Introducing Audra J. Wolfe

I suppose some readers already know of this young scholar, but she is new to me. I found her on my electric teevee a few minutes ago, on  C-Span's American History channel.

She is mentioned here for one reason only.  In discussing pre-Vietnam Pentagon funding for basic academic research, she said usually anti-militarist universities rationalized taking defense money because (a) they assumed military goals and general state goals to be one and the same and (b) they assumed state goals to be proper.

I read into her comment that she has vast doubts about a goal being proper simply because it is a policy result desired by the high federal establishment.

Her book on the subject,  Competing with the Soviets, will be my next serious read. She says of it:

"... a short, accessible introduction to the special role that science and technology played in maintaining state power during the Cold War, from the atomic bomb to the Human Genome Project."

Maybe I'll find us another credentialed libertarian thinker who does her home work. Hope so.