Oil on the Campus

...These contracts represent an extension of an old political role the universities and some of their professors have comfortably played for years as obedient servants of American foreign policy and American corporations...

...Into the dining room walked an old friend who is president of a major university in California...

...This, of course, makes it difficult for the universities to avoid discrimination in putting together research and consulting teams...

...American universities developed big appetites for money during their boom years in the mid and late 1960s, but they have found the 1970s much leaner...

...Governments there have huge backlogs of educational and other needs and enormous amounts of money to buy the high-powered expertise to meet them...

...Stanford is working on an educational satellite for Iran...

...In their consulting work and research priorities, a number of universities have become deeply involved in the Cold War-inspired struggle to shape the social fabric and dominate the politics of the Third World...

...Political prisoners are now estimated to number in the thousands, including leading writers and intellectuals...

...A group of women forestry students issued a statement in support of the proposal...

...And the project grandly and officially disowned in midstream by the mid-western consortium was quietly finished by some of the original professors acting on their own...

...who had worked so hard on the Shah's degree—a man who also had once worked as a consultant to the Iranian military...

...Georgetown gave the empress an honorary doctorate in a ceremony last year—ignoring as much as possible the Iranian students who marched and chanted against the Shah's police state...

...By accepting contracts from anyone with the ability to pay and without regard to politics or morality, it is said, the universities are acting in a neutral, open, and admirable fashion...

...Proponents argued that the United States cannot project its own morality on other nations or the international political arena...

...For the research universities, much of the aid from the Middle East has taken the form of contracts in which they agree to provide consulting, training, or other services in exchange for full costs plus bonuses...

...But there is more involved than money...

...With rare exceptions Saudi Arabia will not grant visas to Jews and continues to hold to its Moslem inhibition against equality for women...

...The Shah was presented a souvenir football by GW's child mascot, and the students worked up a special cheer: "Rah, Rah, Rah...

...They also have formidable contacts here and abroad with which more obscure institutions cannot possibly compete...

...and it would set an unwise precedent, requiring universities to reach devisive political verdicts on all their proposed contracts...

...A series of recent seminars in Washington and other cities featuring embassy personnel with tips on how to tap the Middle East's student market attracted recruiters from about 100 of these schools...

...Governor Thomas Judge took a generally popular position when he asked, "Should we drop a project that would benefit the whole state because of a few people's feelings...

...The president, apparently somewhat distressed by criticism from Iranian students and a few members of Congress, issued a defensive statement justifying the empress's honorary degree...

...The American Jewish Committee, which has begun monitoring Arab contracts with universities and has elicited non-discrimination pledges from about 100 major institutions, is nevertheless troubled by potential evasions...

...This discrimination is quite naturally unpopular in the universities, which have sizable contingents of pro-Israel Jewish professors and students...

...There was somewhat more controversy on the UM campus...

...In the case of Iran, these critics have been especially resistant because of their moral revulsion at what is known about the character of the Shah's government...

...At Georgetown, however, that approach proved inadequate...

...At least a couple of Ivy League institutions were involved long before the petrodollar boom in molding Iranian educational institutions along American lines...

...American campuses also have been used to spread American values to the government and business elites of developing countries...

...Or will they adopt the squalid, morally obtuse values of those who are willing to sell anything to the highest bidder...

...But the critics remained skeptical, and few believed the Iranians admitted under the contract were really good enough to win fifty-four seats in the nuclear engineering department if the competition were truly open...

...Opponents plan no action at this time against the signing of the master contract, but have indicated that they will examine individual agreements as they come up...

...Johns Hopkins, which recently gave an honorary degree to the Shah's sister, is helping plan a new college for Iran in the health sciences...

...I was shocked to hear colleagues on the floor of the faculty meeting dismiss these matters so casually...

...SAVAK, his feared and efficient secret police, keeps informers scattered throughout Iranian universities, and a professor who ventures beyond the narrow limits of acceptable discourse may find himself fired or imprisoned...

...The brave dissidents who languish in Iran's prisons understand this and look to those of us who are still free, particularly to academics and intellectuals, for support and understanding...

...The degree was simply Georgetown's "non-political" way of recognizing a leading figure in the fight for women's rights, he said, and the contract was in keeping with the university's international education mission...

...The Saudis themselves huffily refused to sign the final draft of a $1.5 million contract with MIT on an electric power and water resources study after President Jerome Wiesner sent a letter stressing that the university was under government obligation not to discriminate...

...What seems clear from this explosion of hustling in the Middle East is that American universities are facing again some of the moral, political, educational, and financial choices they encountered during the Vietnam war...

...A number of the university projects with the Saudis, it should be noted, involve only the training of students in this country, and so do not directly encounter the visa restrictions...

...The faculty, after several meetings, voted two to one against breaking the contract and opted instead for, an overall study of the institute's international commitments by a faculty-administration committee...

...We are endorsing the principle that the Shah determines what is right for Iran, not the tens of thousands of political prisoners or the Iranians in exile...

...MIT has gone through perhaps the most thorough debate on the Iranian question, and it is the place where opposition among students and faculty members has been most vocal...

...What is wrong is introducing dirty politics—that of oil and power blocs—institutionally into the Institute, by negotiating with governments rather than with free academic institutions and selling educational services to the highest bidder...

...The critics, of course, pointed to the Shah's lust for conventional weapons as evidence that his pledge on the non-proliferation treaty could not be taken seriously...

...These two factors—the established tradition of overseas projects and the search for new money—have made the academic forays into the Middle East a natural development...

...The exotic fund-raising is being led, as one would expect, by universities with the loftiest reputations for research and graduate education...

...And while much of the money is being spent on military hardware, especially in Iran, a good deal also is going into education and other social services...

...The proponents, naturally, claimed that all the Iranians admitted would meet MIT standards...

...HENRY GORDON argued the same point...

...The other president, who was equally struck by this chance meeting so far from home, wanted to know the same thing...

...Salvador Luria, the Nobel prize-winning biologist, objected to the notion that rejecting a contract with the Shah would politicize the university...

...Defenders of the contract put great stock in Iran's signature on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, belittled the extent to which MIT's contribution alone would make bomb production a technical possibility, and argued that it was better to provide the Shah's people with the "competence and integrity" of an MIT education than have them trained elsewhere...

...Harvard has helped plan a new English-language graduate school to be named after the Shah's father...

...First occupant of the chair was to be the same globetrotting professor Larry Van Dyne, a former education reporter for The Boston Globe, writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education...

...Some of their traditional sources of revenue have been unable or unwilling to keep up with their rising costs, and most universities are now carefully considering every new fund-raising angle dreamed up in their "development offices" or by aggressive professors...

...Both have recently formalized their institutional admiration by bestowing their highest honors on him and his wife, the Empress Farah Pahlavi...

...But at a few institutions, notably MIT and Stanford, they have provoked some student and faculty opposition...

...It is, in addition, prohibited by Federal law...

...George Washington, a year earlier, made the unusual (and considerably less visible) gesture of dispatching its president all the way to Teheran to carry an honorary doctorate for the Shah himself...

...As the world's largest oil producers, Saudi Arabia and Iran each are now undertaking grandiose crash development programs...

...Their long shopping lists include everything from irrigation studies and health-care planning to the training of professors, engineers, and other experts...

...Princeton, for instance, was able to send a delegation to Saudi Arabia that included a trustee and a vice president whose backgrounds included high-level experience in the State Department...

...In January 1975, four months before presenting its honorary degree to the Shah's wife, Georgetown announced a five-year, $11 million agreement involving consulting services and the exchange of students and professors with Iran's Ferdowsi University, one of the empress's pet institutions...

...To improve the efficiency of his military machine, he has his Washington embassy scouting for an American college that will set up an academy on its campus to train personnel for his navy...

...Waving the red flag of politicization is a device traditionally used to uphold the politics of the Establishment in the university and to discourage political dissent," he said...

...The arrangement was worked out secretly after much shuttling of officials between Cambridge, Washington, and Teheran, and it created something of a stir when it was revealed by the student newspaper...

...Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, apparently has the inside track on this contract, one that earlier was rejected by the University of Southern California...

...Essentially, that committee ignored the question of the Shah's politics, despite the objections of a small group of dissenting professors...

...There also was the issue of MIT's admissions standards—standards under which acceptance to graduate school normally is based on a student's academic promise...

...Noam Chomsky, in a memorandum to the committee, Saudis in Montana Bozeman, Montana Saudi Arabia's attempts to purchase U.S...

...Undoubtedly there are others, given the heavy traffic of proposals and delegations now moving between the Middle East and American universities...

...And while some university projects in developing countries undoubtedly have been inspired by noble motives, others have not...

...asked the bemused McGill...

...An idealist would expect the universities—with their special responsibilities for upholding truth and justice —to recognize the Shah's policies for what they are and to condemn them...

...Earlier this year, for instance, Iranian students here organized protests against the execution at home of ten persons accused of killing three American colonels who were advising the Shah's military...

...Despite this fact, the proposal evoked only limited opposition in Montana...

...Instead, many of them have developed a set of rationalizations to support their opportunist rush to Teheran...

...The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has two contracts with Iran, one to train nuclear engineers and the other to supervise development of a technical institute...

...By not raising questions [about the character of the Shah's government] we are, tacitly to be sure, bringing political considerations into the academic process in the most dangerous and offensive way," he said...

...A few examples of agreements already signed are enough to illustrate the trend...

...And Harvard refused to enter extensive negotiations on a public-health project in anticipation of the visa problem...

...In Vietnam, for instance, academics took on such odious tasks as village pacification and police training...

...While on a visit there last year, William McGill, the president of Columbia University, looked up one morning while breakfasting in his hotel...

...A second argument in favor of the contracts is that they call for strictly technical work that has the intellectual elegance to excite the world's best minds but is without political effect...

...There also are plenty of Middle Eastern arrangements among less prestigious universities—a group that includes Georgetown and George Washington...

...Understandably, the publicity departments of these universities found nothing cozy about all this newly acquired wealth and the honors for the Shah and his wife...

...We should continue asking the critical question about how our universities relate to the world at large: Will they be true to the high-minded ideals that fill their catalogs and the work of their most sensitive and humane professors...

...With Saudi Arabia, which probably ranks second in the Middle East behind Iran in negotiating with American universities, the main controversy has been somewhat different...

...Even while studying on American campuses, young Iranian dissenters are apparently not out of reach of the Shah's police state...

...What are you doing here...

...They understand, and we should too, that every academic delegation that engages in friendly conversations with their government leaders buttresses their government and thus prolongs and intensifies their and the people's suffering...

...An additional issue in the MIT debate involved nuclear proliferation—the argument revolving around speculation that the Shah might divert MIT-trained engineers into production of bombs...

...Barely two months later the university announced that it had received a $1 million gift to endow a new faculty chair in the field of multinational management...

...They know that while the Shah may grudgingly appreciate what imported professors can do for him, he is ruthless in his treatment of domestic intellectuals who dare criticize him...

...The professor of management who helped arrange the GW degree remembers the Shah, in private remarks following the award ceremony, as being deeply moved: "He said that since GW had been so kind to him, he'd like to do a little something for GW...

...Following this reasoning to its extreme, one professor defended MIT's training of nuclear engineers for the Shah by pointing out that since forty-four of the sixty-six foreign students already in the nuclear engineering department were from "antidemocratic" countries, it was ridiculous to quibble over a few Iranians...

...Little wonder the professor now keeps a photograph of the Shah, in full royal dress, hung on his office wall...

...it would insult the academic freedom of professors who want to work on his projects...

...When did you start working this territory...

...Officials at MSU expressed more concern about the possible strain on their resources than about the question of discrimination...

...A resolution by the student body Central Board condemned the proposed contract, but the faculty senate endorsed the plan...

...He is the leading customer for American weapons, and he has shown a willingness to use these weapons to secure his hegemony in the Persian Gulf and to intimidate any domestic threat...

...Already this difficulty has prompted universities to withdraw from at least three projects that involved travel to Saudi Arabia by their personnel...

...These arrangements are among the more interesting examples of a widespread new approach to academic entrepreneurship...

...MIT is getting about $10,000 per student during each year of the deal, a figure that is about twice its normal tuition and enough to cover its full costs with a bit left over...

...At the moment, an estimated 13,500 Iranians and about 1,400 Saudis are studying in American colleges, with both countries sending more every year and with more of them indebted to their governments for their scholarships...

...As in other such arrangements, the Saudi government insists upon the right to exclude Jews and women from their country...

...The professor who had spent several months negotiating the abortive MIT contract, for instance, eventually took it on through a private consulting firm set up in offices a couple of blocks from campus...

...The reactors, it is said, will be used for the peaceful purpose of meeting Iran's energy needs when its oil supply runs dry...

...Furthermore, it is argued that these projects are really motivated by the Shah's benevolence toward his poverty-stricken people—to bring them the better health, higher literacy, and other social benefits that, one must point out, have so thoroughly eluded them during the first twenty years of his regime...

...And Rockefeller University—in a project that reportedly developed out of the longstanding relationship between the Shah and David Rockefeller himself—is planning a new showcase research institute in the biological sciences...

...Columbia heads two planning consortia in Iran—one in the social welfare field (with the universities of Michigan, Maryland, and West Virginia) and the other in medicine (with Harvard and Cornell...

...In these contract negotiations, the universities have found themselves drawn into the bitter Middle Eastern conflict between Jews and Arabs...

...Generous though it was, GW's gift was not nearly as impressive in sheer dollar terms as the contract picked up by crosstown rival Georgetown a few months later...

...And Catholic, Utah, Utah State, Cincinnati, Wisconsin at Green Bay, Michigan State, and Wentworth Institute of Boston are among the institutions that have won contracts with Iran...

...Iranian consulates are located in several major American cities, reportedly to keep better abreast of student dissenters—a considerable job, given the high level of anti-Shah activism...

...In the process, they have raised a couple of questions that deserve some attention: Is working for the Shah, who runs one of the world's more repressive dictatorships, an evasion by these universities of their humanitarian responsibilities...

...Oil on the Campus LARRY VAN DYNE When the Shah of Iran visited Washington in 1949— back in those easeful days before he assumed, with a CIA boost, the time-consuming burdens of dictatorship —he found a couple of free hours to attend a football game between Georgetown and George Washington universities...

...The contracts with the Shah and the Saudis have created little discussion in most universities, sometimes because they are negotiated quietly by high-level administrators and a handful of professors...

...The Midwest Universities Consortium for International Activity—which includes Illinois, Indiana, Michigan State, Minnesota, and Wisconsin— suspended consulting work on the new University of Riyadh after a Jewish dean from Michigan State was refused a visa...

...There are at least a couple of factors involved...

...he replied...

...At the very least he would expect these institutions to avoid cooperation with such a ruthless regime...

...Shah, Shah, Shah...

...Recent negotiations between the Montana International Trade Commission (MITC), a coalition of the state's leading industrial and agricultural concerns, and the Saudi government have culminated in an agreement under which the University of Montana and Montana State University will aid the Saudis in fruit management and deciduous fruit production, research in livestock and range management, and various industrial projects...

...What the event lacked in the way of truly superior football was made up for in ceremonial tributes to the guest...

...They suggested that during a period of economic decline and shrinking state budgets, jobs and cash are especially needed...

...Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science, was even more explicit in an essay published in the student newspaper: "Because we are free not to cooperate and because we know of its policy of terror and torture, the identification of the Institute with the Iranian government is at once an identification of the Institute, hence of each of its members, with that government's policy of terror and torture...

...America's elite universities, it is sometimes said, ought to be flattered that the Shah has had the good sense to come to them and buy the best in expertise...

...Syracuse, Oklahoma, Indiana, Sacramento State, Georgia State, and North Texas State are among those with contracts to train Saudi Arabians on their own campuses...

...A favorite story making the rounds is one about the heavy competition for contracts in Teheran...

...The University of Southern California, for instance, has received an endowed professorship in petroleum engineering from the Shah...

...expertise have ranged as far afield as Montana...

...American universities have begun hurrying to cash in on the spending spree by the newly rich oil giants of the Middle East, particularly Iran and Saudi Arabia...

...Such men as Sheik Zaki Ya-mani of Saudi Arabia and Jamshid Amuzegar of Iran, the oil ministers in those countries, are alumni of the Ivy League, and many Third World capitals have enough influential, American-educated natives to keep a good-sized university club in business...

...Even if we regard some of these Middle Eastern projects as harmless (or even useful), it is important to continue monitoring the overall trend closely...

...Now, however, students and faculty are not nearly as vigilant or vocal in seeing that these choices are made with care and sensitivity...

...MITC director James Hodge is enthusiastic about the deal, arguing that it will pave the way for increased sales of wheat and beef, the state's two major cash crops...

...Like many dictators, the Shah is big on the military...

...They are in a strong position to market their expertise...

...Yet even some of the project's supporters are skeptical about how much new business the contract will generate for the state's economy...

...Were these standards being compromised by the Iranian contract, which in effect guaranteed a large quota of vacancies to students educated in Iran's sorry universities and screened, in part, by the Iranian government...

...One maneuver it finds distressing is the practice of shifting contracts from the universities to private consulting firms run by their professors...

...To what extent are the universities, or their professors, winking at the exclusion of Jews and segregation of women by Saudi Arabia, while they piously condemn that sort of behavior at home...

...This display, it now turns out, was the beginning of a continuing friendship between the Shah and these universities...

...For more obscure but eager institutions—and there are a considerable number of these, ranging from former teachers' colleges to small liberal arts schools to two-year community colleges—the hope is to attract foreign students at rates considerably above normal tuition...

...Their professors are the best in their fields, and their prestige is of some value to their Iranian and Saudi clients...

...Included among the dissenters were some of the well-known figures who took part in the protests of the 1960s against MIT's well-established role as servant to the Pentagon...

...The debate centered on a contract MIT signed about a year ago to train up to fifty-four government-sponsored Iranian graduate students as nuclear engineers—the technicians needed to run several reactors the Shah is in the process of purchasing...

...This petrodollar scramble resembles the efforts of American corporations, of course, and in many ways is not too surprising even among the non-profit universities...

...In the past year a score or more of American universities, sometimes in competition with universities in Britain and elsewhere, have landed lucrative contracts in that part of the developing world...

...Their main rationale now is the same one thrown up in the 1960s during the debates over university involvement in the Vietnam war: Refusal on political or moral grounds to work with the Shah would be unduly discriminatory...

...Despite appearances, he announced that there was nothing irregular about the degree and the Iranian contract—a huge one for a university like Georgetown...

...At GW, officials simply kept their mouths shut...