ABSTRACT
The Soviets had given forewarnings of their intentions; and the United States was proceeding, without great haste, toward launching of a satellite of its own in conjunction with the International Geophysical Year. Sputnik did not create a crisis in American education—rather, the problems that the United States faced in the late 1950s originated with the American servicemen who returned to their families after World War II. At the time Sputnik was launched, the pluralist system of government support for university research was fully operational, save for the imminent addition of NASA. The repercussions of Sputnik reverberated through the Pentagon in the form of legislation creating the Advanced Research Projects Agency and establishing the office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering. The measures taken by the federal government in the years following Sputnik permanently altered the research universities by enlarging the dimensions of academic research and by making the conditions of that research unavoidably more dependent on government.
