Ramparts, October 1969
Sinews of Empire
by David Horowitz
Following the student seizure
of Harvard's University Hall last spring, Time magazine reported that
Harvard Dean Franklin L. Ford "emphasized that continued rifling of
University files could have compromised virtually the entire faculty."
This mind-boggling admission (offered in defense of the swift unleashing of
police) is but one measure of how far academia has fallen from the ideal of
open, critical, independent scholarship.
The universities were once
thought to constitute a vital, independent, countervailing estate, but the
modern university has been converted into an Office of External Research for
the State Department, the Pentagon and the international corporations. The
postwar takeover of the university was accomplished with less finesse and
reserve than a corporate conglomerate customarily shows a newly acquired
subsidiary, and it is symbolic that the new management team that was to
reorganize the university from "within" was drawn largely from the
unlikely and forbidding ranks of the crack American World War II intelligence
arm, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services).
The university is
proverbially the most conservative of institutions - tradition-bound, unable to
respond and adapt to changing times. But under the postwar tutelage of its
powerful outside mentors, entirely new academic fields of social and political
science have been created, which cut effortlessly across traditional academic
lines and prerogatives that have so hampered innovations in, for example, black
studies. These new international policy disciplines and "area
studies" (e.g., Asian Studies) were provided with an avalanche of
facilities - buildings, libraries, computer technology. Staffs and faculties
were assembled, granted unprecedented autonomy and exalted in one jump to a
kind of penthouse status in the academic hierarchy. They were provided freedom
and leverage by abundant outside financing. With all of this backing, they
quickly became the most powerful influence on the old horse-and-buggy
departments, whose disciplines and concepts of scholarship began to follow the
winning model set before them.
Thus the experts in
international affairs, the new
The academic Genesis of the
new professionalism is significant not only for what it reveals about the
university, but for what it shows about the institutional Creators. The details
of this history provide a unique insight into the operations of these
institutions of power and their personnel, interests and requirements. For here
they were knitting the sinews of empire - the research, the civil servants, the
technicians, the ideology, the whole fabric which
binds together the imperial whole and reveals the structure of empire itself.
The second world war, and in
its aftermath the collapse of the French, Dutch, German and Japanese empires,
opened the way for a new global American imperium
which required a vast new "service" and policy-oriented intellectual
infrastructure -- the kind for which England was famous, but which America
lacked. Organizations like the foundation-financed Council on Foreign
Relations, a key ruling class policy organization which had come into
prominence during the war, served as the long-range planning bodies for foreign
policy. What was needed now was a reservoir of information and talent at the
intermediate levels: the technicians and middle management of empire.
During the war itself,
intellectuals could be mobilized directly into government. Academia naturally
put itself at the service of
This transition from
extraordinary war mobilization to permanent academic function was engineered
not by the military or the scholars, however, but by the foundations, as is
made clear in a U.S. Office of Education report on Language and
It must
be noted that the significance of the money granted is out of all proportion to
the amounts involved since most universities would have no center program
had they not been subsidized. Our individual inventories indicate clearly the
lack of enthusiasm as well as of cash on the part of most college
administrations for such programs. [emphasis
added]
The significance of
foundation grants today, 25 years after the launching of the first programs, is
as great as ever. In 11 out of the 12 top universities with institutes of
international studies, a single foundation, Ford, is the principal source of
funds. Affiliated with the institutes at
To be sure, there were always
scholars willing to play a role in the development of the international studies
programs. And there was no compulsion - a professor is always free to undertake
any project that somebody is willing to pay for. There are excellent scholars
of all stripes and persuasions, capable of forming all kinds of programs. Only
some get to do so. And it certainly helps if the big foundations happen to
share your interests - or you theirs. In the control of scholarship by wealth,
it is neither necessary nor desirable that professors hold a certain
orientation because they receive a grant. The important thing is that they
receive the grant because they hold the orientation. (Exceptions in the case of
isolated radical individuals, of course, do nothing to counter the momentum and
direction imparted by vast funding programs to a whole profession or
discipline.)
Viewed in the abstract, the
academic objections which were raised against the "area studies"
concept (i.e. the integration of several disciplines to illuminate a particular
geographical area) would seem insuperable (as least as insuperable as the
objections to autonomous black studies programs, and in many ways parallel).
The area program would override the academic departments. It would, it was
maintained, produce not scholars, but dilettantes. Who would be qualified to
run such programs, to set and maintain standards? Area research would become
the refuge of the incapable and incompetent.
Beyond that
were the hard political objections.
Perpetual competition for students, courses, influence and money already
existed within the university. A new overlapping department would be a
formidable competitor and would therefore naturally be resisted by the existing
departments. All these arguments and forces did come into play when the
international studies programs were first being sponsored by the foundations,
but all of them amounted to the merest whiffle of
wind. In effect, academia's most sacred sanctuaries were invaded, its most
honored shibboleths forsworn, its most rigid bureaucratic rules and
"professional" standards circumvented and contravened without a
finger of opposition being lifted. All it took was money, prestige, access to strategic
personnel and collusion with those in the highest reaches of the academic
administrations. As for the professors, they went along like sheep.
The first major international
studies center was
In 1960, the School issued a
pamphlet entitled Employment Opportunities for Students Trained in
International Affairs. The first such opportunity described was the Central
Intelligence Agency, the second the State Department, the third AID, the fourth
the U.S. Information Agency, the fifth the National Security Agency, and then
corporations such as the Bank of America, the Chase Manhattan Bank, the First
National City Bank, Mobil Oil, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and so forth.
Finally, the U.N. and other civic, cultural and international agencies were
mentioned. It was no surprise, then, when in 1968 the director of the School,
Andrew Cordier (a consultant to the State Department
and Ford Foundation), revealed that 40 percent of the School's graduates go
directly into government service and 20-30 percent into "international
banking and business."
Since its inception, the real
substance of the School has been in its new affiliated area institutes, the
first of which was the Russian Institute. Discussions about the Institute had
been initiated by Geroid T. Robinson, the head of the
OSS Research and Analysis Branch, USSR Division, who was to become the Russian
Institute's first director. In 1945 the Rockefeller Foundation made a five-year
starter grant of $1,250,000. Joseph Willits, the Rockefeller Foundation's
director of Social Sciences who disbursed the funds was, like Geroid Robinson and Schuyler Wallace, a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), as were of course David, Nelson and John D.
Rockefeller themselves.
With financing assured, the
Institute's staff was appointed. Most important was Philip E. Mosely, who succeeded Robinson as director in 1951. Also a
member of the CFR (he later became its director of studies),
Mosely was a former State Department officer. Of the
entire five-man steering staff of the Russian Institute, only Geroid Robinson had had any prior connection with Columbia
University, but four had been associated with the OSS or the State Department,
three were in the CFR, and three were members of the upper-class Century club
(as were Schuyler Wallace and Allen Dulles, the OSS veteran who went on to head
the CIA). Such are the basic credentials of the new academic discipline.
The foundations not only
provided funds for the staff salaries, libraries and physical facilities of
these centers and institutes, but financed the students and trainees as well.
Thus in 1947 the Rockefeller Foundation chipped in $75,000 worth of
postgraduate fellowships for the Russian Institute. This was followed by
$100,000 from the Carnegie Corporation for less advanced students. From 1947
through 1953, 140 Carnegie grants were made to 116 students of the Institute
who were also eligible for regular
Prime importance was given to
the influential propagation of ideas - in short, publication. "It appeared
to the staff urgently necessary," the official history reports, "that
the most valuable of the Institute's research results be guaranteed publication
in spite of soaring costs and of shrinking markets for high-priced scholarly
books." How many scholars have wished likewise! But the Institute had the
angels on its side, and thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation it was able to set
up a "revolving publication fund" to subsidize Institute books,
ensuring their publication and widespread academic distribution.
Similarly, Institute
academics had easy access to such prestigious ruling class publications as the
Council on Foreign Relations' influential magazine, Foreign Affairs.
They had funds for their own scholarly journals which quickly became leaders
and opinion makers in what was an open field. They had access to the leading
publications of the various older disciplines, which were usually controlled by
academic politicians of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) or the other
foundation-financed academic "steering committees." Thus the
successive Russian Institute heads, Geroid Robinson
and Philip Mosely, both served on the original World
Areas Research Committee of the SSRC. Mosely was also
chairman of the Joint Committee on Slavic Studies of the SSRC and the American
Council of Learned Societies. Finally, they had access to the university
presses, which, like the other instruments of organized influence in the
university community, are controlled by the administrative foundation-oriented
elite. So, for example, Schuyler Wallace was not only director of
All this served to create an
intellectual juggernaut of unrivaled power in its field. In 1964, the current
director of the Russian Institute boasted that its 500 alumni constituted the
majority of all American experts in the Soviet field. By force of its example,
by the direct influence of its personnel and by the enabling support of the
CFR-foundation power elite, the Institute was able to dominate the field of
Russian affairs both in the academic world and in the sphere of government
policy.
The Russian Institute was the
most important of the many influential institutes in
As the American empire and
its problems expanded, so the
A remarkable team spirit
prevails among the administrations of the School, the foundations and the
government. This was neatly illustrated in a letter liberated during the Spring 1968
Dean Cordier reports to me that he has discussed with you the
possible financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation for a research
project to be undertaken by Mr. Biar Tie Khonw, a former high official in the Indonesian government.
We have been informed by knowledgeable people in the Department of State, by
Mr. Slater of the Ford Foundation, and others, that Mr. Khonw
is very well qualified to contribute to the restoration of economic order and
stability in
Yes. But can he teach?
As in the university system
generally, the "lead system" played a central role in the creation of
the international studies centers. The centers were concentrated for maximum
effectiveness at a few "leading" universities from which their
influence would radiate to others. Of the 191 centers listed by the State Department,
more than half cluster around 12 institutions. Clearly Harvard, the Pentagon of
America's academic legions, would have to be a keystone in the structure. And
indeed the creation of the Russian Research Center there in 1947, and of the
inclusive Center for International Affairs a decade later, reveals even more
graphically than the prototypical case of Columbia the nexus of power in the
field.
The initiative for Harvard's
So in the spring of 1947,
Gardner and the Carnegie staff became actively concerned with the development
of a Russian studies program. At first they were thinking of an
inter-university organization, with Clyde Kluckhohn
of Harvard (formerly of the
During the early autumn of
1947, informal discussions were undertaken between Gardner and select members
of the Harvard faculty. Then in October, two meetings were held between
Gardner, the selected faculty members, the provost of Harvard, and Charles Dollard of the Carnegie Corporation. The provost then
consulted with the president, and "Harvard" agreed to accept the
Carnegie invitation to organize its program. In mid-October, Kluckhohn was indeed asked to serve as director and the
Center was underway, powered by a Carnegie Corporation munificence of $750,000
to be doled out at a rate of $150,000 per year - a five-year plan which was
renewed in 1953. (Eventually this financing was taken over by the Ford
Foundation.)
Despite all this largesse,
the staff quickly learned new ways to make a living. In 1949, they began a
project on the Soviet Social System, known more familiarly as the Refugee
Interview Project, which involved intensive interviewing of Soviet refugees and
was financed by the intriguingly named Human Resources Research Institute of
the U.S. Air Force. In one stroke it quadrupled the Center's 1950 income, while
providing a grateful Defense Department with information that it would normally
expect from the CIA.
The Center itself is
prevented, by Harvard decorum, from accepting contracts involving classified
materials, but individual staff members are not (a nice distinction - for once
very academic). In addition to frequenting lectures at the National Army, Navy,
Air and
In this manner the Center
studied (as the original
A liberated document from
Harvard titled "The Nature and Objectives of the Center for International
Studies" describes the initial impetus: "In the summer of
1950, MIT which has been engaged for some years in research on behalf of the
U.S. military establishment was asked by the civilian wing of the government to
put together a team of the best research minds available to work intensively
for three or four months on how to penetrate the Iron Curtain with ideas."
Out of this scholarly initiative developed a permanent Center at MIT which
rapidly grew in prestige.
MIT's Advisory Board on
Soviet Bloc Studies, for example, was composed of these four academic
luminaries: Charles Bohlen of the State
Department, Allen Dulles of the CIA, Philip E. Mosely
of Columbia's Russian Institute and Leslie G. Stevens, a retired vice admiral
of the U.S. Navy.
If the MIT Center seemed to
carry to their logical conclusion the on-campus extension programs of the State
Department and the CIA, that was perhaps because it was set up directly with
CIA funds under the guiding hand of Professor W.W. Rostow,
former OSS officer and later director of the State Department's Policy Planning
Staff under Kennedy and Johnson. The Center's first director, Max Millikan, was appointed in 1952 after a stint as assistant
director of the CIA. Carnegie and Rockefeller joined in the funding, which by
now, as in so many other cases, has passed on to Ford.
It wasn't until 1957 that
Harvard got its own full-fledged Center for International Affairs. According to
liberated documents, the Center was conceived as "an extension and
development" of the Defense Studies Seminar whose objective was "to
provide training for civilians who might later be involved in the formation of
defense policy" and which was funded by the Ford Foundation, and then
Carnegie.
The
McGeorge Bundy, who originally organized the Center, went on
to become the overseer of JFK's national security
policy. Bundy later left the White House to become head of the Ford Foundation,
his key White House post being filled by the
In university service to the
empire, the grimier field work is often left to unprestigious
social climbers like
Hannah began his career in
what might aptly be termed obscurity - as a specialist in poultry husbandry.
After rising rapidly to the position of managing agent of the Federal
Hatcheries Coordinating Committee in
Seeing the wave of the
future, Hannah made
MSU makes it clear that a
university's external liaisons are not merely peripheral, isolated affairs.
Hannah himself proclaims: "...we are trying to create a general
environment and an international dimension which will permeate all relevant
segments of the university over the years ahead." A 1965 report from
Education and World Affairs concurs: "MSU's
international involvement is widespread, taking in [sic] almost every college
and department: it has stimulated new areas of concern for the faculty,
changed the nature of the faculty over the years, and altered the education of
their primary charges, the students."
Meanwhile MSU, having learned
the ropes in
No one finds university
independence a more pleasant joke than the director of the CIA himself, Admiral
William Raborn:
In
actual numbers we could easily staff the faculty of a university with our
experts. In a way we do. Many of those who leave us join the faculties of
universities and colleges. Some of our personnel take a leave of absence to
teach and renew their contacts in the academic world. I suppose this is only
fair; our energetic recruiting effort not only looks for the best young
graduate students we can find, but also picks up a few professors from time to
time.
It should be noted in passing
that the congeniality of foundation-dominated scholarship to the CIA reflects
the harmony of interest between the upper-class captains of the CIA and the
upper-class trustees of the great foundations. The interconnections are too
extensive to be recounted here, but the Bundy brothers (William, CIA; McGeorge, Ford) and Chadbourne Gilpatric,
Of course turning professors
into CIA agents is not the most common way in which scholarship is made to
serve the international status quo. It is not a matter of giving professors
secret instructions to falsify research results in the dead of night, but
simply of determining what questions they will study. That is where the Ford
Foundation comes in. So, for example, with part of the $2 million Ford grant
that launched the
Occasionally there is an
impotent attempt to impart integrity to these institutes, such as the
"guidelines" established in response to student protests at
The inescapable reality is
that so long as discretion over the vast majority of research funds and all
innovative financing remains outside the university community, it is fatuous to
speak of disinterested scholarship or anything remotely resembling what is
commonly understood as an academic enterprise. This implication is seldom
realized, because the monopoly is so complete that the very possibility of any
alternative orientation is not permitted to arise for serious consideration. To
appreciate the limits placed on institutionalized efforts to establish an
alternative perspective in international studies in the academic world, one
must turn to the one independent, critical center that managed to sustain
itself in the postwar period, only to be crushed by a power so potent and
ubiquitous in the structure of higher learning as to be virtually invisible to
academic eyes.
One of the oldest programs of
inter-American studies in the
In 1960, the Report
dramatically demonstrated its value - and independence - by revealing that the
CIA was training Cuban exiles in
The following year, the Ford
Foundation offered $25 million to Stanford, if they could match it with $75 million
in other gifts. The chairman of the "major gifts" committee was David
Packard, who had made a personal fortune of $300 million as a
military-industrialist and has since gone on to become Deputy Secretary of
Defense in the current Administration. Packard announced at the end of the
fund-raising campaign that more than two-thirds of the $75 million which had
been raised to match the Ford grant was in gifts of $100,000 or more from 150
individuals, corporations and foundations. And among these major benefactors,
more than one expressed misgivings about the Hilton Institute. According to
Hilton, who had been attacked by the Standard Oil Company of California and the
Stanford provost among others, "It was suggested [by university officials]
that I avoid offending powerful fund raisers; a key member of the
administration demanded that, even in editorials bearing my signature, I cease
expressing controversial opinions ... and that, while no attention was paid to
the Institute's two advisory boards who gave me every support, the
administration proposed to appoint two secret committees to keep an eye on the Report."
At precisely the time when
the financial patrons of learning were expressing their misgivings about
Hilton, the question of obtaining funds for an international studies program at
Stanford, including Latin American studies, came up. Beginning in 1959, the
Ford Foundation had embarked on a $42 million program to support international
studies at select universities. At Stanford the task of drawing up a prospectus
was given to a committee headed by Dean Carl Spaeth.
Academically speaking, Spaeth, a law professor, was
not spectacularly qualified for the job. But to preside over yet another
extension of the foundation-State Department hegemony, his credentials were
impeccable. He had been Nelson Rockefeller's assistant in the State Department
and the Ford Foundation's director of the Division of Overseas Activities. Who
could be better equipped to induce the God at Ford to breathe life into
Stanford's international studies efforts?
Accordingly, in 1962 Ford
made a major grant to support international studies at Stanford. The grant
stipulated that all of the funds would be allocated to Spaeth's
committee. It also excluded Latin American studies, pending further studies of
how best to strengthen the field. Shortly thereafter, Spaeth
called a conference of Latin Americanists at the
modern ranch house quarters which the Ford Foundation had built in the
A year of "studies"
ensued, during which the problem was allowed to simmer. Then, at the direction
of the dean of Graduate Students, all PhD candidates were removed from the
Hispanic Institute, and Professor Hilton was informed that the Institute would
henceforth concentrate on practical instruction at the MA level. There had been
no discussion with Hilton, a senior faculty member, and no explanations were
offered. When he asked how the administration could do such a thing without
consulting the responsible faculty member, he was told: "The
administration can do anything it pleases." Hilton resigned from the
Institute and from his post as editor of the Report, hoping it would
compel the administration to take a stand. But the administration accepted his
resignation without discussion and suspended publication of the Report.
Within two weeks the Ford Foundation granted Stanford $550,000 for Latin
American studies.
One of the more revealing
ironies of the destruction of the Hilton program was the general agreement that
Latin American studies was the least developed of any
area in the field. Just months before Hilton's resignation, a conference on
Social Science Research on
The loss of the Institute and
the Report, representing a life-time effort, was a personal tragedy for
Hilton, but for the profession it was an acid test. In fact, the destruction of
one of the only independent and therefore intellectually respectable institutes
of substance in the academic world produced only a ripple of protest. Hilton
was unable to obtain financing to revive the Institute and the Report.
The organized profession took no interest. Nor is this so mysterious when it is
considered that Ford's $550,000 had gone to those Stanford Latinists who didn't
make an issue of the Institute, and that this largesse was repeated on every
campus where significant efforts on
In its "objective"
account of the Hilton affair, the Ford-funded organization, Education and World
Affairs, acknowledges as a major source of conflicts the Report's
treatment of "Castro's takeover," which "made the Stanford
administration uneasy." The issue, they explained, was that Hilton
"was responsible to no one for [the Report's] contents or comments;
it was not beholden to Stanford - and yet it carried the Stanford reputation
behind it."
The concern for
"Stanford" is touching. As we have seen (and the cases we have taken
are wholly representative; there are no exceptions), the international
institutes and centers are responsible to no universities, if
"university" means a community of students and scholars. At most they
are responsible to the president, provost, or chancellor of the university, and
occasionally to a select committee; but even then, if a conflict arises, the
institute is free to take its manpower, prestige and munificence wherever its
money sources will follow (or lead) it. Early in the history of the institutes,
the Yale Center of International Studies, as a result of a policy difference
between its director, Frederick S. Dunn, and the Yale administration, moved
lock, stock and barrel to
Stanford itself houses a
rather extreme (but only because so blatant) example of institute independence
in the form of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Originally
an archive, the Institution's character was changed in 1960 by fiat of its
benefactor, Herbert Hoover, who eased out its liberal director and replaced him
with a conservative economist, Wesley Glenn Campbell (formerly of the Defense
Department, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the right-wing American Enterprise
Institute).
The
purpose of this Institution must be, by its research and publications, to
demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx -- whether Communism,
Socialism, economic materialism, or atheism -- thus to protect the American way
of life from such ideologies, their conspiracies, and to reaffirm the validity
of the American system.
Stanford, which pays at least
$334,000 a year to support the Hoover Institution, was perfectly satisfied with
these academic strictures.
To prevent his man from
becoming a mere figurehead and his statement of purpose mere paper,
Not surprisingly,
The Hilton and
Perhaps the most critical
point of leverage in academic control is in the formation of perspectives,
analytic models, agendas for research. Not all social
phenomena are visible to all analytic models and methodologies, and the social
scientist who shapes his tools to collect government
and foundation finances will not be equipped to research or even ask questions
which, though crucial to an understanding of the contemporary world, would not
be looked on favorably by those agencies.
For example, the American
overseas system consists of some 3000 military bases, mutual security treaties
with more than 30 nations, and more than $60 billion in direct capital
investments around the world. To begin to understand the workings and the
impact of this system, one would need to research (1) U.S. corporate and financial
interests overseas, their interest group structure, their significance in the
U.S. economy, their political influence on U.S. foreign policy, on local
regimes, etc.; (2) U.S. military bases, installations and alliances, their interlockings with corporate and political interests, their
economic impact, etc.; (3) U.S. and U.S.-dominated international agencies,
foundations, universities, their overseas operations and interlockings
with the above interests and so on. Yet on the basis of the State Department's
directory of foreign affairs research in American universities, it can be said
with reasonable certainty that there is not one institutional attempt being
made anywhere to research a single one of these questions.
In the spring of 1966, the
role of the CIA at
What may have seemed like an
isolated scandal in 1966 can now be recognized as a universal condition of
organized intellect in