Heinz von Foerster and the Mansfield Amendment

Heinz von Foerster was the founder and director of the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. BCL existed from 1957 to 1976. In 1976 Heinz retired and moved to California. One revealing story about Heinz and the Biological Computer Laboratory concerns the Mansfield Amendment, which led to the closing of BCL. I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois from the late 1960s until 1975. Cybernetics, as a field, originated in the late 1940s and early 1950s during a series of ten conferences sponsored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. The conferences were held in New York City and were chaired by Warren McCulloch. The conferences were attended by people from philosophy, mathematics, engineering, neurophysiology, and social science (Heims, 1991). In 1956 at a conference at Dartmouth University a split occurred. The engineers felt they had made significant progress in programming computers to emulate some aspects of human intelligence. They preferred to proceed on the basis of somewhat ad hoc assumptions about the nature of intelligence, human or machine. The neurophysiologists and philosophers preferred to continue their research on neurophysiology. They felt they had much to learn about the functioning of the human nervous system. From this time forward the fields of artificial intelligence and cybernetics developed largely independently in terms of communication among researchers. However, various agencies in the Department of Defense, for example the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, continued to support both groups. In the 1960s BCL was the leading center for cybernetics research in the U.S. Most of the money came from the Air Force. In the late 1960s there were protests on college campuses against the war in Viet Nam and against military research being done on campus. The Department of Defense (DOD) funded quite a lot of research on campuses, but most of it was basic research not related to military activities. In an effort to calm the anti-war protests on college campuses Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, a liberal Democrat from Montana, proposed the Mansfield Amendment. This amendment to the Defense Procurement Authorization Act of 1970 required that DOD only support basic research “with a direct and apparent relationship to a specific military function or operation.” (Hauben, 1999) Apparently the intent was to diminish the DOD presence on college campuses.