combination with the dangers that deeper institutional engagement poses, that I am not persuaded that we particularly need to increase those incentives. Scholars who wish to contribute to public debates will continue to do so, as they have done in the past. And I speak from personal experience: I myself have written, even when I was an untenured faculty member at a major research university, my fair share of pieces for more popular journals and magazines over the years, despite the alleged lack of incentives that so exercises Mosser.
Not So Ivory a Tower
Mosser imagines academia as an ivory tower motivated—in his story, for the worse—entirely by disciplinary and narrow careerist concerns: “The puzzle-solving mentality of the academy is driven by the need to find and address puzzles for tenure.” Ironically, this narrative of scholarly purity, albeit with a very different evaluative gloss, is implicitly shared by critics of the Department of Defense's Minerva Initiative who warn that it threatens to put social science in the service of power, to militarize the academy, and to skew research on national security much as tobacco-industry funding skewed research on the health effects of smoking.Footnote 3 But this is simply wrong as far as the history of the (American) discipline of international relations is concerned.
Scholars of international relations have not been nearly as unconcerned with policy matters as Mosser imagines. Money can of course be corrupting, but for political scientists, especially in the subfield of international security, “relevance” and “policy impact” proved awfully alluring even when, in the days after Vietnam, state research funding was relatively scarce. Indeed, in the leading subfield journal since its establishment in the latter half of the 1970s, International Security, as well as its more recently founded competitor, Security Studies, articles routinely in their conclusions offer recommendations to at least generic state policymakers, and often explicitly to the makers of US foreign policy. Nor has it been uncommon for scholars publishing in these journals so to identify with the state that they portray international security as hinging on US national security, presuming thereby that what is good for the United States is good for the global order. “Presentism” in the field of international relations has meant that the concerns of the field have overlapped substantially with the concerns of the state. It is hardly accidental that security scholars focused on the 3:1 rule or strategic stability in the 1980s, nuclear proliferation and ethnic conflict in the 1990s, and terrorism after 2001. These were pressing concerns, on the public agenda, and on the state's agenda.
Such scholarship did not simply serve power: in fact it often spoke to power quite harshly. But it did generally speak to power in familiar terms and on subjects the authorities deemed important. Why? Not because political scientists at the best US universities have been bought, as some might crudely charge, nor because have they been coopted through more subtle means. They do not merely parrot the official government line, nor has the result been to bind the academy so tightly to the bosom of the state as to suffocate it: critical voices have continued to operate in the academy, and universities harbored many dissenters from the War on Terror, just as they previously harbored dissenters from the erstwhile Cold War consensus. But the temptation of affecting public policy, of being “relevant,” is powerful, and this has—both for good and for ill—shaped scholarly research agendas and discourse.
IR's obsession with relevance contributes to the field's abiding presentism. Prediction is of course more than can reasonably be asked of a social science like international relations, but a less presentist discipline would be better positioned when the unexpected occurred—to make sense of those events and to advise unprepared policymakers—simply because it had spread its intellectual bets more widely. The ironic implication is that scholars are perhaps least useful to the polity—as opposed to decision-makers—when we are most attuned to the needs of the moment. Put differently, we are arguably most useful to the polity when we do what scholars are supposed to do: when we resist the temptation of relevance, of seeking to speak directly and immediately to policy.
Defending the Division of Labor
Mosser suggests that, to the extent that a divide exists between the worlds of scholarship and practice, it is the product of professional incentives for junior faculty “to establish their academic bona fides to garner the professional respect and acclaim they need for tenure.” But the divide is rooted equally, if not more so, in a principled division of labor. The comparative advantage of the scholar lies at the level of strategy, in bringing historical or theoretical perspective to bear, in reflection rather than action, at the level of the forest and not the trees. Precisely because scholars operate at a distance from pressing policy concerns, they can perhaps illuminate aspects of the problem that those whacking about in the weeds simply cannot see. Bringing scholars much closer to the weeds—as Mosser recommends—comes at the expense of the very reasons that Mosser presumably sees scholarship as a valuable tool for the state and specifically the military.
Mosser, in presenting an awfully idealized vision of the relationship between the military and civilian policymakers, rightly observes that “there are valid reasons why the military operates in the manner in which it does.” From his silence, it would seem that scholars lack similarly valid reasons. I disagree. Scholars and practitioners have different functions, and they have different comparative advantages. The policymaking process is ultimately directed toward producing “actionable deliverables.” As Mosser puts it in his discussion of the military decision-making process (MDMP), “MDMP will give the decision-maker a solution.” That is certainly what policymaking bodies demand. But it is quite a leap to then conclude, as does Mosser, that “military practitioners ask for explanations: the MDMP is good at giving them.”Footnote 4 MDMP is about action, not explanation. Getting something done is thus more important than getting it right. The imperative to “do something”—often for reasons political—need not have a great deal to do with the design of wise policy. We should not ask scholars to produce “actionable deliverables.”
Michael Mosser asks academia to change. I wonder if perhaps it is the military, and more broadly government, that most needs to change. Mosser cites the Minerva initiative as exemplary of such potential engagement. But the Minerva initiative offered to fund scholars to do work in line with the purposes that government defined.Footnote 5 In so doing, it did exactly what Mosser envisions: it transformed scholarship into little more than a tool of government. But it thus failed to take advantage of what scholars have to offer, of the breadth of perspective that the division of labor bequeaths to them. For instance, scholars were not asked to help define Minerva's mission. At that level, the DoD displayed little commitment to what Alexander George called “multiple advocacy.”Footnote 6 The pluralism of Minerva was thin indeed.
If the DoD really wants to exploit scholars' comparative advantage, it should consider using its vast resources to fund research not just into the “known unknowns” of Minerva, in former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's memorable formulation, but also into what he termed “unknown unknowns.” True, funders never like to see money wasted on projects they deem frivolous or outside their mandate. But social science is comparatively cheap by the standard of the huge sums expended by the DoD every year on research, not just major weapons platforms: the Office of Naval Research's research budget in 2006 was $1.6 billion, of which $160 million was spent on various counterterrorism programs, and the ONR is just one of several DoD units that offer grants for basic research. Billions have slipped through DoD's fingers unaccounted for in Iraq and Afghanistan. It can spend a fraction of those sums, and with far greater accountability, to expand its horizons and to take a chance on out-of-the-box ideas with uncertain payoff and of relatively indirect relevance to battlefield and strategic concerns. Especially in an uncertain security environment, in which the shape of future threats can be only dimly discerned, a well-funded DoD should recognize that its interests and those of the state are best served by letting a thousand flowers bloom and not overly narrowing the field that supported scholarship will bring into view.
Michael Mosser and many others are deeply concerned that the modern academy has rendered itself irrelevant to the concerns of the state. They presume that the fault lies with scholars. There is some truth to that. But it is also true that an often short-sighted policymaking apparatus sees itself as having little interest in hearing alternative voices. In the wake of the series of disastrous foreign policy decisions of the last ten years, in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world since September 2001, perhaps it is the state—not the academy—that needs to change.
