The CIA and the Universities
Hausknecht, Murray
348 In almost every field of governmental concern from economics to national security the academic community has become a central instrument of public policy in these United States. —Lyndon B....
...Sjahrir believed in representative government and free political parties—not simply in order to ape the West, but because he was devoted in principle to the...
...Michigan State and MIT are in no immediate danger of being taken over completely by the CIA, nor is Harvard in any danger of becoming a mere appendage of the State Department...
...1. A thing with or through which something is done or effected...
...b. A person made use of by another person or being, for the accomplishment of a purpose (cf...
...Consequently, a considerable amount of intellectual energy within a university is always directed to ends other than those traditionally associated with the intellectual enterprise...
...In this extreme instance the university was used as a tool, though as a rule the academic community is handled more delicately...
...The fruits of its intellectual enterprises are often useful to particular groups and interests outside the university, but its existence is not finally to be justified on these pragmatic grounds...
...To talk of this as an institutionalized definition is to emphasize the undemocratic and even totalitarian thrust of the attitude and behavior...
...In many instances scholars have deserted the campus for organizations like RAND whose existence is directly related to the needs of "national security...
...A university may still be thought of with some justice as a community of scholars...
...The real peril is of a more subtle kind...
...For many years now the military services have poured millions of dollars for research into the universities...
...Lyndon B. Johnson at Princeton University Instrument...
...He had spent the last four years of his life as a prisoner of President Sukarno, that sinister, aging buffoon, because he had opposed the authoritarian spirit of Sukarno's "guided democracy...
...from a tool, as being used for more delicate work or for artistic or scientific purposes...
...Sjahrir believed in the validity of Western political and cultural values as these would be adapted to an Indonesian context...
...Thus, intellectual work is a "life enhancing" activity...
...What Johnson's statement and the actual practices of the military establishment do is to institutionalize the view of the university as an instrument —and this entails a denial of both its legitimate ends and its autonomy...
...dist...
...How can students be encouraged to 350 take a principled view of their studies when the university and its faculty define themselves and their work instrumentally...
...At the heart of totalitarianism is a refusal to recognize the autonomy of persons and groups, and the lack of any barriers to the state's harnessing of all human energies for its own ends...
...How bitter a commentary the parallel careers of Sjahrir and Sukarno form upon the destiny of Indonesia...
...Though an alliance with the military establishment is not radically different from connections with other economic and social forces, there is one important difference...
...The utilitarian consequences of intellectual work tempt other groups in the society to harness the university to their ends...
...No self-respecting student can be expected to respond positively to talk of "the life of the mind" when the university itself shows no decent respect for it...
...These forces combine with elements within the university, because only in part is it a community of scholars...
...The values of the military are more fundamentally at odds with those of the academic community than are the values of most other groups...
...alliances between universities and the military establishment add to the power of similar forces already eroding the traditions of scholarly work in the universities...
...but can an instrument remain a university...
...Put over-simply, we assume that human life is a struggle for knowledge, mastery, and control of the natural and social forces in the environment, and it is in the course of this struggle that human potentials are realized and life itself is enhanced...
...The problems that occupy scholars arise out of a consensus 349 on "the pertinent problems of our discipline" combined with the manias or daemons that possess individual scholars...
...He reminded the audience that in 1940 Archibald MacLeish had warned intellectuals of "what history would say of those who failed to oppose the forces of disorder then loose in Europe...
...Stanley Plastrik The Example of Sufan Sjahrir: 1909-1966 On April 19, 250,000 Indonesians paid public homage to the memory of Sutan Sjahrir, the Sumatra-born socialist leader of the early Indonesian Republic and its first premier...
...But this makes it increasingly difficult for the institution to perform one of its main functions: to maintain and transmit commitments to the value and discipline underlying intellectual work...
...A major heresy in a totalitarian society is the notion that one can be Iegitimately indifferent or opposed to the ends of the state...
...Released in 1965, his health broken by a series of imprisonments under the Dutch, the Japanese, and then his compatriots, Sjahrir was a stricken man who had already lost his power of speech...
...Intellectual work is congruent with some of the basic assumptions society makes about the nature of human life and personality...
...Both had been leaders in the nationalist movement, and when Indonesia achieved independence, the two men were for a brief moment collaborators in trying to create a new nation...
...tool) .. . 2. A tool, implement, weapon...
...But soon it became clear that they were utterly different in spirit and quality...
...Power within the university is wielded by those who fill economic, bureaucratic, and political roles...
...Now usu...
...Given their perspectives and the imperatives of their positions, such people are vulnerable to the temptations of alliances with outside interests...
...a means...
...Presumably, the university has thereby become an effective instrument...
...To escape the condemnation of history, "other studies, no matter how important, must not now detract the man of learning from the misfortunes of freedom in Southeast Asia...
...A few weeks later he died in a Swiss hospital...
...he opposed the mindless xenophobia which Sukarno made into his special mark and which is often a prop for the authoritarianism that has followed the independence of certain new nations...
...This orientation to the world appears at another point in President Johnson's Princeton speech...
...How then can the university retain this quality when it is harnessed to institutions of death and destruction...
...This totalitarian perspective, complete with its appeal to history, is what justifies the CIA and the Army's Project Camelot...
...Oxford Universal Dictionary The limiting case of the President's generalization is the CIA's enrollment in—or, perhaps, enrollment of—Michigan State University's Vietnam project...
...The university has become the primary place where these ends are pursued, and their achievement depends upon a recognition of the legitimacy of these ends apart from the utilitarian consequences...
...Yet even if one gives an entirely different meaning than the President's to the "misfortunes of freedom in Southeast Asia," it is illegitimate to demand that men of learning desert their daemons for those that possess the state...
...This means the university needs a certain area of autonomy that must be protected against encroachment...
Vol. 13 • July 1966 • No. 4
