Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times (October 31, 2016) interviews Noam Chomsky:
Chomsky here claims that no 'military or classified work' was being done on the MIT campus during the 1960s. Unfortunately, he has previously admitted the opposite on so many occasions that it's hard to know why he considers this a sensible way to take issue with me:
“There was extensive weapons research on the MIT campus. ... In fact, a good deal of the [nuclear] missile guidance technology was developed right on the MIT campus and in laboratories run by the university.”
In fact, as Chomsky explains in a 2009 interview, that claim made by the Pounds Commission was essentially an administrative fiction designed to conceal the fact that MIT's numerous weapons-research laboratories were part of the Institute:
“But the real issue in the Pounds Commission was whether to separate the laboratories from the Institute. There were sort of three views that came out. There was what was called the liberals, who said yeah, we’ve got to separate them from the campus. There were the conservatives who said we’ve got to keep them on campus. There were two or three of us, one student, one me, who were called the radicals. Who agreed with the conservatives. We’ve got to keep them on campus, so that people know what’s going on. It’s a focus of attention and concern, and you think about it, let’s not hide it somewhere – where the same relationships are going to continue, but under an apparent administrative break. Well, we lost, the liberals won. They were formally separated.”
Here is how Chomsky describes the true situation in a further 2009 interview:
“There wasn’t any classified work on campus, but it was two inches off campus. The labs right next door were doing classified work and people were between them all the time.”
More responses:
Tom Bartlett, 'The Chomsky Puzzle. Piecing together a celebrity scientist', The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 25 2016.
'When politics fills the language gap, can science be neutral?', Marek Kohn reviews 'Decoding Chomsky' in The New Scientist, November 2 2016.
Sam Fenn in discussion with Chris Knight. ‘Chomsky’s Carburetor’. University of British Columbia radio show.
Chris Knight replies to Chomsky's criticisms on Sam Fenn's radio show.
'Overweening Generalist' blog on Decoding Chomsky
'Babel's Dawn' blog on The Kingdom of Speech and Decoding Chomsky
“Knight does the better job of destroying Chomsky’s story by showing a constant, failing effort to make the unshakeable idea work. Wolfe makes the tale more dramatic, but probably less convincing. And Wolfe hangs his drama on secondary issues. He badly misunderstands the whole matter of recursion, for example.”