Intelligence agencies and the universities: Further implications of the thesis advanced by sigmund diamond inCompromised Campus

Abstract

Compromised Campus is a study of the collaborative relationship existing in the United States between universities, philanthropic foundations and governmental intelligence agencies such as the F.B.I., O.S.S., C.I.A., National Security Council and State Department. Professor Diamond focuses his research on Harvard and Yale during the years between 1945 and 1955, but his findings extend beyond that time period and those specific cases; they apply to the university system as a whole. He shows that the co-operative relations between universities, foundations and intelligence agencies were not a ColdWar aberration, but part of an ongoing working relationship. The hysteria associated with cold-war anti-communism--and, inter alia, with Senator Joseph McCarthy's attack on Communists and homosexuals in universities and the State Department--merely served to facilitate and enhance the willingness of university personnel to accept F.B.L surveillance. In one important respect Harvard and Yale were special cases because of the role they played in staffing the O.S.S., C.I.A., N.S.C. and State Department with their graduates. Those particular inter-institutional connections have long been an American tradition and have been part of the class culture of the New England establishment. Historically, the F.B.I. was not part of that class's culture, recruiting its agents from largely Catholic universities. Diamond's data show how the exigencies of the Cold War and Senator McCarthy's inquisitions led to a new spirit of covert cooperation between Harvard, Yale and the F.B.I., and suggest how this pattern of cooperation became characteristic of the American university system. During that period procedural codes and operating principles governing the relations between universities and intelligence agencies were formalized. Diamond's in-depth and fully documented case studies are valuable both because they describe the rules of inter-institutional codes of etiquette and