[News] How the CIA is Welcoming Itself Back Onto American University Campuses

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/price04092010.html
April 9 - 11, 2010


A CounterPunch Special Investigation


How the CIA is Welcoming Itself Back Onto American University Campuses


Silent Coup

By DAVID PRICE

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, 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0896084035/counterpunchmaga>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, 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594514232/counterpunchmaga>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 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/price03122005.html>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 
<http://www.aaanet.org/pdf/upload/FINAL_Report_Complete.pdf>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 
<http://concerned.anthropologists.googlepages.com/home>Network 
of Concerned Anthropologist.  He is the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0822342375/counterpunchmaga>Anthropological 
Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of 
American Anthropology in the Second World War, 
published by Duke University Press. He can be 
reached at <mailto:dprice at stmartin.edu>dprice at stmartin.edu




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