This is your periodic reminder that in Eisenhower's Farewell Address, the famous warning about the "military-industrial complex" is just one part of a larger warning about the threat that the modern research university and its scientific elite pose to self-government.

"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=90&page=transcript

"Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."

"It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system—ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."

https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=90&page=transcript

Eisenhower's concluding prayer restates the great ambitions of modern civilization, enabled by the modern project of the conquest of nature for the relief of man's estate.

"The task of statesmanship" remains—how to ensure that modern tech serves the proper ends of we the people.

I don't know much about Eisenhower the general, but I was struck by VDH's portrait of him in The Soul of Battle, in which Eisenhower appears as the bureaucratic, administrative-state foil (though not the worst) to Patton's manly, republican assertiveness. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/74937/the-soul-of-battle-by-victor-davis-hanson/

What's that, you say? The 60th anniversary of the Farewell Address is less than a month away? Looks like it's about time I wrote up these thoughts.