Is the Vietnam-era legacy of animosity by professors for all things military breaking down?

Evan R. Goldstein thinks so, citing examples of academic-military cooperation such as the new Pentagon initiative, the Human Terrain System, which “embeds social scientists with brigades in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they serve as cultural advisers to brigade commanders.” Arch Vietnam-era activist Tom Hayden condemns such cooperation as running “counter to the historic freedom of university life.”

Noah Feldman, a professor of law at Harvard who served as an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, counters, “If academics didn’t get involved with these kinds of difficult questions, maybe all that would be left is a department of Kantian philosophy” “Then we would be pure,” he says, “but we would be irrelevant.”