University’s position on defense funding cited inaccurately in obituary
In your obituary for Alan Waterman (Jan. 23), you paraphrase one of his sons, Dane Waterman, as saying, "The university eventually pulled away from defense contracts." This is just flatly wrong; the university "pulled away from" classified research, but funding from the Department of Defense went on being accepted throughout the period of campus unrest, though campus radicals repeatedly demanded that it stop.
This is an important point. The university resisted all demands that research money be accepted or rejected according to its source. As long as the work was open and the purposes fit the university's interests, support for it would be accepted regardless of the source.
Richard W. Lyman
J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor in Humanities, Emeritus
Stanford University President Emeritus
