CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Intelligence Relations with Academe

A - I

Although located under the broad CIA category, this file includes material on the relationship between academe and the intelligence community generally.

Altbach, P.G. "Spies for CIA or Deserving Students?" Christian Century 15 (Mar. 1967): 352-354. [Petersen]

Austin, C.G. "Credibility Gap." Journal of Higher Education, May 1967, 278-280.

Diamond, Sigmund. The Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. HV6285D53

Surveillant 2.4 comments that while the "basic facts are revealing," the author's "conclusions seem more based on personal experience and still open wounds than supported by events." Reinforcing that appraisal, Savage, I&NS 9.1, finds that Compromised Campus suffers from a "general disorganization. It is a barrel of information, data and polemic rather than a tightly organized argument." Diamond was one of those faculty members purged by Harvard because he would not inform on his colleagues. The "bulk of the book is ... about the Red scare of the 1940s and 1950s."

Noting that "Diamond focuses mostly on Harvard, which is the subject of six of his ten chapters," Freeland, Journal of Higher Education, Mar. 1994, adds that "[t]hree additional chapters are devoted to Yale, and a final essay discusses the FBI's efforts to identify subversives at a large number of other American campuses.... [He] seems to have done very little interviewing of individuals involved in the incidents he recounts. Basically, he relied heavily on the materials he obtained from the government, particularly the FBI, through his persistent FOIA requests." The book does not present a coherent overview of the subject, but rather a "collage of snapshots and vignettes." Diamond "believes the real issue ... is the existence of a systematic and covert 'institutional relationship' between Harvard and the federal intelligence apparatus.... In support of his thesis Diamond provides some fascinating and troubling information... In the end, however, Diamond's fragments cannot sustain his central claims."

Wirtz, IJI&C 8.2, notes that "Compromised Campus is not a detailed history of intelligence-academic interaction.... Instead, it is an indictment of Harvard and Yale McCarthy-era administrators and luminaries for acting as FBI informants." According to Whitehead, JAH, Jun. 1993, Diamond "demonstrates ... that Harvard as well as Yale and other major universities fully cooperated with the FBI, often at the level of the university president, in providing information about the political activities of faculty and students.... His account achieves a remarkable balance of documentation and passion.... This is an important book that questions the inner culture and values of the nation's leading universities."

NameBase feels that "Diamond has the inside scoop after numerous FOIA requests filed with the FBI, access to private collections and archives, and dozens of interviews. Much of this book deals with the FBI on campus and their use of informants (including Henry Kissinger and William F. Buckley), although it breaks off before the FBI got really nasty in the late 1960s. That still leaves two revealing chapters on Harvard's Russian Research Center.... This book is essential for anyone interested in the CIA-campus connection."

Douthwright, Jean A. "Rochester Institute of Technology: A CIA Subsidiary?" Covert Action Information Bulletin, Fall 1991, 4-9.

There has been a "long, complex, and pervasive relationship between RIT and the CIA.... [T]he College of Graphic Arts and Photography received about $200,000 from the CIA in grants from 1966 to 1975. In 1985 it was reported that '30 RIT ... students have gone to work just for the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.' Most of the students were from computer science, math, engineering and imaging science programs." [Footnotes omitted] See also, Denise K. Magner, "At Rochester Institute, a Spectrum of Opinions on Links with the CIA," Chronicle of Higher Education (10 Jul. 1991): A1, 11, 14.

Ege, Konrad. "Rutgers University: Intelligence Goes to College." CounterSpy, Jun.-Aug. 1984, 42-44.

Oh, horrors! The head of the political science department at Rutgers is a consultant to and does research for the CIA. And others do it as well -- and some even do work for the Pentagon!

Evans, Rob, Nicola Butler, and Eddie Goncalves. The Campus Connection: Military Research on Campus. London: Student CND, 1991.

Surveillant 2.5 characterizes this work as an "anti-university/military alliance tract."

First Principles. Editors. "The CIA and the U.S. Academic Community: Harvard's Report and Guidelines." 3 (Jun. 1977): 10-11. [Petersen]

Gates, Robert M. "The CIA and the University: An Address by Robert M. Gates, Deputy Director, Central Intelligence Agency, before the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, October 10, 1987." Periscope 12, no. 4 (1987): 17-19.

Gibbs, David N. "Academics and Spies: The Silence that Roars." Los Angeles Times, 28 Jan. 2001, M2.

Although the previous ties between academics and the CIA "supposedly withered during the 1970s,... [a] recent article in the magazine Lingua Franca, however, reveals ... that the 'cloak and gown' connection has flourished in the aftermath of the Cold War.... The close relationship between intelligence agencies and scholars ... poses a conflict of interest.... If political scientists are working for the CIA, how can they function as objective and disinterested scholars?" [See Chris Mooney, "For Your Eyes Only: The CIA Will Let You See Classified Documents -- But at What Price?" Lingua Franca, Nov. 2000, 35-43.]

Goodman, Allan E. "The CIA and the Universities: The Prospects for Improved Relations Have Never Been Better." Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 Nov. 1992, B1-B2.

Greenfield, Patricia. "CIA's Behavior Caper." APA Monitor, Dec. 1977, 1, 10-11.

"While news of blatant attempts at behavioral control have had immediate shock value, the CIA's support of basic research has had the more lingering effect of posing many difficult and complex questions and issues for psychologists.... The CIA's key instrument for sponsoring basic research in psychology, sociology and anthropology in the decade from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s was the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, later called the Human Ecology Fund.... Psychological Assessment Associates, a private consulting firm,... was the CIA's successor to Human Ecology."

Hedley, John Hollister. "Twenty Years of Officers in Residence." Studies in Intelligence 49, no. 4 (2005): 31-39.

The CIA's Officer-in-Residence Program "stands as a model for nurturing relations between intelligence and academia."

Horowitz, Irving Louis, ed. The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship Between Social Science and Practical Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967.

Dale Wharton, Montreal <dale@dale.cam.org>, posted to alt.politics.org.cia, 20 Nov. 1995: In 1964, the U.S. Army launched Project Camelot, a multinational social science research project, to explore "the social processes which must be understood in order to deal effectively with problems of insurgency.... The Army managed Camelot through a contractor, the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) of American University." The project was conducted on an unclassified basis. This book "comprises project briefs plus 10 papers by academics, four by politicians, and two by bureaucrats." The project was canceled in July 1965, after an uproar followed the U.S. action in the Dominican Republic.

Hulnick, Arthur S. "CIA's Relations with Academia: Symbiosis Not Psychosis." International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 1, no. 4 (Winter 1986-87): 41-50.

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