Scholars Award: Industrial Patronage and the Cold War University

第二次世界大战后，科学开始推动新的消费和军事技术的发展。拟议的研究将集中在学术界和产业界科研合作的历史上。它将加深我们对科学在战后时代是如何进行的了解。这项拟议的调查将说明学术和工业科学兴趣之间的共同点。通过对这些关系的历史研究，拟议的研究将提供对学术界和工业界如何在过去形成成功合作的透彻理解。通过关注大学和企业精心设计的合作伙伴关系的历史案例，拟议的研究确定了可以为当代研究政策提供参考的历史模式。这项拟议的研究将促进我们对冷战期间学术界和工业界如何以及为什么合作支持科学研究的历史理解。历史学家此前曾对大学与行业的合作进行过调查，以表明其中一些合作在冷战期间如何支持美国的军事利益，有时还会将研究引向经济和军事利益。这项提案将对机构进行更广泛的调查，以便将现有的对学术界和产业界伙伴关系的理解置于关于美国科学、技术、学术界和产业界的更大、更复杂的故事中。拟议的研究将通过大学、基金会和企业档案的历史研究来发展案例研究。这些研究将有助于回答以下问题：1)推动工业科学投资的动机在多大程度上是偶然的，而不是有时假设的那么僵化；2)各个机构在多大程度上有权决定其研究项目的形式和方向，以及它们的机构合作伙伴关系的性质。

After World War II, science began to drive the development of new consumer and military technologies. The proposed research will focus on the history of academia-industry scientific research collaborations. It will deepen our knowledge of how science was conducted in the post-war era. This proposed investigation will illustrate the common ground between academic and industrial scientific interests. By doing a historical study of these relationships the proposed research will provide a thorough understanding of how academia and industry have formed successful collaborations in the past. By focusing on historical cases in which universities and businesses crafted partnerships, the proposed research identifies historical models that can inform contemporary research policy. The proposed research will advance our historical understanding of how and why academia and industry collaborated to support scientific research during the Cold War. Historians have previously investigated university-industry collaborations to show how some of them supported American military interests during the Cold War and at times steered their research towards economic and military interests. This proposal will do a broader survey of institutions in order to situate existing understanding of academia-industry partnerships within a larger, knottier story about American science, technology, academia, and industry. The proposed research will develop case studies through historical research in university, foundation, and corporate archives. These studies will help answer the questions of 1) the extent to which the motives driving industrial investment in science were contingent, and less rigid than is sometimes assumed, and 2) the degree to which individual institutions had agency to determine the shape and direction of their research programs and the character of their institutional partnerships.