Carnegie Program in Science and Government

Biography

In 1960 the Carnegie Corporation gave a substantial grant to Caltech's Humanities Division to support a program on "Science and Government." The decision was made to focus the program on arms control, and by the summer of 1960, the first session of "preliminary" seminars was underway. The program lasted five to six years.

The program modeled itself to some degree on an existing joint faculty seminar at Harvard and MIT led by Henry Kissinger. At Caltech, the two original organizers were Professors David C. Elliot (history) and Matthew Sands (physics), with consistent support from Charles C. Lauritsen (physics). The purpose was to bring scientists, historians and political scientists together to try to answer some of the most pressing questions of security and arms control. Approximately fifty Caltech faculty members agreed to commit themselves to weekly meetings, to which a distinguished speaker, typically from the outside but not always, was invited. In the first year, some of the visitors were: a number of representatives from the Rand Corporation, including Albert Wohlstetter (the Rand visitors provided the "preliminary" or orientation phase of the seminar); US military leaders, such as Gen. Maxwell Taylor; representatives from academic institutions, including Kissinger and Thomas Schelling from Harvard, James R. Killian and Jerome B. Wiesner from MIT and I. I. Rabi from Columbia; and an array of foreign visitors, among them John Strachey, liberal MP from the UK, Sir Solly Zuckerman from the University of Birmingham (UK), and A. Topchiev from the USSR. Talks were not recorded or published at Caltech; however, after the first year, UCLA began to host the speakers following their Caltech presentations, and the talks were then published under UCLA's aegis.

From the guide to the Records of the Carnegie Program, 1960-1966, (California Institute of Technology. Archives.)