Higher Espionage
The CIA finds a warmer reception on campus since 9/11, as it openly seeks scholars' expertise. But critics say such close ties compromise academic values.
It's almost 4 p.m., feeding time for the chameleons at the National Security Program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
"Let's go see the lizards," suggests John Grierson, a veteran CIA undercover agent who came in from the cold a few years ago - and has morphed into a visiting scholar.
Moments earlier, Mr. Grierson, a Middle East expert who was an agent in Teheran and Baghdad in the 1970s, had been holding forth on a warming trend in the Central Intelligence Agency's long, yet often icy relationship with American higher education.
Now he leads a visitor past office cubicles to an alcove where graduate students crowd around a glass cage. A pair of lizards, one green, one brown, glide out of their leafy camouflage and, after a brief survey of the food dish, begin snapping up their wriggling prey to the admiring comments of onlookers.
"I guess this stuff is just to keep us loose," Grierson says, gesturing at the lizard cage.
It's not lost on anyone that chameleons, as quick-change artists, are the perfect emblem for a spy. But the consequences of the Central Intelligence Agency mixing more openly with scholars and tapping into their expertise trouble many in academia.
If universities are warming to the CIA, and the agency funds more research, critics ask, what will happen to scholarly objectivity and academic freedom? Will the CIA's penchant for secrecy corrode the university's mission to pursue truth and publish it openly?
Closer ties between academia and the agency do not yet rival the clubby atmosphere of the 1950s. The Vietnam War, 1970s congressional inquiries, and scandals over covert funding on campuses in the 1980s (see sidebar, below) contributed to the frosty relationship. Yet all signs indicate that the tweedy set and the CIA are getting cozier.
For one, the revolving door between the agency and the ivory tower has been spinning of late. Last year, two public universities named presidents with CIA ties: At Texas A&M, former agency director Robert Gates took the helm, while Arizona State University picked Michael Crow, vice chairman of In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit venture-capital arm of the CIA.
Then, too, agency insiders and scholars cite a leap in CIA funding of academic-research contracts and conferences, though numbers are hard to come by.
The CIA has also reached out to higher education with its Officer in Residence (OIR) program, which since 1985 has sent 84 agents to 46 universities. Requests for visiting faculty such as Grierson are also on the rise.
The promise of closer university/CIA ties is a better-informed government, perhaps resulting in a US foreign policy that is wiser or more grounded. But concerns abound - especially when it comes to preserving the standard of scholarly objectivity and meeting the CIA's demand for secrecy.
"The secrecy the CIA requires of scholars who work for them is antithetical to ... the openness that is presumed to operate in the university," says Bruce Cumings, an Asian studies expert at the University of Chicago. He has documented how, during and after the cold war, intelligence-agency funding led academic scholarship to shift to areas of keener interest to government.
