The Public Interest

Project Camelot: an autopsy

Robert Nisbet

Fall 1966

Project Camelot may well have been the worst single scientific project since King Canute dealt with the tides: the worst conceived, worst advised, worst designed, and worst executed. But this much has to be said for it. Never has one project in the social sciences aroused interest so broad, so diverse, and in such high places of the national government. More important, never has one project produced, or at least stimulated, results so momentous (and possibly beneficial) in the long run to government policy with respect to the social sciences.

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