Wednesday, August 27, 2008
The Minerva Initiative: A Perspective from the Association of American Universities
A DoD-sponsored, university-based social science research initiative
“We represent the presidents and chancellors of 60 leading US research universities and two Canadian institutions. Our universities produce over 50% of Ph.D.'s in the United States. We also receive a significant proportion of federal funding for research. Of course as you might guess a significant proportion of our federal funding comes from the Department of Defense. I always like to remind people the significance of DOD in supporting basic research at our universities. DOD is the number one sponsor of academic engineering research on our campuses, and is more so than NSF. They're also critical to other fields: oceanography, computer science. There are many areas that they play an important role in advancing research on our campuses. Now having said that, while on the one side we have the engineers, (on the other side) we also represent many of the folks who've raised concerns about the Minerva program, particularly in the anthropological community. And so one of the great things about working for universities is academic freedom, and we have many different perspectives on programs such as this one. ” -- Dr. Toby Smith
| Introduction of Mr. Tobin Smith (1m6s) MP3 AMR 3GP 3G2 WMV | ||
| Remarks by Tobin Smith (13m2s) MP3 AMR 3GP 3G2 WMV | ||