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

Diamond, Sigmund [David Sacks Association]

ISBN 10: 0195053826 / ISBN 13: 9780195053821

Published by Oxford University Press, 1992

About this Item

SIGNED and warmly inscribed by the author to David and Eleanor Sacks. David was a noted British Historian at Reed College in Portland, Oregon and a longtime personal friend of 'Sig'. First Printing with complete number line. ix, 371pp. 8vo, sewn binding in blue paper over boards backed in red cloth with gilt stamped spine lettering. Foxing to top edge with a few spots to the fore edge, a bit thumbed, text unmarked with sound and square binding; DJ clean and bright with a small bline imprint to the spin eand some trivial rubbing to the tips. 'A remarkable book, not only for what is said but for how and by whom it is said. Sigmund Diamond begins with his own experience as a Ph.D. from Harvard, where, in 1954, he was withdrawn from consideration for an administrative position due to alleged past associations with the Communist party. Twenty-three years later, in the New York Review of Books, Diamond excoriated Education and Politics at Har-vard, by Seymour Martin Lipset and David Riesman, for the authors' casual exoneration of Harvard's behavior during the McCarthy era. Diamond recalled that Harvard dean McGeorge Bundy had offered to intercede in his case, but only if Diamond would agree to name his former political associates. In short, he was asked to become an FBI informer. How many others, Diamond wondered, had been put into similar po-sitions, at Harvard and elsewhere? What did his own experience suggest about university complicity with government security agencies such as the FBI and the CIA? In his current study the author takes us step by step through his own efforts to uncover at least some truths (if not 'the truth'). He focuses primarily on Harvard and Yale, in order to trace in some detail their long decades of covert cooperation. . Diamond's research makes Buckley's charges of 'ultra-liberalism' in *God and Man at Yale* look like a well-calculated deception.' (Paul Buhle review in 'History of Education Quarterly'.).

Seller Inventory # 513807

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication Date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195053826
• ISBN 13: 9780195053821
• Binding: Hardcover with Dust Jacket
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: VERY GOOD
• Dust Jacket Condition: NEAR FINE
• Weight: 35 ounces
• Signed: Signed
• Seller catalogs:
  • History

About this title

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.

About the Author

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