email icon Email this citation

CIAO DATE: 6/00

The Co-option of the Modern University and the Need for Reform: The National Security / Neo-Liberal University and the Adoption of a Hippocratic Oath for Academics

Michael McKinley

International Studies Association
41st Annual Convention
Los Angeles, CA
March 14-18, 2000

 

Abstract

It is a popular belief in modern democratic societies that modern, Western universities are unique as sites of teaching, inquiry, research, and writing which, above all, are marked by their independence from the various forces which influence so much of the life outside of the academy. The academy, in these terms, approximates to an ideal which, though it never existed, continues to be honoured. Never the less, to the extent that the University-as-Institution approached it, universities in general "reduced the entropy of time and fought against it;" fought against it, furthermore, as a stable institution, able, because of its historical consciousness, "to preserve at least a pocket of memory, " and maintain, as Regis Debray recalls it, "a tribal reservation for the ethics of truth." Relatedly, the University, was a dominant site of secular critique practised by people "capable of living what [they] taught until it killed [them].

It is the argument of the first part (I) this paper that, over the period marked by World War II and the Cold War, "research universities" emerged which came to not only derive their status from the extent to which they were consultants to government or industry, but also radically undermined the residual commitments to, and practices of the traditional / idealised academy. In plain terms, the result was that independent inquiry in the "relevant" areas of such universities, became almost hopelessly compromised. The argument, albeit briefly made, in the second part of this paper (II) is that the University is now in need of renewing itself along the lines of an ethical code modeled upon, the principle primum non nocere (first, do no harm) — in other words to develop a way of thinking which places the welfare of students and society above other concerns.

 

I

 

Introduction

It is a popular belief in modern democratic societies that the Universities are unique as sites of teaching, inquiry, research, and writing which, above all, are marked by their independence from the various forces which influence so much of the life outside of the academy. The academy, in these terms, approximates to an ideal which, though it never existed, continues to be honoured in the terms put forward by Wihlem von Humboldt, as:

But this is more than an ideal proclaiming the need for the satisfaction of a personal yearning; indeed, its wider, extremely serious ramifications are apparent in the comment it attracted from Noam Chomsky:

Historically, moreover, to the extent that the University approached von Humboldt's ideal in more than a vestigial resemblance it "reduced the entropy of time and fought against it;" fought against it, furthermore, as a stable institution, able, because of its historical consciousness, "to preserve at least a pocket of memory, " and maintain, as Regis Debray recalls it, "a tribal reservation for the ethics of truth." 3 Within it, which is to say within the membership of the academy, education and abnegation were "virtually synonymous," a deceased identity which Debray laments with just a hint of contempt for its successors:

The University, then, was of a dominant site of secular critique practised by people "capable of living what [they] taught until it killed [them]. 5 In their commitment to this principle, to what Paul Bove sees as the imperative to "take aim at the unequal, imperial, antidemocratic present," academics demonstrated a truth: "Critics should never be good company." 6 Which is why the popular belief is wrong.

In the United States this is generally case because of the operant environment being determined by American Exceptionalism, American Religion, and Capitalism as a pantheon of beliefs beyond radical criticism. And within a society which Barry Alan Shain reminds us tolerated "only a narrow range of behaviour," 7 at its inception, and which, subsequently, acquiesced in the transformation of its foundational myths and religions by corporate capitalism, resulting in criticism being rendered either acceptable or unacceptable by capitalist-corporate criteria, it is particularly wrong. In the McCarthy period, loyalty to the United States, and to the university, therefore, was defined to include a faculty member's an acceptance of the existing politico-economic order and a willingness, induced on pain of dismissal, to sign a "loyalty oath." 8

Furthermore, the popular belief about universities is inevitably wrong where the universities in question are defined, as most are wont to define themselves, as "research universities," and where the disciplines covered include the natural sciences most in demand by military-industrial interests, or the social sciences with pretences to prediction and control, sought after by those policy communities of the state which seek power in, and over, human affairs, both at home and abroad. This is no less the case when the universities in question derive their status from the extent to which they are consultants to government or industry. In plain terms, if independent inquiry in the "relevant" areas of the mainstream American research universities, and under the conditions outlined, is predicated upon the independence of the individual university, then, on an everyday basis, those universities have been, and remain hopelessly compromised. Even a cursory acquaintance with the history of the university system should be sufficient to dispel doubts to the contrary.

 

The Co-option of the University

Since the 1880s, businessmen have dominated the boards of trustees of most American universities which, of course, might be thought to explain the corporatisation of the modern university. 9 A more accurate assessment, however, is that this stewardship is better seen as a reflection of the deeper capture of the universities themselves, and on a day-to-day basis. Such a view is assisted by the role which the universities are accorded by the wider society within which they are situated, which, for the most part, is as a service sector devoted to the production of graduates — teachers and technocrats —who will develop, justify, and maintain the exclusivity of capitalism as a political-economic system. And that includes the system's imperatives which, via policies, institutions, and regimes of one type or another result in capitalism's global domination. So steeped is this view that, with no little sense of irony, Michael Ryan observes that two otherwise opposed groups in society, radical teachers and business technocrats, hold identical views as to the operational purposes of universities in the United States though their reasons for doing so differ widely. 10

As regards the former, the proposition appears to be warranted beyond America, and no matter whether the teacher is on the (broadly perceived) left or the right. Thus Michel Foucault identified two functions of the University: "to put students out of circulation," and to "integrate" them into the values of a society. 11 For the conservative ideologue, Allan Bloom, the issue of what is at stake for American society in the course of a student's "four years of freedom" is even more baldly asserted: "They are civilisation's only chance to get him." 12 "Possession" of the student, and therefore, the student's environment, is the objective, but not for its own sake:

The purpose, more finely put, is the maintenance and reproduction of the already-existing power relations conducive to business, within what Frederick Bohm, Director of the Exxon Education Foundation, describes as the University's "cohesion of purpose" which, notably, "leaves out any moral perspective." 14 Thus, it is on the basis of this, and similar pronouncements, and an extended understanding of the tensions between left and right, radical and conservative, which they give rise to that Michael Ryan concludes:

But this situation has less to do with fiats handed down by boards of trustees who, basically, lack the capabilities of to effect their wishes within the faculty, and is more a function of the university becoming increasingly dependent for its survival upon infusions of corporate funding in order to survive as a "research university." Previously, it was the case that the universities were regarded as an intellectual prosthesis provided by the state on the grounds that some research tasks were so considerable in scope, and so beyond the resources of even the largest enterprises, that the "socialisation of intellectual production" was agreeable even to business. 16 They were funded accordingly, especially in the context of the Cold war, and especially where a relation to "national security" could be, or was, asserted. But, with the contraction of the state as a source of infrastructure development, and the growth in non-university research institutions ("think tanks") the patronage of research universities underwent a profound change: the emergent phenomenon is the inability of such universities to attract adequate funding for research which might not have an immediate, and, above all, profitable application, whereas funding is available for those universities prepared to act as, effectively, the research divisions of corporations and the residual government programmes. In most cases this arrangement conceals the fact that, because the university adopts the position of a mendicant in its eagerness to be "relevant" to contemporary demands — namely, it has so internalised the identity of receiving alms that it no longer expects to receive what it needs — the full costs of the research are simply not covered. The result is that corporations and government agencies obtain an undeclared subsidy from whatever source is principally responsible for university funding overall — frequently government education budgets — a practice neo-liberal economic theory, virtually all corporations, and most Western governments disavow as an inducement to dependence upon the "nanny state" when it is described as "welfare" or "social security." 17

Funding foundations are thought to ameliorate this condition, but it is difficult to see why. Foundations are to the super-rich what legitimate businesses are to organised crime: they serve two entirely necessary rehabilitations for what is, ultimately, greed. In the first instance of reputations built on the amassing of fortunes derived from the exploitation of resources and labour as a result of, or under conditions not dissimilar to, conquest, giving some of it away to respectable members of the middle-classes for their otherwise unfunded research; in the second, of the status quo by maintaining an intellectual climate which will not seriously challenge the dominant discourse. And because monetary wealth has received the benediction of American Religion, the excess of it which is offered as alms comes to the clerisy of university professionals not only in measured quantities, but on the understanding that the projects they undertake be conducted with impeccable professional discretion. 18 Funding agencies or foundations, therefore, effect a conservatism in the approach to knowledge which they underwrite in addition to entrenching the conservatism of professions in general. Conversely, they cannot be correlated with the knowledge that insight and experience provide because the historical locales for both are in the margins between disciplines, in the heaths beyond settled accounts of the world.

So long as the regime of selective and institutionalised penury operates, four subordinate, but interrelated, factors or tendencies, all in any case pronounced in modern capitalist society at large, vitiate all attempts to achieve greater intellectual independence. The first of these is the reduction of the University's activities — its courses, research output, and publications — to commodities, or products, in a "generalised market" which services "a society of mall-strolling consumers with short attention spans." 19 Since, so the logic goes, money is the most decisive determinant of institutional existence, the University can satisfy the prerequisite of its survival by teaching whatever is in demand, especially in the light of contested claims concerning the nature of "excellence" within, and between, disciplines. In the absence of any agreement as to what counts as "good" in each field, the "market" masks all dissension with an appeal to the student who, in Bill Readings' economic reformulation of the traditional relationship, "is situated entirely as a consumer, rather than as someone who wants to think." 20 The dignity of a particular course of study is simply erased by its marketability. 21 What is procured, then, is not an education, and what is saved is hardly a university which accords with the popular, idealised concept espoused by von Humboldt; rather, to borrow from Lewis Lapham, the whole process is one of denigration in which the University is conceived as "a resort hotel deserving of respect in the exact degree to which it satisfies the whims of its patrons and meets the public expectation of convenience and style at a bargain price." 22

The second factor, well developed by Regis Debray, concerns the identity of university intellectuals in a generalised market. In particular, the intellectual understands that to exist is to be heard, and that he exists "only in so far as he (sic) is recognised by others as worthy to exist." 23 Thus, in a society marked by the "organic decadence" of capitalist reductionism, university academics are faced with what they construct as a choice between a life of abnegation, or the seeking out of acknowledgment and reward wherever it is forthcoming. The pursuit of the latter, then:

It is nevertheless a free choice of identity enhancement since neither the government nor the private sector of the economy force academics into their respective service, and many are those who refuse despite being offered considerable inducements to enlist. But for those making the choice an ostensible escape is effected from the anomaly of universities — namely, according to Harvard's R. C. Lewontin, a situation in which "academic staff have the education, social status, and special intellectual craft knowledge, of self-employed professionals such as doctors and lawyers, while at the same time are salaried employees who are required to work for periods under conditions set by their employing institution." 25 And clearly, it is an attractive option for some, as David Newsom recounts the American scene in the mid-1990s:

A virtually logical extension to the presence of business interests on the formal controlling bodies of universities, the increasing domination of the University by corporate capital, constitutes the third factor and tendency. In America during the Cold War it became somewhat more entrenched as a form of academic dogma to counter the threat of "world Communism," and eventually found expression in a document entitled The Rights and Responsibilities of Universities and Their Faculties, published under the auspices of the American Association of Universities, which proclaimed that a university was "an association of individual scholars . . . united in loyalty to the ideal of learning, to the moral code, to the country, and to its form of government." It also included the statement "free enterprise is as essential to intellectual as to economic progress." 27 Years later, though, the corporate disposition remained unapologetic in its attitude to free inquiry: William Simon advocated that the withholding of business funds from universities which did not promote its interests, while Business Week felt compelled to alert its readership to the proposition that the existence of Marxists on American campuses could presage an intellectual climate hostile to private enterprise. 28

Their fear was as absurd as it was unjustified, and both because the myopia of business was unable to discern what the more sensitive lens of critical theory saw foregrounded — Debray's "organicity" of the intellectuals:

In a general sense, confirmation is provided from a most unlikely source, the universities themselves. Carnegie Mellon University report that, in 1994, in excess of 1,000 university-industry cooperative research centres had been set up some 200 campuses. Between them they spent USD4.3 billion on research and related activities, involved 12,000 faculty members in the project as well as 17 per cent of the America's PhD students in the sciences and engineering. 30 Also confirmed was Debray's "transfer of power" as evidenced by the chronic and substantial declining share of the federal government's contribution to research and development (to 55 percent in 1993), and the corresponding rise to dominance in some areas — health research, for example — of corporate funding. 31 Thus, in a study by Juliet Merrifield, there was no doubt that a transformation has been achieved:

The implications of this transformation create, in turn, the final factor, the reorientation of the university to, in Ryan's terms, an "economy." In effect this is but the final consummation of the university's relations with the "generalised economy" of the wider society, a conclusion which overturns any notion of the two being defined by their allegiance to unbiased scholarship, and the biased politics of the world, respectively. It is, equally, the satisfaction of two complementary desires, the union of a technologically-created corporate sphere (reliant on university-produced knowledge), and university knowledge which is created by corporate finance. 33 As participatory witnesses to this transaction, students inescapably become part of what Foucault saw as the "rituals of inclusion inside a system of capitalist norms." 34

For many, this represents the "the moral collapse of the university," the "decline of the university," or the "university in ruins." Whatever the perspective of critique, a sense of loss accompanies the understanding of the University-as-corporation. In the context of this analysis, the nature of the loss is most acutely undergone as a general reorganisation of the academy according to the rubric of capitalism, while, in the particular, it is experienced as the "destruction of the humanities as critique." 35 Within the former, critique is pauperised to the extent that, unless it is valued because it is pleasurable, it is, quite simply, unmarketable to the populations of modern economies impatient with the written word (always provided they can read and understand it), and dependent more than ever on media ruled by sensationalism, personality at the expense of symbol, image at the expense of concept, and obsessed with distribution to the detriment of production. 36

By even these injuriously brief accounts, so subordinated to the dominant interests of society is the university that any self-conscious and self-critical assessment of it would have to conclude that it is, in the main, just another instrument of the dominant political-economy. Removing the term "just," however, allows for a necessary expansion and refinement because the subordination extends to the University being more than an educational institution with a corporate ethic, as developed in above: as is documented in the works of Jonathan Feldman, Michael Parenti, and Lawrence Soley, it has become so integrated into corporate life that its investment portfolios and consultancies make it complicit in Third World repression; its emphasis on the consultative function alone has corroded its commitment to education; and even the commonplace crimes it now commits are indistinguishable from the worst in corporate history — fraud, deception, and corporate corruption. 37

In sum, loyalty oaths served only as a general instrument for academic discipline, but did not preclude the imposition of more traditional forms of censure, such as dismissal, denial of tenure, or the cutting-off of research funds, where critique, or the threat of critique from the "left" arose in relation to capitalism, U.S. imperialism, wars, and other social ills consequential to all three. 38 With the passage of time, the corporatisation of the university, in all its fuller expressions, provided a more urgent inducement for these measures to be exercised, ultimately to the point where an inversion was obvious. Thus the sociologist, Sigmund Diamond, could be denied a position at Harvard on the grounds of his public, civil-libertarian resistance to McCarthyism, but the same university was untroubled by the fact that its scientists invented one of the most horrendous of "conventional" modern battlefield weapons, Napalm. (That cisplatin (a treatment for hepatitis B) was developed by Miichigan State, and Gatorade by the University of Florida are hardly consolations). 39

 

The Privileging of Annihilation

If at this point is introduced the eminently reasonable proposition expressed by Ryan — that reason "is inseparable from the institutions in which it is preserved and passed on, and in the practice of which it has its being," 40 — then the idealised notion of universities as sites of independent inquiry is seen to founder on its confrontation with their everyday practice. Not only is the university-as-institution a preposterous site of knowledge because of its institutional involvement in the antitheses of education, but its faculty is not credible to the extent that they embody the corporatist ethic of the institution. As Wilshire phrase it, the "ultimate educating force is who I am." 41 His argument, which is identical to Debray's in this regard, is that the teacher carries both a special authority and a special responsibility to exemplify personally, "the nature, value, and meaning of truth." 42 It follows, therefore, that teachers who identify with the pathologies of the university pointed to here — what Wilshire perceptively regards as its "moral collapse" — are at the same time exemplifying themselves and, more importantly, their discourse, to their students, and their society more broadly.

There is, furthermore, no limiting case for the co-option of the University. Projects involving indiscriminate, massive, and wanton death and destruction have been, and continue to be embraced within the professionalised ambit of academic expertise, so much so that, in the interests of honesty, Chomsky advocated that universities establish in their very centres, appropriately named "Departments of Death," "Death Technology," and "Theory of Oppression." 43 In effect, his proposal was an alert to the fact, attested to in the disciplinary histories of the natural, and social sciences, that war, and especially the Cold War, has been an undisguised benefactor of the academy. 44 Indeed, for those in it who were prepared to accept the latter's strictures in order to enjoy its opportunities, the retrospective glance can be unwelcome and uncomfortable:

What is being suggested here is no more than an overture, a first indication of just how unremarkable, in a university context, have been other, more dramatic excursions in annihilation.

In 1959, at the Commander Hotel in Cambridge, Mass., Harvard President Nathan Pusey made the following observation about his institution:

Although everything that Pusey had to say about Harvard was, and remains true, it is the invocation of "every conflict in our nation's history" that deserves particular examination because of the evident pride Pusey expresses in relation to them. His evident concern is to laud Harvard's substantial contributions without reference to the causes which they have served, an inexcusable default in a post-Nuremberg world sensitised to the dictum that patriotism and duly authorised commands are held to be subordinate to humanitarian ethics. In other words a prudential caution attaches to serving the state in general, and, given the history of the United States, serving the US in particular. And the reason is clear on two counts: first, there broad critical scholarly agreement that the United States is a "country made by war," that "[p]olitics and folklore sustained the centrality of war for Americans long after the Revolution," that war is an ever-present metaphor in other struggles in America, and that the armed forces "spurred economic development." 47 Second, and more significantly in the current context, what Russell F. Weigley has called the "American way of war" was defined very early in the nation's existence, against the native Americans, by none other than George Washington, in his instructions to Major General John Sullivan on how to proceed against the Iroquois in 1779: he was to "lay waste to the all the settlements around . . . that the country may no be merely overrun but destroyed.." Further, he was ordered to:

Understanding perfectly the tenor of his commander, Sullivan expressed his accord with the statement that "the Indians shall see that there is malice enough in out hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support." 48 Alien was the dictum of Polybius, that it is not the object of war to destroy one's enemies but to cause them to mend their ways.

When subsequently extermination again became emblematic of the Union against the Confederacy in the Civil War, and each successive war thereafter, historians began to understand that the "American way of war" was a particular, though not unique, egregiously brutal and unlimited type of war informed by a "strategy of annihilation." 49 Struggling to understand it, some, like Charles Royster, found their voices in eloquent and insightful accounts which resonated with American Exceptionalism:

Nathan Pusey's pride in the services Harvard had rendered to the United States over the years, no less than his embrace of the national mission of 1959, required either an amnesiac condition which covered one hundred and eighty years, or a sense that the criminal excesses of the national strategy was irrelevant in the interests of his institution remaining a courtier to Washington. Either way, if Harvard is taken as the exemplary model for American universities, the prognosis for education as for critical resistance to the state in the coming years, was bleak, and was eventually proven to be so. Just over thirty years later, and with considerable justification, Neil Postman could write that one the great popular myths of education — that the study of the humanities was politically liberating and ethically uplifting — should better be understood as "balderdash:"

With a fitting focus on the exemplar, however, if we briefly examine one of the great dichotomies of global strategy of the last half-century we find that the University in general and Harvard in particular have exerted an extraordinary and, pathological influence on the way the world is known. This is because the understanding of the (Soviet) East within the East-West relationship owes much to the fact that Western Sovietology was a para-disciplinary discourse dominated, in the first instance, by the importation of anti-Russian bias acquired as a result of study in western Europe, and then, research centres in the United States which, returning the compliment, appointed European and Russian emigres who imparted the same hostility while resident in the US. The earlier acquisition had it origins in America's need to understand the Soviet Union in the pre-World War II period, and consequently, decisions taken by Robert F. Kelley, a Harvard graduate and former instructor who was head of the State Department's Eastern European Division from 1924-1938. In this period he ensured that his Soviet specialists were trained in either Paris or Berlin as were, for example, Charles Bohlen (later ambassador to the USSR), and George Kennan, respectively. Both deserve the title "fathers of containment," 52 Kennan moreso, but not just because of the famous "X" telegram; his early writings and memoirs are marked by the adoption of the nineteenth century dichotomy between Teutons and Slavs wherein German culture was viewed most favourably, whereas Russian civilisation was seen as unchanging and barbaric. 53

The later effect was noticeable when Harvard, with its Russian Research Centre, was charged with training American Sovietologists after 1945 and the course offerings were seen to follow in the intellectual tradition of Kennan. Thus, the peoples of the USSR were either described in terms such as "heathen" or "primitive", or genealogically linked with Genghis Khan (which amounted to the same thing) 54 . Not only was a permanent Soviet threat thesis perpetuated, but also a contempt and/or hate for the country which was the object of study. Furthermore it was a disposition which could be sustained without great difficulty by the practices of recruiting emigre intellectuals who shared the animus — such as Zbiegniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Talcott Parsons, Richard Pipes, Thomas Schelling, and Adam Ulam — and so were in a position of recognised authority within the foreign policy discourse to pass it on to successive generations of students, or graduates who rose to prominence within the policy-making bureaucracy — such as John J. McCloy, Robert McNamara, Donald Regan and Caspar Weinberger — where they did not actually accept such positions themselves.

Yet it is important to understand that emigre, mainly eastern European intellectuals were only the more visible and constant reminders of the discourse of Soviet-hating at Harvard and in the US. more generally. Others, whose details are understandably less well publicised, were relied upon to establish an understanding more intimate, more extensive, and more immediate than mere scholarly inquiry could impart. Hence, one of the major enterprises of Soviet studies was the "utilisation" of Russians who were exiles or refugees for reasons having to do with World War II (so-called Displaced Persons), and other Russians who had been encouraged to defect from the elite of the "Soviet World". These were to be interviewed for information thought to be indispensable to, inter alia, US Air Force intelligence, in return for possible academic employment in the America. Of this development, Diamond concludes "the intelligence aspect of the work of the Russian Research Centre and the research aspect of its work cannot be distinguished." 55

What could be distinguished, however, were those who were identifiably neither eastern European, nor Russian, and whose presence confounded the declared tenets of every American university. These were academics and members of research institutes thought to possess valuable scientific knowledge and expertise on the Soviet Union, but whose records would otherwise disqualify them from entering the United States. They were Nazis and Nazi collaborators, and they came in their hundreds — 642 between May 1945 and December 1952 — and, most likely, thousands, under the aegis of Project Paperclip, a program that had its origins in 1944, long before the advent of the Cold War. They came to the United States, moreover, with the full knowledge and approval of their host institutions, which included the universities, "think tanks," and industrial corporations of highest renown. They included, for example, Nicholas Poppe, a famous language expert, and former employee of the Wannsee Institute, an SS research facility which had been the site of the announcement of the "final solution to the Jewish question." Nevertheless, Harvard initially agreed to offer him a faculty position on condition that the US. Government certify in writing that Poppe's presence was in the national interest; despite this being forthcoming, he was eventually denied a position there only to take one at the University of Washington. 56

But of particular significance for this paper is the fact that Project Paperclip was directed by George Kennan and closely supervised by personnel within the State Department's Office of Research Intelligence, in particular, Evron M. Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick typifies the interpenetration of academic and state space and, thus, the homogenising of their discourse(s). He later became Executive Director of the American Political Science Association, and in the company of his wife, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a Georgetown University political science professor, and former ambassador to the United Nations in the Reagan Administration, a member of the editorial board of the journal of the American Peace Society, World Affairs,. Intellectually, he was a defender of conventional political "science" and, although it does not necessarily follow, primitive and closed. From his position in APSA he not so much attacked, as condemned critical theory on the grounds that it assails "the very foundations of the scholarly ethic: reason, objectivity, and freedom," going so far, ironically, as to associate it with a politically inspired attack on objectivity and reason by forces hardly worth differentiating from Communism, Fascism, and, ironically, Nazism! 57

This particular example, of hysterical anti-intellectualism and ethical disengagement by the academic community is, however, but an acute case of a chronic condition. In the thirty-plus year span of Kirkpatrick's career of influence upon American knowing, other, convergent developments and influences, of a no less reprehensible complexion, give the lie to any suggestion that Kirkpatrick and Project Paperclip were temporary or situational aberrations. Examples of the type cited to this point, and immediately following, and the documentation provided to accompany Sigmund Diamond's analysis of the University in the early Cold War dispel any myth that it was a place for the most part removed from the inanities of McCarthyism. To the contrary, they and he show why it was that many prominent administrators, faculty, and students were so caught up with the popular suspicions of the time that they actively and secretly sought close ties with the intelligence agencies 58 . In the process the University became a willing accessory to, and accomplice of the FBI and the CIA.

 

Celebrants and Celebrations in the Discipline of International Relations

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Samuel P. Huntington, director of Harvard's Centre for International Affairs, joined his opinions with those earlier expressed by Stanford's Thomas Bailey to the effect that the foreign policy elite were even right to deceive the citizenry about the true nature of American interventions and other military actions essentially on the grounds that (i) deception was an inescapable attribute of the process of government; (ii) some people no longer accepted their inferiority to the governing classes; (iii) democracy is possessed of a "distemper" or "excess" which facilitates "previously passive or unorganised groups in the population ..... blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students, and women [to embark] on concerted efforts to establish their claims to opportunities, positions, rewards, and privileges, which they had not considered themselves entitled to before," and (iv) effective democracy "usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups." 59

At other times — in the 1960s — Huntington designed the forced urbanisation of the South Vietnamese peasantry as a legitimate instrument of US strategy and in so doing was the architect of the reduction of the rural population of the country by some 30 per cent, the consequential transformation of Vietnam from a food exporter to a food importer, and the parallel legitimation of a rural bombing campaign over five times more intense than the US campaigns against Germany and Japan in World War II combined. 60 In the same decade he also advocated that political scientists become social engineers rather than theoreticians, and, somewhat consistently, that US foreign policy concern itself less with the development of democratic government among its allies and other states with which it had influence, and more with supporting those who were, no matter their undemocratic character, effective. 61 None of this was an impediment to his appointment to President Carter's National Security Council or his continued tenure and standing at Harvard.

Henry Kissinger, too, was welcome in this milieu, no objection being raised to his presence, let alone academic status, despite the fact that his record of foreign policy stewardship is, literally, strewn with support for assassination, murder, and coup d'etat (Chile, 1973), betrayal in the name of power politics (Kurdistan/northern Iraq, 1975), invasion and subsequent genocide (East Timor, 1975), just to name three representative examples, the last two of which produced a combined death toll of at least 150,000 , and 600,000 refugees. 62

In the light of these examples, and the International Studies Association — South Region's decision to invite former Director of Central Intelligence, William Colby, to give the keynote address at its annual meeting in 1993, 63 it seems reasonable to infer that such persons and their exploits exert an almost pornographic attraction upon the mainstream discourse; it provides a voyeuristic association with those who have, or had power over the life and death of nations and their peoples, an occasion of encouragement for their would-be imitators, and stimulation for the more passive. Certainly, it was implicit in the invitation to Colby that his direction of the Phoenix program — a computer-directed campaign within the war in Vietnam, made notorious by its "assassination, torture, and systematic savagery," which resulted in the deaths of between 20,000 and 60,000 Viet Cong and suspected communist sympathisers — was absolved, declared irrelevant, or even retrospectively endorsed. 64 As well, it confirms, under the guise of a scholarly enterprise, the close historical affinity between the mainstream discourse of international relations and successive theories, practices, and practitioners which countenance genocide. 65 And, should it be doubted, the ongoing status enjoyed by people such as Colby, Kissinger, and Huntington in the University, confirms the organic nature of the relationship between the state, university faculty, and significantly, students.

What needs to be emphasised at this juncture is the fact that, though attempts have been made to place restrictions on the more invasive activities of the state on US campuses, those concerning the intelligence agencies have evidently failed for the most part. Indeed, on the basis of the above examples, and Loch Johnson's analysis, we should infer that the will to resist the both the constrictions of American knowing, and the premature closure of alternatives simply never existed for long enough, or strongly enough to keep at bay the dominant discourse. Today, as a consequence, the CIA attempts to open, and maintain some form of contact with, approximately 25 per cent of the approximately 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States, has mail and telephone links with about 18 per cent, and actually visits some 10 per cent, especially those offering advanced programs in language, science, and foreign policy. 66 The last-mentioned category covers a multitude of activities under which the CIA's four directorates (Operations, Intelligence Administration, and Science and Technology) and the Office of Public Affairs engage in data and information collection (which also covers the use of academics in covert operations), recruitment of foreign agents (including covert recruitment of American and foreign faculty and students by the CIA) and general staff, research consulting, research contracting, career instruction, protection of campus recruiters and public relations. 67

The National Security Education Act of 1991 is but a current indicator of the institutionalisation of these practices. In formal terms it is piece of legislation that was written and sponsored by the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, David Boren, in response to a post-Cold War world held to consist of regional, non-communist threats. According to a former CIA senior estimates officer, David MacMichael, "gives the directors of the national security system a solid foothold on university campuses and a significant amount of control over their programs of international affairs, language and area studies, and of the students enrolled in them 68 ". The money provided under the Act will, inter alia, fund scholarships for student to study abroad and for programs in "critical areas". The students, then, will be subject to a type of double jeopardy: as the Act makes clear, they will be on Defence Department money, studying the society, language and culture of a country the government of the United States thinks might pose a "security problem", and in that country; at the same time they will also have their program of study determined by another government agency, the Defence Intelligence College, which will monitor their progress which, inevitably, leads to graduation and the time when the Secretary of Defence is empowered to order them into service in an intelligence organisation, under threat of financial penalty. The conditions of this arrangement would, therefore, appear to deserve MacMichael's conclusion: "Universities, under this scheme, merely contract to provide training for the nation's intelligence services." 69

Tolerances of anti-intellectual practices and apocalyptic concepts such as those discussed come to reign as regressive consequences for four reasons integral to a capitalised, corporatised regime of knowledge production:

In other words they reign because they are the logical conclusions to forms of knowing which include prejudicial abstraction, abusive simplification, and an obsessive concern for the detail which leads intimate knowledge which is unleavened by empathy or humility in the face of the complexity which the Other turns to us. As well, they reign now because of an unchallenged discursive privilege, just as they did during the Cold War. Then, privilege (and protection) permeated the intelligence project. Not only were graduates of the universities mentioned earlier recruited disproportionately to such organisations as the OSS and the CIA, and thus both received rewards for their orthodoxy, but steps were taken to ensure that as little disruption as possible, intellectually speaking, came their respective ways 71 . Beneficiaries have included numerous Harvard professors such as: Richard Betts and Samuel P. Huntington, who published an article in International Security in 1986, based on research funded by the CIA which that agency would not allow to be acknowledged; Nadav Safran, director of the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, who book on Saudi Arabia was funded in the amount of $107,430; 72 and Ernest May and Richard Neustadt, whose $1.2 million study of intelligence was openly sponsored by the CIA and praised by the university's President, Derek Bok. 73 But large sums have also gone elsewhere — for example $25 million to the MSU (Michigan State University) Project which, under the pretext of training South Vietnamese police officials and supporting the development of democracy, maintained a dictatorship in accordance with US strategy. 74

More recently, the inability of US intelligence to in any way anticipate the end of the Cold War, and the break-up of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc — in effect to discharge its raison d'etre — and yet not be held publicly accountable for either of their defaults, is to comprehend the extent of this extraordinary privilege. At its simplest, it is the unembarrassed indulgence of egregious failure. But it is not just a singular privilege; it also mandates limboic exile for the critical. The failure requires little illustration other than to note the constructions, ad seriatim, of an unchanging and unchangeable Soviet Union and Warsaw Treaty Organisation; of hostile intent, replete with bomber gaps, missile gaps and windows of vulnerability; of implacable Soviet opposition to the West since the beginning of the Cold War; and a Soviet Union which thought it could fight and win a nuclear war which dissolved notwithstanding the weight of worst-case scenario writing and mainstream international relations theory which held that they could not, and would not. The privilege, because it remains, deserves further consideration.

 

Understanding the World: The End of the Cold War

Any discussion of the end of the Cold War either starts with, includes, or ends with the failure of the U.S. intelligence community to predict it. Given the centrality of the Soviet threat as an ontological instrument, this is no more than is to be expected. Unfortunately, such an expectation obscures the fact that, in relation to the anticipation of major events of national and international significance, the U.S. record is not one which would inspire confidence (which in, and of itself would be insignificant if it were not for the fact that the Newtonian mind-set which dominates all aspects of intellectual production — from the mainstream discourses produced, and reproduced in the academy to the policy formulation process — marginalises alternative approaches at the same time as it promises insight, certainty and control). Hence the poverty of this official and/or celebrated futurology is revealing: Robert Heilbroner recounts that, for most of the two decades or more prior to the 1970s, economists failed to see such large-scale events as the advent of the multinational corporation, the rise of Japan as a major economic power, and the emergence of inflation as a chronic problem of all industrial nations; 75 similarly, more recent "world-scale happenings" such as the decline in productivity suffered by all the Western powers in the 1970s, or the striking loss of global economic leadership of the United States were not anticipated by "the great research institutions". 76

And since the Central Intelligence Agency is, arguably, the greatest of the research institutions available to the U.S. Government, its history, "rich with failures" according to Thomas Powers, needs to be emphasised so as to contextualise the relatively normality of its most recent failure. 77 Thus, among the former, and the list is by no means exhaustive, would be such major developments as the first Soviet atomic bomb, the North Korean and Chinese invasions in Korea, the Hungarian revolt, Fidel Castro's victory and Khrushchev's subsequent placement of missiles in Cuba, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the invasion of Afghanistan. 78 But whereas these intelligence defaults were relatively local and raised questions concerning the quality and competence of area specialisation and understanding, the failure to predict the end of the Cold War is more critical still since it threw the mainstream discourse of International Relations (IR), which claimed to understand such matters, into an existential crisis. Or rather, it would have thrown mainstream IR into an existential crisis had it been a genuinely self-critical and scholarly discourse: simply put, the phenomenon which the end of the Cold War represented — international system change of an extraordinary magnitude — goes to the heart of IR theory as an explanatory and predictive instrument. In which case the question, or rather, questions, becomes (i) why did the failure occur?, and (ii) why is its existence being avoided?

In attempting to answer the first, part of the answer is trite: in almost the same manner that Francis Fukuyama's "end-of-history" thesis was seized upon by an audience eager for an alternative, no matter how sophomoric, to the deep forebodings of Paul Kennedy and others of the "declinist" genre, reflection was jettisoned in favour of triumphalism. Thus, Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski acknowledged the "grand transformation of the organising structure and motivating spirit of global politics" without in any way whatsoever conceding that it was unexpected; indeed, he explains this "success of the West and, specifically, the United States" in terms of the latter's victory in two areas: "first, in deterring the Soviet Union from dominating Eurasia and, second, in discrediting its ideology and exhausting its economy". 79 Yet, in reality, Brzezinski has explained nothing, even in his own terms. Since the reasons he gives were "realities" throughout most of the seventy-odd years of the Soviet Union's existence, the task incumbent upon him is to elucidate why it was, that in the specific period 1989-1991, it unraveled. As Theodore Draper frames the problematic:

Draper then proceeds to argue that the collapse "was a specific event that occurred during the Gorbachev regime," 81 and as a result of his "structural reforms [which] divided and demoralised the Party, so that it could no longer function as the only political bonding which held the centrifugal forces within the country from flying apart". 82 What is significant about this approach is the way in which Draper presents the event as discrete, or singular — which so often is the legitimate wont and strength of an historian — because it is that very quality which, inter alia, Pierre Allan and Friedrich Kratochwil identify as a limiting condition in mainstream IR theory's currently dominant variant — neo-realism. 83 In Kratochwil's account, moreover, we find an understanding of not only how this came to be the case, but also how it came, in effect not to matter. The former is quite straightforward and is articulated in terms of three embarrassing paradoxes. First, neo-realism is "accustomed to explaining changes in terms of shifting patterns of growth or the distribution of capabilities" and, thus, when faced with fundamental change, within a system in which absolute and relative capabilities were constant, and without hegemonic war, the problematic was essentially alien. 84 Second, since the international change so effected was the result of "the reconstitution of the domestic political systems rather than from systemic factors....neo-realism had no conceptual apparatus for understanding the nature, scope and direction of change" (emphasis added). 85 Third and finally, neo-realism's pretensions to "greater precision, depth and, above all, scientific respectability" led it to hold in contempt the insights of its predecessors — "fuzzy realism practised or preached by mere theologians, or historians, such as Niebuhr or Kennan" — which at least were sensitive to "the linkages between domestic and international change". 86

These paradoxes, in turn, are accounted for in terms of the dominant ethic and aspiration of the American social sciences previously referred to when considering the regime of intellectual production. Principal among these, as Kratochwil affirms, are the willful attempts to understand ("solve") political problematics by "applying the \0xD4scientific' method; the consequential requirement to ask only those questions which are, seemingly, susceptible to that method; the further consequence of "premature closure"; and, ultimately, the reinforcement and rigidification of "orthodoxies based on a mistaken ideal", which, all taken together, leaves the putative mainstream study of politics in the "unenviable position of not measuring up to the standards of science..". 87 All of these operations, it should be noted, extend directly out of the "professionalisation of [a] discipline" 88 seeking "objectivity, legitimacy, and predictability" 89 of the type found in the more successful hard sciences. Or, as it might be put more succinctly in a Freudian vein, out of "physics envy". (And the massive irony here is that it is an envy based on Newtonian, or pre-quantum physics, and so is innocent of the revolution in the philosophy of science which quantum physics effected, including, of course, a rejection of "objectivity" and an acceptance of the fact that "observation-is-participation").

Clearly, in the process outlined, though science is not, nor can it be served, due obeisance is, however, paid to the "profession" by resisting all pressures which would disturb it if they are taken seriously, including the tolerance, "bordering on the miraculous" for cognitive dissonance as an operating principle. 90 In the place of controlled and repeated experimentation under specific conditions — a total impossibility in political matters — the mainstream IR theorists settle for "mastering a particular technique, or method", and a "hypertrophic concern with rigour" to the point where peer review revolves around this competence and concern, and issues "are often discussed on a level of abstraction that defies any further detailed examination". 91 Here, a return to the opening lines of Brzezinski's essay is mandated since they exactly typify both the amnesiac mind of mainstream IR theory and its insulation against criticism:

Thus, in a single disclaimer, the particular way of living and thinking which was the Cold War is "forgotten" out of mainstream IR discourse as though its contemporary practices didn't matter and its consequences were, and are of no importance in the present or, for that matter, for some time to come. It is as though the general pathologies of mainstream IR, and the particular compulsions of mainstream Sovietology — which included the former's ahistorical orientation (except where it was relieved by misreadings of history), and lack of sensitivity to profound change and its attendant problems in conjunction with an exaggerated institutional focus on the Politburo 93 — were either mere peccadilloes or pragmatic means justified by the nature of a virtuous end, but, in any case, certainly not the cause for what in some ecclesiastical circles is known as "an examination of conscience". Unwittingly, it would seem, Brzezinski's representative refusal to contemplate the intellectual, political, social and economic harm wrought in the name of mainstream IR theory not only recalls the ethic of avoidance canvassed earlier, but also, in Kratochwil's apposite description, a certain characteristic "speechlessness" in the political discourse of America whenever a rending is threatened in the whole cloth of its identity. 94

Yet this regime of productive truth remains essentially unchanged since there has been no attempt to disqualify it from involvement; indeed, it is now being reinvented as the source of wisdom on, and insight into the post-Cold War world — as though prodigality in one era was a guarantee of success in another. For this magisterium to have continued for so long required the complicity of generations of mainstream intellectuals who, it must be emphasised, did not have to be bent to the purposes of enterprise and the state as have intellectuals in some settings where the requirements of both were incompatible with the practice of free thought; on the contrary, they were, in Edward Saids's expression of disdain, "flatteringly invited to the White House, and rewarded presidents with the incense due to royalty." 95 For this to happen, though, the their had to be regularised and unremarkable, the hallmarks of an entrenched discourse.

The "incense," though, is a fairy tale, being, rather, the approved version. And the problem is not that it is totally false, rather that it is only, and could ever be, partially true. It enthralls children but in point of historical fact, and as a guide for action in the world, it is not only profoundly lacking, but dangerous in the extreme. As the absolute it is represented to be, the "incense" becomes the source of arrogance, inadequacy, delusion, and crime committed in the name of strategic intelligence. Or in Michel Crozier's reflection, the forgetting process by which "a partial truth embraced for too long becomes an insane idea." 96

 

II

 

A Hippocratic Oath for Academics

The very notion that academics who practise International Relations might, in a declaratory sense, adopt a code of ethics along the lines of the Hippocratic Oath is, it is conceded, fanciful. That they would consider themselves duty-bound by such a code in its own terms is even more fanciful. The reasons need not be canvassed here: they are too numerous and too well-known to devote space to. Indeed, most academics are content to observe the customary (and now legal) proscriptions against plagiarism and sexual harassment in return for blandishments that they live exemplary ethical professional lives. Furthermore, to suggest a formal declaration can be caricatured as a return in the direction of the oaths of allegiance, and something, therefore, which only a fool would propose. At the very least it would be pilloried as blasphemy against the economy of the university.

But suppose, on reflection, it was concluded that an ethical system which declared plagiarism and sexual harassment to be anathema, but which honoured those who had advised the state how to commit industrialised mass murder was, to say the least, inadequate. Suppose, also on reflection, it was concluded that the "moral collapse of the university" had gone far enough; that society in general was disgusted with the record and quality of advice that its university academics had rendered the state, and, more specifically, that the national treasure which is the student population required something more substantial by way of ethical example in their teachers than observation of the customary and legal proscriptions noted above — that, in other words, society required a minimal assurance from all academics similar to that which (individually) its members receive when they consult medical practitioners — that, no matter the circumstances, the operating principle is, and will be, primum non nocere (first do no harm)? Indeed, could the medical ethics said to reside in the guidance provided by the Hippocratic Oath be a consensual foundation of such assurance? [The Oath itself is a statement, attributed to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, that serves as an ethical guide for physicians — especially "to do no harm," and to keep medical confidences — and is incorporated into the graduation ceremonies at many medical schools. By way of a tentative suggestion, this part of the paper ventures such a proposition.

Consider, first, the Hippocratic Oath in popular version (modified only by the need to provide sentence numbers, and sentence separation for ease of reference in the discussion below)

  1. I swear by Apollo the physician, by Aesculapius, Hygeia, and Panacea, and I take to witness all the gods, and all the goddesses, to keep according to my ability and my judgment the following Oath:
  2. To consider dear to me as my parents him who taught me this art; to live in common with him and if necessary to share my goods with him; to look upon his children as my own brothers, to teach them this art if they so desire without fee or written promise; to impart to my sons and the sons of the master who taught me and disciples who have enrolled themselves and have agreed to the rules of the profession, but to these alone, the precepts and the instruction.
  3. I will prescribe regimen for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgement and never do harm to anyone.
  4. To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug, nor give advice which may cause his death. Nor will I give a woman a pessary to procure abortion.
  5. But I will preserve the purity of my life and my art.
  6. I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners (specialists in this art).
  7. In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing and all seduction, and especially from the pleasures of love with women or with men, be they free or slaves.
  8. All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession or outside of my profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal.
  9. If I keep this oath faithfully, may I enjoy my life and practice my art, respected by all men and in all times; but if I swerve from it or violate it, may the reverse be my lot."

Clearly some of it is redundant for current purposes: to begin, the references to the patron of medicine, and the deities of health, medicine and healing, respectively, (1) can be surrendered without any loss of relevance; secular affirmations, if that is the preference, are now such an integral part of official, solemnly sworn intentions that they are accepted without quibble. Similarly (2): though it acknowledges the deep sense of obligation we incur with respect to our teachers, it is doubtful whether the extension of it their families needs to be honoured by an ethico-professional oath, especially where it comprises property rights of a substantial nature which do not apply elsewhere in Western society. Furthermore, discharging the obligation to teach the discipline of International Relations "without written fee" would almost certainly create both indefensible privilege and contravene the allegedly sound financial management of most modern universities. And finally, the intention to teach the discipline only to those men who accept "the rules of the profession," is best omitted in the interests of an open intellectual life within and without the university; besides, it might create the impression, already abroad in the community, that International Relations is an occult practice, something done behind closed doors by consenting male adults.

The third undertaking, very much to the contrary, needs to be retained, with only one word changed, and would read as follows:

This is the central tenet of the Hippocratic Oath and would, I suggest, be an acceptable foundation for an academic oath taken by teachers of International Relations. It is the passage which gives rise to the most famous phrase associated with the Oath, although the expression itself never appears in these exact words in anything by Hippocrates: the reason, apparently, is that, when the Roman physician, Galen, was translating the former's magnum opus, Epidemics (Book I, Section XI), from the original Greek into Latin, his sense of what Hippocrates meant by the injunction "As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least do no harm" was represented by primum non nocere (first do no harm). Moreover the responsibility it carries does not vary between the clinic and the classroom in as much as it defines a way of thinking which places the welfare of the patient / student above all other concerns. Moreover, and by extension, the duty "to do no harm" would apply to students only in the first and most immediate instance: clearly, it is the ordering principle in all the actions which would be undertaken by academics in their relations with the communities and societies beyond the university.

The two sentences comprising (4), and the one sentence that is (5), extend and repeat this commitment but in more detailed terms. Essentially, the obligation is to counsel students in life-enhancing politics (however they might be defined) in, for example, the following terms:

The specific opposition to abortion, on the other hand, would undoubtedly be the cause of profound disagreement in any contemporary Western university setting; yet, for all of that, it is not essential in any ethical commitment an International Relations academic might make in the context of a minimal code of conduct. At its centre lies a choice between evils which a simple declaration cannot be expected to resolve; in any case, it is not the intention of this proposal to place domestic laws, which frequently sanction abortion, in the way of its feasibility.

To this writer at least, (6) appears to be sound advice, conveying the reality that there are limits to our knowledge and skill which must be recognised, no matter how strong the inducements are to act outside our competencies. Perhaps it could read:

Limits to behaviour also form the basis of (7) but they are unexceptional in the contemporary setting for the simple reason that it is difficult to imagine a modern university that does not already have an ethical code to this same effect, even in the unlikely event that the civil law is silent on the matter. For these reasons it is not an essential component of the proposed code. The matter of confidentiality raised in (8) is probably not worthy of inclusion, either, on the grounds that, contrary to the medical profession, there is a great deal of information which academics come to know in the exercise of their daily profession which should be "spread abroad;" moreover, where personal and other details become gossip, the caution as to spreading it would appear to be covered already by primum non nocere. Finally, (9) is an acknowledgement of the binary relationship between the need to be respected for living an ethical professional life according to the Oath, and, in default of this, the need to be held accountable, if only in terms of reputation. Accordingly, it should be included, unchanged.

A minimal code of ethics for International Relations academics would, therefore read:

Conceded immediately is that, even if such a minimal code were to become de rigueur, there is a high probability that it would become a casualty of both the genuinely ambiguous nature of the world that academics are called upon to diagnose, describe, and predict, as well as what Pascal scorned as the "utility of interpretations." And these predations notwithstanding, there is a need to answer this question: "What would be the discernible public and pedagogical benefit from requiring academics to take such an oath?" (though this is a question which cannot be divorced from questions concerning the efficacy of law in general, and ethical codes in particular, be they sworn, informal, or unwritten — in other words questions concerning the codes and conventions which currently operate under various undeclared regimes). In sum, there is no shortage of legitimately difficult challenges to the status quo which quite likely could relegate notions of a declared ethical code to the realm of utopian discourse.

For all of that, however, if all that is on offer is default, or worse, deferral — effectively, the celebration of the careers of the likes of Samuel Huntington, Henry Kissinger, and Milton Friedman as stellar performances — might there not be a reaction along the lines of thinking and acting that have marked the renewed interest in war crimes prosecution, even while conceding the profound imperfections that attend these enterprises? More specifically, the proposition is that a critical understanding of the roles of leading universities — be they of the type and nature which this paper addressed earlier, or, more broadly, which permitted researchers at MIT and Vanderbilt University to expose more than 110 mentally retarded children and hundreds of pregnant women (none of whom were adequately informed of the risks) to radioactive materials in the 1940s and 1950s, and similar, subsequent experiments conducted by Columbia University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Washington in the 1960s and 1970s, or of the type and nature in which mental and psychiatric patients at Tulane University, and the Universities of Missouri and Minnesota, respectively, were given mind-altering drugs such as LSD in studies conducted for the US armed forces 97 — regardless of discipline, could cause a reconsideration of the practices that are ethically acceptable. In the light of the fact that some universities are now do indebted to sources of the problem rather than the solutions — for example, the University of Texas at Austin, by 1991, had 1,051 endowed chairs, endowed professorships, and endowed faculty fellowships 98 — the prospect of it being generated by faculty members must be seen as problematic, but this is not to say that a combination of concerned faculty members and students is out of the question.

Questions, ultimately, are in profusion in this matter, but it would be a mistake to believe that the difficulties which attend answering them dissolve the need to contemplate reform, if only because the obscene and egregious traditions alluded to here in part are creating their own persistent challenges as well. The suggestion, and the hope, then, is that that which goes by the generic, if altogether too gentle a term, "harm," could, like all great institutional excesses, first create its own powerful opposition, then subsequently it own demise, and finally, its epitaph — along the lines of these lines borrowed selectively from Nizar Qabbani's 1967 banned poem,

Footnotes to the Book of the Setback:

Or worse, if Voltaire lent the licence:

 

Endnotes

Note 1: As cited in Milan Rai, Chomsky's Politics (London: Verso, 1995), p. 125 (hereafter cited as Rai, Chomsky's Politics). Back.

Note 2: As cited, ibid. Back.

Note 3: Regis Debray, Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France, trans. David Macey (London: NLB, 1981), p. 49 (hereafter cited as Debray, Teachers, Writers, Celebrities). Back.

Note 4: ibid. Back.

Note 5: ibid. Back.

Note 6: Paul Bove, In the Wake of Theory (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992), p. 66 (hereafter cited as Bove, In the Wake of Theory). Back.

Note 7: Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism; The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 320. Back.

Note 8: Michael Parenti, Against Empire (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995), p. 180 (hereafter cited as Parenti, Against Empire). Back.

Note 9: ibid, p. 177-178; and Lawrence C. Soley, Leasing the Ivory Tower: The Corporate Takeover of Academia (Boston: South End, 1995), pp. 19-21 (hereafter cited as Soley, Leasing the Ivory Tower). Back.

Note 10: Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 132 (hereafter cited as Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction). Back.

Note 11: As cited in Bove, In the Wake of Theory, p. 95. Back.

Note 12: Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy And Impoverished The Souls Of Today's Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 336. Back.

Note 13: Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction. p. 132. Back.

Note 14: As cited, ibid, p. 134. Back.

Note 15: ibid, p. 136. Back.

Note 16: R. C. Lewontin, "The Cold War and the Transformation of the Academy," in Noam Chomsky et al, The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York: New Press, 1997), p. 3, (hereafter cited as Chomsky et al, The Cold War and the University). Back.

Note 17: Soley, Leasing the Ivory Tower, pp. 32-35. Back.

Note 18: Bruce Wilshire, The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity, and Alienation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 249 (hereafter cited as Wilshire, The Moral Collapse of the University). Back.

Note 19: The above phrases are from David Damrosch, We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995), and Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996), respectively, as cited in James Miller, "The Academy Writes Back: Why We Can't Close the Book on Allan Bloom," Lingua Franca, March 1997, pp. 64-65 Back.

Note 20: Readings, as cited, ibid, p. 65. Back.

Note 21: ibid. Back.

Note 22: Lewis Lapham, Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin-de-Siecle (London: Verso, 1995), p. 5. Back.

Note 23: Debray, as cited in Bove, In the Wake of Theory, pp. 115-117. Back.

Note 24: As cited, ibid, p. 111. Back.

Note 25: R. C. Lewontin, "The Cold War and the Transformation of the Academy," in Chomsky et al, The Cold War and the University, p. 28. Back.

Note 26: David D. Newsom, "Foreign Policy and Academia," Foreign Policy, No. 101 (Winter 1995-96): 53. Back.

Note 27: As cited in David Montgomery, "Introduction," in Chomsky et al, The Cold War and the University, p. xxii. Back.

Note 28: Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction, p. 133. Back.

Note 29: As cited in Bove, In the Wake of Theory, p. 114. Back.

Note 30: Wesley Cohen, Richard Florida, and W. Richard Goe, University-Industry Research Centres in the United States (Carnegie Mellon University, July 1994), as cited in Ron Nixon, "Truth to the Highest Bidder: Science for Sale," Covert Action Quarterly, No. 52 (Spring 1995): 49. Back.

Note 31: ibid. Back.

Note 32: Juliet Merrifield, Putting Scientists in Their Place: Participatory Research in Environmental and Occupational Health (New Market, Tennessee: Highlander Research and Educational Centre, January 1989), p. 7, as cited, ibid. Back.

Note 33: Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction, p. 148. Back.

Note 34: As cited in Bove, In the Wake of Theory, p. 95. Back.

Note 35: ibid, p. 110. Back.

Note 36: ibid, pp. 109, 111, and 118. Back.

Note 37: See: Jonathan Feldman, Universities in the Business of Repression: The Academic-Military-Industrial Complex in America (Boston: South End, 1989), hereafter cited as Feldman, Universities in the Business of Repression); Parenti, Against Empire, and Soley, Leasing the Ivory Tower. Back.

Note 38: Parenti, Against Empire, pp. 175-196. Back.

Note 39: ibid, pp. 34, 175, and 179. Back.

Note 40: Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction, p. 132. Back.

Note 41: Wilshire, The Moral Collapse of the University. Back.

Note 42: ibid. Back.

Note 43: As cited in C.P. Otero(ed.), Language and Politics (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1988), p. 248, in Rai, Chomsky's Politics, p. 129. Back.

Note 44: The benefits to the discipline of economics have already been the subject of exposition in this regard, but for a brief survey of other areas of inquiry see Margaret C Jacob (ed.), The Politics of Western Science 1640-1990 (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1992), esp. the editor's chapter "science and Politics in the Late Twentieth Century, " and Stuart W. Leslie's "Science and Politics in Cold War America." Back.

Note 45: R.C. Lewontin, "The Cold War and the Transformation of the Academy," in Chomsky et al, The Cold War and the University, p. 2. Back.

Note 46: As cited in Trumpbour, How Harvard Rules, p. 51. Back.

Note 47: See, for example, Geoffrey Perret, A Country Made by War: From the Revolution to Vietnam — The Story of America's Rise to Power (New York: Random House, 1989), and Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 1-3 (hereafter cited as Sherry, In the Shadow of War). Back.

Note 48: Citations from Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (New York: Schocken Books, 1990), pp. 329-332. Back.

Note 49: Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1973). Back.

Note 50: Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: 1991), p. 241, as cited in Sherry, In the Shadow of War, p. 2. Back.

Note 51: Neil Postman, Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology, and Education (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 95. Back.

Note 52: Trumpbour, How Harvard Rules, p. 63 and 79-80. Back.

Note 53: ibid., pp. 79-80. Back.

Note 54: ibid., p. 81. Back.

Note 55: Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 103-110 (hereafter cited as Diamond, Compromised Campus). Back.

Note 56: ibid., pp. 105-108; and Trumpbour, How Harvard Rules, pp. 80-82. Back.

Note 57: Diamond, Compromised Campus, pp. 103-106, and David Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press,1984 (hereafter cited as Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science), pp. 135, 140, 166, and 283-284. Back.

Note 58: Diamond, Compromised Campus, pp. 24-49, and 243-286. Back.

Note 59: Samuel P. Huntington in Michael J. Crozier, S.P. Huntington, and J. Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1975), pp. 61-62, 75, 92, 102, and 113-114, as cited in John Trumpbour, How Harvard Rules, p. 74. Back.

Note 60: Trumpbour, How Harvard Rules, pp. 78-79, and Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991) p. 177. Back.

Note 61: Trumpbour, How Harvard Rules, p. 107-108. Back.

Note 62: For an account of Kissinger's responsibility in these events, and others, see Walter Isaacson, Kissinger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). Back.

Note 63: International Studies Newsletter, Vol. 21, No. 1, January 1994, pp. 1 and 3. Back.

Note 64:For a well-documented account of this program see Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: Avon, 1992). Back.

Note 65:The term "genocide" is used advisedly": Frank Snepp, Chief Strategy Analyst for the CIA in Saigon, described his ultimate position in Phoenix as a "collaborator in the worst of the terrorist programs, in the most atrocious excesses of the US government." Barton Osborne, another who helped direct Phoenix operations, was more specific: he termed it a "bad genocide program." See Michael Maclear, Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War (London: Thames/Methuen, 1981), pp. 354-357. Back.

Note 66: ibid., p. 166. Back.

Note 67: ibid., p. 170-175. Back.

Note 68: David MacMichael, "Spooks on Campus", The Nation, June 8, 1992, p. 780. Back.

Note 69: ibid. Back.

Note 70: Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction, p. 152. Back.

Note 71: For an account of recruitment habits see, Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New York: Quill/William Morrow, 1987). Back.

Note 72: Loch K. Johnson, America's Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), hereafter cited as Johnson, America's Secret Power, p. 159. Back.

Note 73: Trumpbour, How Harvard Rules, p. 72. Back.

Note 74: Johnson, America's Secret Power, pp. 157 and 300 n. 4. Back.

Note 75: Robert Heilbroner, Twenty-First Century Capitalism (Concord, Ontario: Anansi, 1992), p. 3. Back.

Note 76: ibid., pp. 3-4. Back.

Note 77: The claim above rests on the distinction that the CIA is an institution directly dedicated to servicing the U.S. Government whereas, say, the U.S. universities, per se, and "think-tanks" are less directly implicated in this function. Back.

Note 78: Back.

Note 79: Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Selective Global Commitment", Foreign Affairs 70 (Fall 1991):1-3 (hereafter cited as Brzezinski, "Selective Global Commitment"). Back.

Note 80: Theodore Draper, "Who Killed Soviet Communism?", The New York Review, 11 June 1992, p. 10. Back.

Note 81: ibid. Back.

Note 82: ibid., p. 14. Back.

Note 83: Pierre Allan, "the End of the Cold War: The End of International Relations Theory?", in Pierre Allan and Kjell Goldmann (eds.), The End of the Cold War — Evaluating Theories of International Relations (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1992), p. 234; and Friedrich Kratochwil, "The embarrassment of changes: neo-realism as the science of Realpolitik without politics", Review of International Studies 19(1993): 66 (hereafter cited as Kratochwil, "The embarrassment of changes"). Back.

Note 84: Kratochwil, "The embarrassment of changes", p. 63. Back.

Note 85: ibid. Back.

Note 86: ibid., p.64. Back.

Note 87: ibid. Back.

Note 88: ibid., p. 65. Back.

Note 89: John Lewis Gaddis, "International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War", in International Security 17(Winter 1992-1993): 54. Back.

Note 90: Krachtowil, "The embarrassment of changes", p. 66. Back.

Note 91: ibid., p. 67. Back.

Note 92: Brzezinski, "Selective Global Commitment", p. 1. Back.

Note 93: See Patrick Cockburn, Getting Russia Wrong: The End of Kremlinology (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 25-49. Back.

Note 94: Kratochwil, "The embarrassment of changes", p. 69. Back.

Note 95: Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 302. Back.

Note 96: Michel Crozier, The Trouble With America: Why The System Is Breaking Down (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Back.

Note 97: Soley, Leasing the Ivory Tower, pp. 39 and 170. Back.

Note 98: ibid, p. 129. Back.