A CounterPunch Special Investigation
How the CIA is Welcoming Itself Back Onto American University Campuses
http://counterpunch.com/price04092010.html
Silent Coup
By DAVID PRICE
April 9 - 11, 2010
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.
--
David Price is a member of the Network of Concerned
Anthropologist. He is the author of Anthropological Intelligence:
The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second
World War, published by Duke University Press. He can be reached at
[email protected]
.
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