TUCSON — An academic controversy has revealed a most interesting fact: A significant number of social scientists, especially political scientists, regularly work with the Central Intelligence Agency.
It has long been known that the academia-CIA connection was a staple of the early Cold War. During the 1940s and '50s, the CIA and military intelligence were among the major sources of financial support for America's social scientists. In Europe, the agency covertly supported some of the leading writers and scholars through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, as Frances Stonor Saunders recently documented in her book "The Cultural Cold War."
Such ties supposedly withered during the 1970s, in the aftermath of Vietnam and hearings by the U.S. Senate select committee on intelligence, which revealed extensive CIA misdeeds, including fomenting coups against democratically elected governments, plotting assassinations of foreign leaders and disseminating propaganda. After these revelations, it seemed that no self-respecting academic would go anywhere near the agency.
A recent article in the magazine Lingua Franca, however, reveals that this perception is inaccurate and that the "cloak and gown" connection has flourished in the aftermath of the Cold War. The article states that since 1996, the CIA has made public outreach a "top priority and targets academia in particular. According to experts on U.S. intelligence, the strategy has worked," it says. The article quotes esteemed academics, including Columbia's Robert Jervis, former president-elect of the American Political Science Assn., and Harvard's Joseph S. Nye. Both acknowledge having worked for the CIA. Yale's H. Bradford Westerfield is quoted as saying: "There's a great deal of actually open consultation and there's a lot more semi-open, broadly acknowledged consultation."
What is interesting about the above quote is that it is offered so casually, as if no reasonable person could find fault with the activity. Something is seriously wrong here.
The CIA is not an ordinary government agency; it is an espionage agency and the practices of espionage--which include secrecy, propaganda and deception--are diametrically opposed to those of scholarship. Scholarship is supposed to favor objective analysis and open discussion. The close relationship between intelligence agencies and scholars thus poses a conflict of interest. After all, the CIA has been a key party to many of the international conflicts that academics must study. If political scientists are working for the CIA, how can they function as objective and disinterested scholars?
