Snooping for Reds in the Ivory Tower

BOOK

Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities Wit the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955

by Sigmund Diamond

Oxford University Press

$27.95

In 1954, Sigmund Diamond lost his offer of a job at Harvard because, he says, he refused to tell federal officials about the political views and activities of his colleagues.

Diamond eventually went on to tenure at Columbia as a professor of sociology and history. But his own early run-in with the power of the anti-communist FBI in the J. Edgar Hoover era is a telling example of how an unchecked government agency can trample individual lives.

In his recently released book, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities With the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955, Diamond tells the stunning story of how the paranoia of the Cold War ruined the careers of academic professionals and corrupted America's leading universities.

The argument put forth is a wholesale revision of the popular image of the universities as paragons of virtue, beacons of principled opposition to McCarthyite bullying. Diamond demonstrates that Harvard and Yale secretly cooperated with and helped advance the anti-communist purges even while they were publicly trumpeting the rhetoric of academic freedom.

Diamond writes that there was "a degree of cooperation between Harvard and the intelligence agencies in the making of faculty appointments that is surprising for what it reveals of the abdication of University autonomy."

It is a convincing, solidly constructed argument. Diamond relies on a hefty source base of FBI documents, some of which were obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. University records and memoranda also bolster Diamond's argument. There are 62 pages of footnotes. The source base might have been strengthened with more interviews, but many of the main figures in the book have died.

Diamond's investigation of the universities during the 1945 to 1955 period touches on a fair number of personalities who have gone on to notoriety. For example, we see Henry A. Kissinger '50, as a Harvard junior professor, opening his colleagues' mail and informing to the FBI. And we see William F. Buckley Jr., as editor of the Yale Daily News, running errands for the FBI and the Yale administration.

Compromised Campus focuses on Harvard and Yale as case studies of the FBI's far-reaching activities on college campuses. The FBI kept records on student organizations and did background checks on professors being considered for tenure.

Equally abhorrent, the FBI was not an intruder, but a welcome guest on campus in the eyes of top administrators. At both Harvard and Yale, high-level liaisons were charged with the specific task of coordinating relations with the FBI. Diamond says it was likely that then-Provost Paul H. Buck was the liaison at Harvard.

There are few heroes and little courage to be found in this story, but it is at least a bit heartening to find that the undergraduate editors of The Crimson were among the rare true defenders of academic freedom. It seems from Diamond's account that the FBI Boston field office read The Crimson regularly and clipped relevant articles. In one case, a Crimson article was teletyped directly to Washington headquarters from the Boston office on the day it was published. (This was in the days before fax machines.)

Why remember this wretched period in our nation's history? Diamond offers a compelling reason in his conclusion: so it will not happen again.

The question of the independence of universities is by no means closed. Diamond cites more recent efforts by the FBI and CIA to keep track of students supporting leftist movements in Latin America.

And while Diamond concentrates on the relations between universities and the government, another entire book could be devoted to the growing and troubling influence of corporations on institutions of higher education.

For now, university deans, presidents and vice presidents would do well to read Compromised Campus, as would anyone with an interest in institutions of higher education free from the poisoning influences of politics, paranoia and profit.