Chapter Four: Silent Coup - How the CIA Welcomed Itself Back onto American University Campuses Without Public Protest

Worship of the state has become a secular religion for which the intellectuals serve as priesthood.

— Noam Chomsky

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 Mill’s 1990 book, C.I.A. Off Campus: Building the Movement against Agency Recruitment and Research (Mills 1991). Mills’ book presented tactics for campus activists to resist CIA campus incursions, but it also gave voice to the multiple reasons why so many academics during this period opposed the presence of the CIA on university campuses; reasons that ranged from the recognitions of secrecy’s antithetical relationship to academic freedom and the production of critical knowledge, to political objections to the CIA’s unbridled 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 and shocking revelations of the Church Committee Hearings and other congressional inquiries in the 1970s documenting the CIA’s routine institutional involvement in global and domestic atrocities, it made sense to many in our universities to construct and maintain institutional firewalls between an agency so deeply linked with these actions and educational institutions dedicated to at least promises of free enquiry and truth. But the last dozen years has seen the retirements and deaths of generations of academics who had lived through this history and had been vigilant about keeping the CIA off campus; and with the terror attacks of 9/11 came new campaigns to bring the CIA back onto American campuses.

In post-9/11 America, the Bush administration spun a narrative that was accepted by Congress and the media claiming that one of the reasons that the 9/11 attacks occurred was because the US did not have well trained analysts who understood the Middle East. Rather than acknowledging that shortcomings in US policy and intelligence were related to the extreme narrowness of political perspectives allowed to exist within agencies like CIA, State, and Defense Department, governmental agencies moved to spread their own narrowness of institutional knowledge by exporting the CIA’s dysfunctional institutional culture and groupthink externally to universities.

Henry Giroux’s book, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial Academic Complex, details how shifts in university funding over the past two decades brought increased intrusions by corporate and military forces onto university campuses in ways that transformed the production of knowledge (Giroux 2007). Over the past twenty years, U.S. universities shifted from a reliance on traditional funding sources for research and classroom instruction as both private and public universities welcomed private corporations’ money and external research agendas. This shift in corporatization increased most universities reliance on outside corporate funds and an acquiescence towards external agendas positioned university administrators to see post-9/11 advances by intelligence agencies as just another revenue stream.

After 9/11, intelligence agencies pushed campuses to see the CIA and campus secrecy in a new light, and as traditional funding sources for university research did not keep up with perceived funding needs, military and intelligence agencies launched a well-financed bureaucratic push to gain footholds on university campuses in a soft campaign that largely escaped public notice, though privately on each campus where these intelligence programs nest and reproduce, shock waves of concern, outrage and disapproval quietly internally emerged among faculty and students.

Post-9/11 scholarship programs like the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP) and the Intelligence Community Scholarship Programs (ICSP) now sneak unidentified scholars as secret sharers with undisclosed links to intelligence agencies into university classrooms. A new generation of so called “flagship” programs have taken root on campuses, and with each new flagship our universities are transformed into vessels of the militarized state as academics learn to sublimate their unease about these relationships. 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” (IARPA); both programs share a vision of quietly using existing universities to train present and future intelligence operatives by establishing at least partially non-transparent programs on these campuses that can piggyback onto existing educational programs. Campuses that can learn to see these outsourced programs as nonthreatening to their open educational and research missions are rewarded with a wealth of funds, useful contacts within intelligence agencies for professors and students, and other less tangible benefits.

These new programs are different from the Cold War’s language and area study center funding programs that provided funds for students and faculty to somewhat independently study languages, regions and topics of interest to the American national security state. Cold War language programs like those funded by the 1958 National Defense Education Act, funded things like the study of Russian Language and Soviet culture and history (or later, Latin American language and culture) in ways beneficial to the needs of state without linking scholars to agencies in ways that so obviously limited scholarship. While there were troubling instances where these programs covertly interfered with academic freedom, the extent that these programs funded critical scholarship demonstrates a break with present trends. These past programs created critical scholarship without front loading academics with the intelligence communities institutional world view.

On January 25th, 2010, James O’Keefe and three other individuals were arrested in connection with efforts to wiretap Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in downtown New Orleans. One of the individuals arrested was Mr. Stan Dai, who was arrested a few blocks away from Landrieu’s office in a car with a small radio listening device. Independent journalist Lindsay Beyerstein soon identified Stan Dai as a former Assistant Director of Trinity Washington University’s ICCAE program. The extent of Mr. Dai’s ongoing connections with intelligence agencies remains unclear, but in the summer of 2009 he gave a public talk on the topics of terrorism and torture at a multi-campus “CIA Day” student program in the Junior Statesmen of America’s summer school. Dai’s arrest makes him ICCAE’s reluctant poster child, a status that belies ICCAE supporters routine claims the program is simply another federally funded academic program, essentially no different from funding programs like Fulbright, the National Science Foundation or the Department of Agriculture. This is ludicrous; none of these other federally funded programs openly link scholars with military or intelligence agencies.

After Beyerstein blogged of Dai’s connections to ICCAE, Newsweek interviewed Ann Pauley, Vice President of Trinity Washington University, who confirmed Dai’s work in the ICCAE campus program. Pauley described Trinity’s program as seeking “to expose female and minority students to the kind of work spy agencies do and potentially interest them in becoming intelligence officers.” The publicity surrounding Dai’s arrest was certainly one way of “exposing students to the kind of work spy agencies do.” Pauley assured Newsweek that Dai’s work with ICCAE was only on an administrative level, but Newsweek determined that “online records indicate Dai did interact with high-ranking intelligence personnel” (Newsweek 2010). Dai pled guilty to charges of “entering real property belonging to the United States under false pretenses,” was fined $1,500, and sentenced to two years probation.

It should be no surprise that ICCAE personnel would be arrested in a bungled blackbag operation. The history of American intelligence agencies is full of characters mixed up in harebrained misadventures, and when universities succumb to the economic pressures to bring ICCAE on campus they need to know they are embracing ignoble institutional histories packed with a motley cast of characters like E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Libby and Edwin Wilson. Given the CIA’s well documented history and university administrators’ refusals to acknowledge that there are fundamental differences between intelligence agencies and universities, this state of denial guarantees we can expect to see more connections between ICCAE-linked personnel and all sorts of nefarious activities.

Today’s shift to bringing programs like ICCAE onto American campuses is but one part of the growing acceptance of what anthropologist Catherine Lutz calls “the military normal,” as the American military and intelligence state continues to grow in uninhibited ways that increasingly take over all facets of our culture. It isn’t enough that U.S. military spending makes up 49% of the planet’s military budget: this core militarism reaches into all elements of cultural life until its presence is seen as proper, normal and good. This is how culture works; pastoralist cultures tend to idealize the virtues and imagined personality traits of cattle into countless facets of daily life and religion (it’s no coincidence that the Lord is my shepherd came from semi-nomadic shepherds), insect eaters normalize what to us is grotesque, hunters and collectors value egalitarianism and sharing, collective cultures shun the private, capitalists come to see selfishness, bragging, and greed as virtues, and private gain is valued over public good. That economic cultural values are internalized, viewed as natural virtues is not surprising to anthropologists; so in this anthropological sense we should expect a military economy the likes of which the world has never seen before should spread an acceptance of militarization into all forms of social life. We should expect citizens in such a society to be encouraged to accept as normal conditions where basic medical care, food and education are seen as secondary importance to financing the uncontrolled growth of military spending.

ICCAE is part of larger efforts to coax Americans into seeing intelligence agencies as a normal part of life; as a way to get us to internalize surveillance as a new element of American freedom. None of us are immune from such subtle internalizations. When editing a first draft of an article on ICCAE, Alexander Cockburn pointed out to me how many times I had used the word “community,” in various ways, including seamlessly switching between references to academic and citizen “community” resistance efforts to CIA campus programs and non-ironically referring to the spy agencies as “the intelligence community” — this being the self-christened innocuous phrase of desensitized preference used by a broad range of intelligence agencies ranging from the CIA to the Defense Intelligence Agency. The soft inviting glow of using “community” to refer to spy agencies devoted to anti-democratic means, imperialism, torture, and any-means-necessary is but one small example of how we are all being socialized to accept intelligence agencies intrusions as part of the normal fabric of American life. In the movie, Three Days of the Condor, Mr. Higgins (Cliff Robertson), tells Joe Turner (Robert Redford) that someone within “the community” must be behind the killings that have Turner on the run. Turner repeats Higgins’ phrase back to him, saying “community” with disdain. Higgins clarifies, saying “intelligence field,” and Turner says, “Community! Jesus, you guys are kind to yourselves. Community!” The CIA’s colonialization of America’s consciousness has progressed so well that the words “intelligence community” has taken on a normal soft and natural feel.

But even in the extreme militarization found in America today, it is the public silence surrounding this quiet installation and spread of programs like ICCAE and IARPA on campuses that is extraordinary. Since 2005 ICCAE has more rapidly progressed along a trajectory of bringing the CIA and other intelligence agencies openly to multiple American university campuses than any previous intelligence agency’s intrusion onto American campuses since the Second World War. Yet the program has spread with little public notice or organized multi-campus resistance. 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, as 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 DC-based intelligence agencies made the program financially attractive.

In 2005, the first wave of ICCAE centers were installed at ten university campuses: California State University San Bernardino, Clark Atlanta University, Florida International University, Norfolk State University, Tennessee State University, Trinity University, University of Texas El Paso, University of Texas Pan American, University of Washington, and Wayne State University. Between 2008-2010 another wave of expansion brought ICCAE programs to another eleven 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 intelligence agencies that ICCAE brings to American university campuses. ICCAE quietly brings a smorgasbord of intelligence agencies to campuses with fifteen agencies, such as the National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Homeland Security on our campuses.

Roberto González’s research explores how ICCAE’s university programs are but part of a larger project that also seeks to connect intelligence agencies with American students in high school and even younger. In Militarizing Culture, González notes that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s program plan encourages grantees to “consider coordinating summer camps for junior high students. . .[they] should be at least one week in duration with high energy programs that excite the participants” (González 2010:39). He also describes programs tailored especially for high school students, such as Norfolk State’s “simulation exercise in which faculty asked Nashville-area high schoolers to locate ten simulated ‘weapons of mass destruction’ hidden in the city” and the University of Texas Pan American’s high school summer camp which featured talks “from speakers from intelligence community agencies, such as the CIA and FBI.”  González poses the question: “Couldn’t these young people play a more constructive role in our society if they were aggressively recruited into careers in medicine, engineering, or education” rather than spy work (González 2010:49)?

ICCAE’s stated goals are to develop a “systematic long-term program at universities and colleges to recruit and hire eligible talent for IC 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 [Intelligence Community] 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” (http://www.dni.gov/cae/). In other words, ICCAE seeks to shower fellowships, internships, scholarships and grants on universities willing to adapt their curriculum and campuses to align with the political agenda of American intelligence agencies, and installing corridors connecting ICCAE campuses with intelligence agencies through which students, faculty, students studying abroad and unknown others will pass. These ICCAE sponsored centers have different names at different universities, for example, at the University of Washington, 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 (CAE-NSIS) and Clark Atlantic University’s program is the Center for Academic Excellence in National Security Studies (CAENS).

Even before 2008’s economic downturn, there were decreased traditional funding sources for students and faculty conducting research in university environments — but further reductions in funds exacerbated a funding environment characterized by extremely scarce financial resources. Layoffs of university staff became a common occurrence at many universities. Such scarcity of funds leads scholars to shift the academic questions they are willing to pursue and suspend previous ethical and political concerns about funding sources; and many scholars who are unwilling to set aside ethical and political concerns are keenly aware of institutional pressures to keep their outrage and protests in-house and remain publicly silent.

In 2010, Alumni and professors at historically black colleges and universities wrote me with accounts of the ways that ICCAE and other programs linked to the FBI and CIA are increasingly embedding themselves on these campuses to increase minority recruitment for intelligence agencies. This correspondence shared concerns that Howard University and Miles College figured prominently on the list of new ICCAE institutions. One Howard alumnus wrote me that various efforts to connect the campus with CIA personnel have made Howard “CIA central;” while a Howard professor wrote me about the university’s consortium relationship with Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University connecting the FBI, Homeland Security and the CIA with Howard faculty and students; writing, “these agencies would love to make connections with our students, and the amount of funds they can offer to students without financial means makes it difficult for many to say no.” American intelligence agencies need transformational overhauls, but moving the FBI and CIA onto historically black colleges and universities won’t transform the FBI, it will transform these institutions in ways they aren’t critically considering. With the generational loss of memory of the roles these agencies played in the domestic and international suppression of minority power movements, one wonders if the FBI will try and sponsor a Fred Hampton Intelligence Scholarship designed to recruit students from historically black colleges and universities.

The targeting of minority populations on campuses clarifies systemic problems with intelligence agencies trying to reform themselves. The United States never had anything like a truth and reconciliation commission to sort out past accountabilities for these agencies; instead, it has named the headquarters of our secret police after J. Edgar Hoover himself, embracing the agency’s links to Hoover’s shameful practices. If the FBI and CIA want to use ICCAE as a front to set up shop on our campuses, they must be held publicly accountable for their own institutional history, but they have yet to produce a public history clarifying exactly where they break with past atrocities, and the lack of critical public discourse on ICCAE further reduces the possibility that these campus intelligence centers will bring about needed reforms.

The Washington Post published two articles mentioning ICCAE after the program had quietly been running for a few years, but there has been no critical coverage of these programs in the national press; there certainly has been no mention of the faculty and student dissent that these programs create. Despite the lack of media coverage of student and faculty misgivings over ICCAE programs coming to campuses, some traces of dissent can be found in internet records of faculty senate minutes from various campuses. These records show things like, when Dean Van Reidhead at the University of Texas PA, brought a proposal for ICCAE to establish a center on campus, some faculty and graduate students spoke out against the damages to academic freedom that the program would likely bring. At the senate meeting where this was raised, the 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 (ICCAE).” 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” (UTPA Senate 4-26-06). And at UTPA, as at other ICCAE campuses, administrators noted these concerns and continued with plans to bring intelligence agencies to campus.

The online minutes of the University of Washington Faculty Senate and Faculty Council on Research, record shadows of dissent that are so vaguely referenced they are easily missed. For example, while points raised in debates and discussions in the UW’s senate are generally itemized and characterized in the minutes on other topics, the minutes for the December 4, 2008 meeting publicly gloss over even the nature of the issues raised when Christoph Giebel, acting as a member of the University of Washington’s AAUP Executive Board, submitted a request to the Faculty Senate for information concerning INSER’s contacts with intelligence agencies. These 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,” but what these “good questions” were and the nature of this “tough and serious conversation” were not mentioned in the minutes, as if “good questions” were not important enough to enter into a public record (UW Faculty Senate Minutes, 12/4/08, pp 5). Likewise, the nature of faculty objections to INSER are glossed over in the January 29, 2009 University of Washington Senate minutes which simply reported that: “a number of email communications have come through the faculty senate that reflect a range in attitude towards the INSER program” (UW Faculty Senate Minutes 1/29/09, pp 3).

A significant portion of this faculty “range in attitudes towards the INSER program” could best be characterized as outraged. I have heard from faculty at a dozen of the ICCAE flagship campuses that some form of internal dissent has occurred on each of their campuses, and professors at the University of Washington have sent me documents clarifying the extent of the campus’ anguish over intelligence agencies’ insertion onto their campus; an insertion whose success can best described as a silent coup for the CIA.

The faculty and students’ public silence at ICCAE universities in the face of these developments needs some comment. While some public attitudes towards the CIA changed after 9/11, 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 rightwing media pundits attacking those who question increasing American militarization adds pressure to muzzle vocal dissent on anything framed as a national security matter — 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 such a 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 a very effective tactic; institutions like the CIA don’t want to operate in the sort of sunlight that public scrutiny brings, and these ICCAE programs deserve lots of public scrutiny.

In a healthy step towards moving beyond internal private critiques of ICCAE programs, multiple professors at the University of Washington provided me internal memos sent from professors to administrators. These memos document the form and breadth of internal faculty dissent on this campus over administrators’ October 2006 decisions to bring the CIA and other intelligence agencies on campus. University of Washington professors are not alone in these internal critiques, my contacts with professors at other ICCAE universities finds that similar internally expressed concerns are happening on the other ICCAE campuses.

In 2008, AAUP campus executive board member and history professor, Christoph Giebel led efforts in the University of Washington Faculty Senate to pressure the administration to publicly answer faculty questions about university contacts with ICCAE. The campus attention that Giebel generated triggered a wave of memos from departments to the administration questioning the appropriateness of establishing an ICCAE center on campus. Giebel took his concerns public and he worked hard to try and raise public awareness of these developments. He worked to get local newspaper reporters interested in covering plans to bring the CIA onto campus, but beyond a small piece in a local alternative paper, the local media completely ignored these developments (Spancenthal-Lee 2008)

Initially, the University of Washington’s administration appeared to appreciate the concerns raised by faculty. In October 2005, David Hodge, University of Washington’s Dean of Arts and Sciences met with School of International Studies faculty to discuss proposals to establish affiliations with US intelligence agencies after International Studies faculty wrote the administration expressing opposition to any affiliation linking them with the CIA and other intelligence agencies (though one faculty member reported Hodge was less diplomatic in private). 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 real risks that students and faculty working abroad could lose research opportunities because of negative views of having a CIA-linked program on campus, and that these concerns led the administration initially to not pursue an affiliation with these intelligence agency-linked programs.

But these privately raised concerns did not derail the administration’s interest in bringing intelligence agencies on campus, and the following year the administration decided to establish the new ICCAE funded Institute for National Security Education and Research (INSER) on campus. But even after INSER’s opening, concerned memos continued to come from faculty across the campus. Letters voicing strong protest from at least five academic units were sent by groups of concerned faculty to Deans.

In October 2008 Professors Bettina Shell-Duncan and Janelle Taylor, composed a challenging memo that was approved by the anthropology faculty as a whole, and sent to Dean Howard, Dean Cauce, and Provost Wise, raising concerns about INSER’s presence on campus, and the damage INSER could bring to the University and its students, writing,

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. Recognizing that anthropologists often “study down steep gradients of power” ([Paul] Farmer 2003), 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 to Howard, Cauce & Wise, 10/31/08).

Shell-Duncan & Taylor tied disciplinary concerns to anthropology’s core ethical issues and also raised apprehensions that INSER funding could convert the university into a hosting facility for “military intelligence-gathering efforts.” This memo voiced concerns over reports that INSER personnel would debrief some students completing studies abroad. Specifically, concerns were raised about,

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 (Shell-Duncan to Howard, Cauce & Wise, 10/31/08).

This memo cited a 2007 report written by a commission (of which I was a member, and was a report co-author) charged by then American Anthropological Association President Alan Goodman to critically evaluate a wide variety of engagements between anthropologists and the military and intelligence agencies, referencing this report, the memo 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. This raised profound questions about whether or not such activities could be conducted under the AAA’s Code of Ethics, not to mention the requirements of most human studies review boards.” Among the recommendations reached by the Commission was that “anthropologists must … remain cognizant of the risks engagement entails to populations studied (through information-sharing about fieldwork, applications of knowledge gained from fieldwork, tactical support and operations), to the discipline and their colleagues, and to the broader academic community. The AAA’s Code of Ethics should remain the focal point for discussions of professional ethics” (Shell-Duncan to Howard, Cauce & Wise, 10/31/08).

Professors Shell-Duncan & Taylor concluded by asking the administration for,

a clear and detailed account of the process by which the Institute for National Security Education and Research was formed, and request assurances that this was done in accord with our shared governance procedures. We would like clarification of the role that students are playing in military intelligence gathering, and whether and how that information is made clear to the student or to their academic advisors. We would like clear and detailed information on the nature and requirements of the reports that students are asked to prepare, and information about the dissemination of these reports. And finally, we would like information about the scope, nature and parties involved in the debriefing process. Without disclosure of such information, it is impossible for us to know if we are acting within the scope of the Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association (Shell-Duncan to Howard, Cauce & Wise, 10/31/08).

This record finds the Anthropology Department doing all they could to express concerns and to press for answers. A public accounting of the processes leading to the establishment of INSER has yet to occur; the silence of administrators over the details of how these ICCAE programs come to campuses is not unique to the University of Washington. Sober questions about the roles that students will play in military intelligence gathering also remain unanswered, as do questions of what information about links or agreements for future employment between students and intelligence agencies is being disclosed to academic advisors.

Other academic departments wrote the 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 US 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 US 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,” the shooting down of a civilian aircraft in Peru, 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. It is our position that until the ODNI and the various sectors of the Intelligence Community which it oversees demonstrate a clear break from their anti-democratic practices, then the UW, as a global leader, should not be partnered with it. 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 (Jonathan Warren, Chair of Latin American Studies, to Secretary Killian, Vice Provost Hason, Dean Cauce and Dean Howard 11/25/08).

This argument voiced historical concerns that the CIA’s unapologetic role in human rights violations, torture, assassination, and thuggish policies supporting brutal dictators throughout the third world, but it is the reference in the closing paragraph acknowledging that the University of Washington “faces a number of financial constraints” that touches on university administrator’s motivation for embracing the CIA in the face of faculty unease in ways that undermines principles of shared governance.

A letter from a broad group of faculty from the Southeast Asian Studies Center anchored its concerns in the CIA’s dark history. They wrote that their,

particular concerns are related to the history of US relations with Southeast Asia [(SEA)], and fall into two inter-related categories:

Firstly, the particular history of intelligence operations in SEA and the ongoing legacies of these interventions in the countries, and among the communities that we interact with, in our study aboard and our research activities, makes us particularly aware of how any apparent connection with the US intelligence apparatus could be perceived . We have study aboard programs in 5 countries: Indonesia, Viet Nam, Thailand, Cambodia and Philippines. All of these countries have witnessed political manipulations and instances of violence directly related to US intelligence agency activities: the beginnings were in Indonesia in the 1950s and 1960s, and in the Philippines from the mid 1950s through the 1970s, under Cold War doctrines. Covert activities in Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia are well known, due to the public scrutiny that resulted from the very overt nature of much of the American war in Indochina. While these may seem to be episodes of the past, memories and legacies are still powerful forces in those countries, and our partners remain particularly sensitive to associations with intelligence activities.

These histories make us particularly concerned that professional standards of disclosure and transparency are maintained in our relationships with our partner institutions. Such transparency is not possible when we may be unwittingly including IC [e.g. Intelligence Community] Scholars in our programs. As we try to work through these histories, we do so in the expectation that the ethics of our profession guide us in our international activities in relation to our counterparts. As we consider our study abroad programs, some of which now require home-stays, we are most concerned about not only the safety and security of our students, but of our hosts and host institutions, who may be seriously damaged by any association with students funded under this program.

In short, having INSER money directly tied to UW programs and students, will taint our reputation, and will endanger the viability of our research, and will endanger us and our counterparts. Like our Jackson School colleagues, we request that the University address our concerns in a public forum (Judith Henchy & Christoph Giebel, to UW Administration, Dec. 2008).

But the administration’s actions appeared less concerned with the damage to the university’s reputation, the viability of research and endangerments of researchers and subjects than it was with the funding and opportunities that ICCAE provided.

Members of the History Department questioned whether the administration had considered how the presence of INSER on campus would taint professors and students, because, “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?” (Purnima Dhavan & Adam Warren to Chair Lovell undated letter). Given the lack of transparency surrounding decisions to establish INSER on campus and that ICCAE programs attract secondary secretive funding through programs like PRISP or ICSP, the odds of compromising these professional obligations increase. Given this lack of transparency, many of these transgressions will be unwitting and unknown to many involved.

Among the problems facing the University of Washington’s administration in creating INSER was to find an existing academic structure where they could park such a stigmatized program; because the social sciences represented hostile territory, administrators looked to the Information School (I-School). But librarian and Information School faculty weren’t happy about having to house INSER.

International Studies Fund Group Librarians privately raised multiple concerns; concerns about transparency, about developing a program outside the normal standards of peer review, and the damage they would receive from having INSER housed within their administrative structure, concerns that this relationship would naturally generate suspicions that the I-School was facilitating intelligence “data mining and exploitation.” 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. We feel that the presence of the INSER program, not just on campus, but in the very professional school that purports to train librarians in the ethics of their mission, is damaging to our credibility as independent professionals serving the scholarly endeavor. Indeed, in some instances, it could endanger our personal safety and liberty as we travel on behalf of the Libraries to certain areas of the world where the US foreign policy apparatus that INSER represents is not perceived as a benign force (Judith Henchy, Michael Beggins et al. to Bill Jordan & Tim Jewel, undated memo).

Many I-School faculty were unhappy with having to manage such a problematic program and the prospect of being left holding the bag when something goes wrong with one of INSER’s intelligence agency partners was not something anyone in the I-School wanted to contemplate.

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Taken as a whole, this correspondence of professorial dissent produces a broad critique of the damaging impacts that INSER brings to the University of Washington. While some critics of the CIA’s presence on campus will be encouraged to find faculty privately pushing administrators to avoid such pitfalls for ethical, historical, political and very practical reasons; but it’s not clear that these private critiques really mattered precisely because they remained so private. It is striking that activists at the University of Washington have organized protests over their Provost Phyllis Wise’s, membership on Nike’s board, yet public campaigns against the administration’s invitation to the CIA remain publicly dormant.

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 University of Washington’s campus. We don’t know what all members of the so called “intelligence community” on campus are doing, but those scholars who study the history of the agency know that in the past CIA campus operatives have performed a range of activities, 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, these contacts have been used to recruit foreign students to collect intelligence for the CIA, they’ve debriefed graduate students upon return from foreign travel, we know the CIA has cultivated relationships with professors in order to recruit students (Mills 1991; Price 2007). When universities bring IACCE programs to their campus, they are bringing this history with them, and as students from IACCE universities travel abroad, suspicions of CIA activity will travel with them and undermine the safety and opportunities to work and study abroad for all.

ICCAE campus administrators are quick to mouth smooth assurances that these are simply government funded academic programs, akin to National Science Foundation, or Fulbright, or other governmental programs, they are telling half-truths; half-truths that do not confront the history of the very agencies they seek to embed in our classrooms and that ignore how ICCAE transforms the universities that host it.

Taking Stock and Breaking the Silence

University of Washington faculty unease about ICCAE programs is not an anomaly; it isn’t the only institution with apprehensions about intelligence agencies’ rapid move into education; professors and staff at other ICCAE schools have privately voiced these same concerns. These concerns move beyond universities. I’ve spoken with staff and administrators at international education NGO’s who are so troubled by the rapid advances of intelligence agencies into new flagship programs, that they are considering switching careers.

Conservative ideologues like to argue that academics do not want the CIA on campus because of claimed un-American tendencies; such claims make good scarecrows to frighten away the uninformed, but these claims are even sillier than claims that ICCAE is just like any other governmental funded academic program. While the American public is expected to have little historical memory of the specifics of the CIA’s history, academics in disciplines like anthropology, sociology, political science and history know this history too well to be easily distracted by hasty jingoistic arguments that will not confront this history.

There are lots of good reasons to keep the CIA off of our campuses, the most obvious ones stress the reprehensible deeds of the agency’s past (and present), and while not denying these powerful arguments, for me the best reason is that this move further diminishes America’s intelligence capacity while damaging academia. ICCAE, like the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, the Intelligence Community Scholars Program or the Minerva Consortium strives to expand the knowledge of military and intelligence agencies by moving operations onto university campuses, but this will not be their primary impact. The primary impact will be to transform segments of universities so that they learn to limit themselves and to adapt to the cultures of the intelligence agencies, and as these processes occur, our intelligence capacity, and scholarship, will diminish and narrow. ICCAE mimics the Soviet model of centralized, state directed scholarship, and this tactic will stifle the independent development of the braches of scholarship it touches as scholars follow those who can learn to think in the ways desired by the CIA and ICCAE. The memo from the Latin American Studies got half of this point in observing that, “the training we provide is unlikely to change the deeply entrenched institutional cultures among the various entities, such as the CIA,” if one adds to this a dose of institutional back-flow we can see how this “entrenched institutional culture” overflows into the universities that house ICCAE programs and learn to chase their funds. These dynamics will weaken American universities and our intelligence capacities, as scholars learn to think in increasingly narrow ways.

If the United States wants intelligence reform, it needs to fund independent scholarship: not narrow down the range of discourse on our campuses by paying cash-strapped universities to house revolving doors between the academy and the CIA. If the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security and the Pentagon want to change the way they approach problems they should encourage Congress to fund research and education on American university campuses without restrictions (as they did with significant self-interested returns throughout the Cold War); and they should resist the urge to spread their tendrils — spreading the institutional limits and problems that they are trying to eliminate — onto American campuses.

But there are other damages that will follow intelligence agencies’ presence on campus. Bringing intelligence agencies onto campuses damages academic inquiry and threatens academic freedom. In my book on McCarthyism’s impact on anthropology (Threatening Anthropology) I used tens of thousands of FOIA documents to show how increased presence of intelligence operatives and informers on American campuses wounded the development of anthropology as endless dossiers were compiled on academics disagreeing with US policies on war, race, class, gender etc. This is one of the things that intelligence agencies do: they collect intelligence on those they come in contact with, and especially those they see as different. Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens’ classic book, The Academic Mind: Social Scientists in a Time of Crisis, is full of examples of how intelligence agencies on campuses deadened academic freedom in the 1950s. In one example, a professor tried to caution a student that his comments in class were close to following “the Communist Pravda line,” and the professor tried to warn the student to be more careful. But the student’s response was:

“In the university anything goes, any idea — just so it’s within the bounds of propriety and decency.” At the end of the session [the student] announced that he knew the incident would be reported since there were unknown intelligence men in the class. I felt that I ought to report this incident, but I felt like a rat. A friend who is also teaching in the military told me to cover myself. I phoned the next day to the civilian security man, and explained the situation to him. I later learned that the F.B.I. had already heard most of the conversation. I didn’t have to repeat the story to them. They had already received reports of the incident (Lazarsfeld & Thielens 1958:210).

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 question such things as the wisdom of American drug policies, immigration policies and spending on military and intelligence programs will find themselves choosing between silence, softening what might have been harsh honest critiques, or speaking their mind. Academic enquiry suffers in such environments. As ICCAE students graduate and begin careers at the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies requiring security clearances, accounts of all sorts of academic discussions stand to make their way into intelligence files as clearance background checks comb through records on any known “subversive” acquaintances these individuals encountered during their university years.

These problems are not intended outcomes of ICCAE bringing the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security etc. on campus; but as unintended consequences, these problems will emerge. The history of how this worked in the past is pretty clear, and these problems are why legislation prohibiting forms of domestic political surveillance (later undone with the Patriot Act) were written. It’s easy to see this past as prologue, and now that the Patriot Act removed vital legal firewalls prohibiting these forms of domestic political surveillance, the stage has been set for a dark renaissance to begin.

Because ICCAE’s successful embedment on campuses depends on institutional memory-loss, silence and a lack of student and faculty resistance, academics opposed to these developments can draw on their professional strengths to break the silence and fill the sizable gaps in the public’s memory of the CIA’s institutional history. Historians and political scientists can develop curriculum drawing on scholarly materials and primary sources to teach students the unsanitized details of the CIA’s history. If faculty remain in control of the curriculum, then documenting this past may be one of the best ways to defend the present.

The CIA and other intelligence agencies have always relied on secrecy for their operations, and with the public silence over ICCAE’s intelligence-gateway onto our campus communities; this silence has been a real boon for the CIA’s quiet entrance onto our campuses. If students, faculty and citizens are concerned about ICCAE’s impact on our universities, then breaking the silence is the simplest and most effective tactic available.

Anyone who wants specific information on contacts between university administrators and ICCAE officials or other members of intelligence agencies can use state public records laws and the federal Freedom of Information Act to request these records. Given university administrators’ claims that everything is above board, these records should not be blocked by national security exemptions, and if they are, this would be important information. In most states, public records laws can be used to access the correspondence of public employees. 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 consortiums online to share information from various campuses and make common cause. ICCAE has made significant and rapid headway because of the internal and 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. Philip Zwerling has written about how a group of undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas Pan American organized themselves to protest the CIA’s campus presence, and to raise awareness (Zwerling 2009:256-257). Other campuses resisting the CIA’s campus expansion need to open channels of communication with each other.

Finally, tenured professors on campuses with ICCAE programs, or on campuses contemplating ICCAE programs, need to use their tenure and speak out, on the record, in public: the threats presented by these sorts of developments are exactly why tenure exists. If professors like the idea of bringing the CIA on campus (they need to read more about the history of the agency…), fine, they have the right to publicly express these views, but the split between the strongly voiced internal dissent while remaining publicly silent has helped usher the CIA silently back onto American university campuses, and if this move is to be countered, it must be done publicly with academic voices demanding that the CIA and other members of intelligence agencies explain them self and their history in public.

The intelligence community thrives on silence; and the only way for academicians to challenge the threats to academic independence and integrity that ICCAE presents is for tenured professors to speak out and raise their concerns in public.