Throughout the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, independent
grassroots movements to keep the Central Intelligence Agency off
American university campuses were broadly supported by students,
professors and community members. The ethos of this movement was
captured in Ami Chen Mills’ 1990 book,
C.I.A. Off Campus.
Mills’ book gave voice to the multiple reasons why so many academics
opposed the presence of the CIA on university campuses: reasons that
ranged from the recognition of secrecy’s antithetical relationship to
academic freedom, to political objections to the CIA’s use of torture
and assassination, to efforts on campuses to recruit professors and
students, and the CIA’s longstanding role in undermining democratic
movements around the world.
For those who lived through the dramatic revelations
of the congressional inquiries in the 1970s, documenting the CIA’s
routine involvement in global and domestic atrocities, it made sense to
construct institutional firewalls between an agency so deeply linked
with these actions and educational institutions dedicated to at least
the promise of free inquiry and truth. But the last dozen years have
seen retirements and deaths among academics who had lived through this
history and had been vigilant about keeping the CIA off campus;
furthermore, with the attacks of 9/11 came new campaigns to bring the
CIA back onto American campuses.
Henry Giroux’s 2007 book,
The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial Academic Complex,
details how two decades of shifts in university funding brought
increased intrusions by corporate and military forces onto university.
After 9/11, the intelligence agencies pushed campuses to see the CIA and
campus secrecy in a new light, and, as traditional funding sources for
social science research declined, the intelligence community gained
footholds on campuses.
Post-9/11 scholarship programs like the Pat Roberts
Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP) and the Intelligence Community
Scholarship Programs today sneak unidentified students with undisclosed
links to intelligence agencies into university classrooms (both were
first exposed by this author here in
CounterPunch
in 2005). A new generation of so-called flagship programs have quietly
taken root on campuses, and, with each new flagship, our universities
are transformed into vessels of the mitarized state, as academics learn
to sublimate unease.
The programs most significantly linking the CIA with
university campuses are the “Intelligence Community Centers of Academic
Excellence” (ICCAE, pronounced “Icky”) and the “Intelligence Advance
Research Projects Activity”. Both programs use universities to train
intelligence personnel by piggybacking onto existing educational
programs. Campuses that agree to see these outsourced programs as
nonthreatening to their open educational and research missions are
rewarded with funds and useful contacts with the intelligence agencies
and other less tangible benefits.
Even amid the militarization prevailing in America
today, the silence surrounding this quiet installation and spread of
programs like ICCAE is extraordinary. In the last four years, ICCAE has
gone further in bringing government intelligence organizations openly to
American university campuses than any previous intelligence initiative
since World War Two. Yet, the program spreads with little public notice,
media coverage, or coordinated multi-campus resistance.
When the New Infiltration Began
In 2004, a $250,000 grant was awarded to Trinity
Washington University by the Intelligence Community for the
establishment of a pilot “Intelligence Community Center of Academic
Excellence” program. Trinity was, in many ways, an ideal campus for a
pilot program. For a vulnerable, tuition-driven, struggling financial
institution in the D.C. area, the promise of desperately needed funds
and a regionally assured potential student base, linked with or seeking
connections to the D.C. intelligence world, made the program
financially attractive.
In 2005, the first ICCAE centers were installed at ten
campuses: California State University San Bernardino, Clark Atlanta
University, Florida International University, Norfolk State University,
Tennessee State University, Trinity Washington University, University of
Texas El Paso, University of Texas-Pan American, University of
Washington, and Wayne State University. Between 2008-2010, a second wave
of expansion brought ICCAE programs to another twelve campuses:
Carnegie Mellon, Clemson, North Carolina A&T State, University of
North Carolina-Wilmington, Florida A&M, Miles College, University of
Maryland, College Park, University of Nebraska, University of New
Mexico, Pennsylvania State University, and Virginia Polytechnic
Institute.
But the CIA and FBI aren’t the only agencies from the
Intelligence Community that ICCAE brings to American university
campuses. ICCAE also quietly imports a smorgasbord of fifteen agencies –
including the National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency,
and Homeland Security.
ICCAE’s stated goals are to develop a “systematic
long-term program at universities and colleges to recruit and hire
eligible talent for IC [Intelligence Community] agencies and
components,” and to “increase the [intelligence recruiting] pipeline of
students … with emphasis on women and ethnic minorities in critical
skill areas.” Specifically, ICCAE seeks to “provide internships, co-ops,
graduate fellowships and other related opportunities across IC agencies
to eligible students and faculty for intelligence studies immersion,”
and to “support selective international study and regional and overseas
travel opportunities to enhance cultural and language immersion.”
ICCAE’s aim is to shower with fellowships, scholarships and grants those
universities that are adapting their curricula to align with the
political agenda of American intelligence agencies; also to install a
portal connecting ICCAE campuses with intelligence agencies, through
which students, faculty, students studying abroad, and unknown others
will pass. While ICCAE claims to train analysts, rather than members of
the clandestine service, the CIA historically has not observed such
boundaries.
ICCAE-funded centers have different names at different
universities. For example, at the University of Washington (UW), ICCAE
funds established the new Institute for National Security Education and
Research (INSER), Wayne State University’s center is called the Center
for Academic Excellence in National Security Intelligence Studies, and
Clark Atlantic University’s program is the Center for Academic
Excellence in National Security Studies.
With the economic downturn, university layoffs became a
common ocurrence. Need breeds opportunism, as scarcity of funds leads
scholars to shift the academic questions they are willing to pursue and
suspend ethical and political concerns about funding sources. Other
scholars unwilling to set aside ethical and political concerns are
keenly aware of institutional pressures to keep their outrage and
protests in-house.
Covering Up Dissent
Despite a lack of critical media coverage of ICCAE
programs, traces of campus dissent can be found online in faculty senate
records. When Dean Van Reidhead at the University of Texas-Pan American
(UTPA) brought a proposal for ICCAE to establish a center on campus,
some faculty and graduate students spoke out against the damage to
academic freedom that the program would likely bring. Senate minutes
record that faculty “representatives spoke against and for UTPA
submitting a proposal to compete for federal money to establish an
Intelligence Community Center for Academic Excellence.” At this meeting,
graduate students “listed the following demands: 1) inform the
community via press release about the possible ICCAE proposal, 2)
release the proposal draft for public review, 3) establish a community
forum on ICCAE, and 4) abolish the process of applying for ICCAE
funds.” At Texas-Pan American, as at other ICCAE campuses,
administrators noted these concerns but continued with plans to bring
the intelligence agencies to campus, as if hearing and ignoring concerns
constituted shared governance.
The minutes of the University of Washington’s Faculty
Senate and Faculty Council on Research record shadows of dissent that
are so vaguely referenced that they are easily missed. The minutes for
the December 4, 2008, meeting gloss over the issues raised when the
American Association of University Professors, University of Washington
chapter, had issued a strongly worded statement by Executive Board
representative Christoph Giebel, requesting information concerning UW’s
INSER contacts with the Intelligence Community. The minutes simply read:
“… both Giebel and Jeffry Kim [INSER director] answered a series of
good questions that resulted in a fair, tough and serious conversation.”
What these “good questions” were and the nature of this “tough and
serious conversation” are not mentioned in the minutes, as if “good
questions” were not important enough to enter into a public record.
Similarly, the nature of faculty objections to INSER are glossed over in
the 1/29/09 UW Senate minutes, which simply listed the findings of the
Faculty Council on Research that “a number of email communications have
come through the faculty senate that reflect a range in attitude toward
the INSER program.”
In fact, a significant portion of this faculty “range
in attitudes toward the INSER program” is most accurately characterized
as outraged. I have heard from faculty at other ICCAE flagship campuses
that some form of internal dissent has occurred on each of their
campuses, and professors at UW have sent me documents, quoted below,
clarifying the extent of the campus’s disquiet over the intelligence
agencies insertion into their campus; an insertion whose success should
be described as a silent coup.
Faculty and students’ public silence at ICCAE
universities over these developments needs some comment. The post-9/11
political climate casts a pall of orthodoxy over critical discussions of
militarization and national security, and the rise of anti-intellectual
media pundits attacking those who question increasing American
militarization adds pressure to muzzle dissent. Faculty at public
universities often feel these pressures more than their colleagues at
private institutions. There are also natural inclinations to try and
keep elements of workplace dissent internal, but two factors argue
against this public silence. First, most of the ICCAE institutions are
publicly funded universities drawing state taxes; the state citizens
funding these universities deserve to be alerted to concerns over the
ways these programs can damage public institutions. Second, university
administrators have been free to ignore faculty’s harsh, publicly
silent, internal dissent. Keeping dissent internal has not been an
effective resistance tactic.
Inaudible Uproar at UW
In a step moving beyond internal private critiques of
ICCAE programs, multiple professors at the University of Washington have
provided me internal memos sent by professors to administrators. These
memos document the breadth of internal faculty dissent over
administrators’ October 2006 decisions to bring the CIA and other
intelligence agencies to the UW campus.
Initially, the UW administration appeared to
appreciate faculty concerns. In October 2005, David Hodge, UW dean of
Arts and Sciences, met with School of International Studies faculty to
discuss proposals to establish affiliations with U.S. intelligence
agencies, after International Studies faculty wrote the administration,
expressing opposition to any affiliation linking them with the CIA and
other intelligence agencies. This group of faculty wrote that such
developments would “jeopardize the abilities of faculty and students to
gain and maintain foreign research and study permits, visas, and open
access to and unfettered interaction with international research hosts,
partners, and counterpart institutions,” and they worried that any such
relationships would “endanger the safety and security of faculty and
students studying and conducting research abroad as well as their
foreign hosts.” One participant in these meetings told me that the
administration initially acknowledged that there were serious risks that
students and faculty working abroad could lose research opportunities
because of the CIA-linked program on campus, and that these concerns led
the administration initially to decline any affiliation with these
intelligence agency-linked programs.
But these concerns did not derail the administration’s
interest in bringing the Intelligence Community on campus, and the
following year the administration of UW decided to establish the
ICCAE-funded Institute for National Security Education and Research. But
after INSER’s launch, concerned internal memos continued to come from
faculty across the campus. In the past year and a half, letters voicing
strong protest from at least five academic units have been sent by
groups of faculty to deans.
In October 2008, anthropology professors Bettina
Shell-Duncan and Janelle Taylor drafted a critical memo that was voted
on and approved by the anthropology faculty and then sent to Dean
Howard, Dean Cauce, and Provost Wise, raising fears about the damage
INSER could bring to the University:
“As anthropologists, we also have more
specific concerns relating to the nature of our research, which involves
long-term in-depth studies of communities, the majority of which are
located outside the United States. Some of these communities are very
poor, some face repressive governments, and some are on the receiving
end of U.S. projections of military power … our profession’s Code of
Ethics requires first and foremost that we cause no harm to the people
among whom we conduct research.”
Shell-Duncan and Taylor tied discplinary concerns to
anthropology’s core ethical principles and raised apprehensions that
INSER funding could convert the university into a hosting facility for
“military intelligence-gathering efforts.”
They pointed to:
“1) the reports that students are required
to submit to INSER at the end of their studies, and 2) the debriefing
that they are required to undergo upon their return. Although our
faculty have already been asked [to be] academic advisors for students
with INSER funding, we have never been given any information on the
guidelines for the reports, or the nature, scope or purpose of the
debriefing process. This is of particular concern given that National
Security is not an academic field of study but a military and government
effort. Unless and until we are provided with clear and compelling
information that proves otherwise, we must infer that these reports and
debriefings are, in fact, military intelligence-gathering efforts.”
They cited a
2007 report (of which I am a co-author) written by an American Anthropological Association (AAA) commission,
evaluating a variety of engagements between anthropologists and the
military and intelligence agencies. The anthropologists argued that this
AAA report found that while,
“…some forms of engagement with these
agencies might be laudable, the Commission also issued cautions about
situations likely to entail violations of the ethical principles of our
profession. In particular, the members of the Commission expressed
serious concern about ‘a situation in which anthropologists would be
performing fieldwork on behalf of a military or intelligence program,
among a local population, for the purpose of supporting operations on
the ground.’”
Other academic departments wrote the UW administration
expressing concerns. In November 2008, members of the Latin American
Studies division in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies
complained to the administration in a memo that
“in light of the U.S. Intelligence
Community’s extensive track-record of undermining democracies and
involvement in human rights violations in Latin America and elsewhere,
we find it unconscionable that the UW would have formal ties with the
newly created Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI),
let alone involve our students in an exercise of gathering intelligence
information and assist it with its public relations campaign among
children in our local schools. The most recent examples of the U.S.
Intelligence Community’s inexcusable behavior in Latin America are
torture at Guantanamo detention centers, collaboration with the infamous
School of the Americas, the backing of paramilitary forces as part of
the ‘drug war,’ … and support for the failed coup in Venezuela…
“…Some would argue that UW should engage the
Intelligence Community as a method of constructively influencing or
reforming it. To our mind, this argument is naïve and misguided at best.
The training we provide is unlikely to change the deeply entrenched
institutional cultures among the various entities, such as the CIA,
which form a part of ODNI. In effect, then, we would be enabling the
Intelligence Community to be more effective at carrying out their
indefensible activities … We realize that the UW faces a number of
financial constraints, perhaps now more than ever, but the needs for
monies can never justify collaboration with an Intelligence Community,
which is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and
immeasurable human suffering throughout the world.”
Also at UW a group of Southeast Asian Studies Center
faculty and members of the History Department questioned whether the
administration had considered how the presence of INSER on campus would
taint professors and students because, in the words of the group in the
History Department, “The professional bodies of many disciplines and
professional programs have barred members from participating in programs
funded by groups like the CIA due to the ethical conflicts such a
relationship would involve. Did the administration take this into
account in the process of creating INSER? Are there steps taken in the
administration of funds from INSER to prevent faculty from unknowingly
compromising their professional and ethical obligations?”
Among the problems facing the UW administration in
creating INSER was finding an academic structure to administer such a
stigmatized program. Because the social sciences represented hostile
territory, administrators looked to the Information School. But many
Information School faculty weren’t happy about having to house INSER. A
letter signed by a dozen faculty from the International Studies Fund
Group Librarians expressed deep concerns that that housing “a CIA
Officer in Residence” would pollute perceptions of them in ways that
could “damage our ability to serve the [other campus constituencies],”
arguing that their long standing “strategy of impartial professionalism”
across the campus “has enabled us to create collections of such depth
over the years. It is also this professional independence that has in
the past protected us from undue scrutiny by the governments of the
countries that we visit and from which we solicit information sources –
sometimes of the most sensitive nature – for our scholarly
collections.”
While it is encouraging to find UW faculty raising
ethical, historical, and political objections, it’s far from clear that
these private critiques had any measurable effect, precisely because
they remained private.
Today, INSER hosts at least one CIA funded post-doc on
the UW campus. It is unknown how many CIA-linked employees or
CIA-linked students are now on the UW’s campus. We don’t know what all
members of the intelligence agencies on campus are doing, but scholars
who study the history of the agency know that in the past CIA campus
operatives have performed a range of activities that included using
funding fronts to get unwitting social scientists to conduct pieces of
research that were used to construct an interrogation and torture
manual; to establish contacts used to recruit foreign students to
collect intelligence for the CIA; and debriefing of graduate students
upon return from foreign travel of research. We know historically that
the CIA has cultivated relationships with professors in order to recruit
students. When universities import ICCAE programs, they bring this
history with them, and, as students from ICCAE universities travel
abroad, suspicions of CIA activity will travel with them and undermine
the safety and opportunities to work and study abroad for all.
There are many good reasons to keep the CIA off
campus, the most obvious ones stress the reprehensible deeds of the
agency’s past (and present). For me one good reason is that this
Intelligence Community invasion diminishes America’s intelligence
capacity while damaging academia. As the Intelligence Community’s
“institutional culture” seeps into ICCAE universities, we can foresee a
deadening of intellect, weakening American universities and intelligence
capacities as scholars learn to think in increasingly narrow ways,
described by President Eisenhower half a century ago in his farewell
address’s warning that “a government contract becomes virtually a
substitute for intellectual curiosity.”
If the United States wants intelligence reform, it
needs to fund independent scholarship, not narrow the range of discourse
on our campuses by paying cash-strapped universities to house revolving
doors between the academy and the CIA.
Universities need to be places where people can freely
explore ideas, but ICCAE inevitably brings chills to open classrooms.
How long will it take until students at ICCAE universities start to
wonder about who’s reporting on free-flowing discussions in classes?
With cadres of future FBI and CIA employees on campus, those who develop
dissident political critiques will find themselves opting for a choice
between speaking their mind, or keeping silent, or softening harsh
honest critiques. As ICCAE students graduate and begin careers requiring
security clearances, accounts of academic discussions stand to make
their way into intelligence files, as clearance background checks ask
for accounts of known “subversive” acquaintances encountered during
university years.
These are foreseeable consequences. Now, that the
Patriot Act removed legal firewalls prohibiting these forms of political
surveillance, the stage has been set for a dark renaissance of the
fifties to begin.
Ending the Silence
If students, faculty and citizens are concerned about
ICCAE’s impact on our universities, then breaking the silence is the
most effective opposition tactic available. Anyone who wants specific
information on contacts between university administrators and ICCAE
officials and the intelligence community can use state public records
laws and federal Freedom of Information laws to request records. Given
university administrators’ claims that everything is above board, these
records should not be blocked by national security exemptions; if they
are, this would be useful to know. Concerned members of individual
campuses can use these tools to access correspondence and verify claims
by university administrators about the nature of their contact with
ICCAE.
Faculty, staff, students, alumni and community members
concerned about ICCAE’s presence on university campuses should form
consortia online to share information from various campuses and make
common cause. ICCAE has made rapid headway because of the internal
campus-specific, isolated nature of resistance to ICCAE. Something like
an “ICCAE Watch” or “CIA Campus Watch” website could be started by a
faculty member or grad student on an ICCAE campus, providing forums to
collect documents, stories and resistance tactics from across the
country.
Finally, tenured professors on ICCAE campuses, or on
campuses contemplating ICCAE programs, need to use their tenure and
speak out, on the record, in public: the threats presented by these
developments are exactly why tenure exists. If professors like the idea
of bringing the CIA on campus, they can publicly express these views,
but the split between the public and private reactions to ICCAE helped
usher the CIA silently back onto American university campuses. The
intelligence agencies thrive on silence. If this move is to be
countered, academic voices must publicly demand that the CIA and the
Intelligence Community explain themselves and their history in public.
(Credit: Henrik5000 via iStock/Salon)
