Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955 - Hardcover

Diamond, Sigmund

 
9780195053821: Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0195053826 ISBN 13: 9780195053821
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1992

Synopsis

In the early 1950s, a young Harvard professor named Henry Kissinger approached the FBI with alleged evidence of communist subversion among the foreign students of his summer seminar. His evidence was a flyer criticizing the nuclear arms build-up and promoting world peace. At the same time at Yale, young William F. Buckley, Jr., was discovering more than God while writing God and Man at Yale as an undergraduate. He was discovering J. Edgar Hoover. These are just two examples of how ambitious young men used the "special relationship" developing between the FBI and the universities to advance their fledgling careers. Revelations such as these abound in Sigmund Diamond's Compromised Campus, an eye-opening look at the role American intelligence agencies played at some of America's most prestigious universities.
It is often said that in the 1950s, American universities were free of the McCarthyism that pervaded the rest of the nation. Not so, says Diamond. Using previously secret materials newly made available under the Freedom of Information Act, and an impressive amount of information gained from years of research in university and foundation archives, he reveals that despite academia's "official story" of autonomy from the federal government, in fact university administrators, faculty, and students secretly and actively sought close ties with intelligence agencies. Diamond describes the cooperation of Harvard President James B. Conant with intelligence agencies, the institution and operation of Harvard's Russian Research Center, Yale's shadowy "liaison agent" H.B. Fisher, who moved from problems of student drinking to cooperation with the FBI in loyalty-security matters, and the existence of formal and informal relations with the FBI and other intelligence agencies at major universities throughout the country. He calls attention to the cooperation of university presidents--Griswold of Yale, Dodds of Princeton, Wriston of Brown, Sproul of California, among others--with the FBI and state governors on the techniques of blacklisting.
Diamond shows how this interaction between intelligence agencies and American universities has had serious consequences for America ever since--on foreign policy, questions of law and constitutional government, the role of secrecy, separation of public and private activities, and the existence and control of government deceit and lawlessness. Dismissed himself from Harvard in the 1950s by McGeorge Bundy (for refusing to talk to the FBI about former associates), Diamond brings a special immediacy to this revealing study.

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About the Author

Sigmund Diamond is Giddings Professor of Sociology and Professor of History, Emeritus, at Columbia University.

From the Back Cover

In the early 1950s, a young Harvard professor named Henry Kissinger approached the FBI with alleged evidence of communist subversion among the foreign students of his summer seminar. His evidence was a flyer criticizing the nuclear arms build-up and promoting world peace. At the same time at Yale, young William F. Buckley, Jr., was discovering more than God while writing God and Man at Yale as an undergraduate. He was discovering J. Edgar Hoover. These are just two examples of how ambitious young men used the "special relationship" developing between the FBI and the universities to advance their fledgling careers. Revelations such as these abound in Sigmund Diamond's Compromised Campus, an eye-opening look at the role American intelligence agencies played at some of America's most prestigious universities. It is often said that in the 1950s, American universities were free of the McCarthyism that pervaded the rest of the nation. Not so, says Diamond. Using previously secret materials newly made available under the Freedom of Information Act, and an impressive amount of information gained from years of research in university and foundation archives, he reveals that despite academia's official story of autonomy from the federal government, in fact university administrators, faculty, and students secretly and actively sought close ties with intelligence agencies. Diamond describes the cooperation of Harvard President James B. Conant with intelligence agencies, the institution and operation of Harvard's Russian Research Center, Yale's shadowy "liaison agent" H.B. Fisher, who moved from problems of student drinking to cooperation with the FBI in loyalty-security matters, and the existence offormal and informal relations with the FBI and other intelligence agencies at major universities throughout the country. He calls attention to the cooperation of university presidents--Griswold of Yale, Dodds of Princeton, Wriston of Brown, Sproul of California, among others--with the FBI and state governors on the techniques of blacklisting. Diamond shows how this interaction between intelligence agencies and American universities has had serious consequences for America ever since--on foreign policy, questions of law and constitutional government, the role of secrecy, separation of public and private activities, and the existence and control of government deceit and lawlessness. Dismissed himself from Harvard in the 1950s by McGeorge Bundy (for refusing to talk to the FBI about former associates), Diamond brings a special immediacy to this revealing study.

Reviews

A detailed investigation of the extent to which American universities, Harvard and Yale in particular, collaborated with government intelligence agencies in monitoring and suppressing political dissent in the early cold war period. In 1954, Diamond (Sociology and History/Columbia) was fired from Harvard by Dean McGeorge Bundy for failing to show ``complete candor'' about his past association with the Communist Party. The issue resurfaced in 1977 with the publication of Seymour Martin Lipset and David Riesman's Education and Politics at Harvard, which portrayed the university as standing firm against the anticommunist hysteria of the McCarthy period. A long-running controversy ensued when Diamond charged in The New York Review of Books that his experience placed Harvard's integrity on this point in question. Here, Diamond looks beyond his own case to the broader question of how far Harvard and Yale were complicit, despite their official neutrality, in FBI and CIA surveillance and manipulation. The existence is alleged of an ``intelligence-university complex,'' a discreet but active partnership between university authorities and the intelligence agencies. At Harvard, the Russian Research Center was intimately linked with the CIA, Diamond argues, while at both Harvard and Yale the FBI recruited college officials, faculty, and students to inform the agency of any left-tending unorthodoxies in the political views of their fellows. A glittering cast of informants includes Harvard President James B. Conant, Henry Kissinger, and William F. Buckley, Jr. (Buckley is given star billing, with a chapter all to himself describing how he could not find God at Yale, but found J. Edgar Hoover instead). Diamond's evidence is carefully assembled, and much of it comes from the FBI's own files, despite the limitations of the Freedom of Information Act. (The book is interesting for its account of these censorship difficulties alone.) Persuasively argued and thoroughly documented, this is clearly no mere set of unfounded allegations. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Publisher
Oxford University Press
Publication date
1992
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0195053826
ISBN 13 
9780195053821
Binding
Hardcover
Edition number
1
Number of pages
384