Back issues of BCAS publications published on this site are

intended for non-commercial use only. Photographs and

other graphics that appear in articles are expressly not to be
reproduced other than for personal use. All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

Vol. 29, No. 1: January–March 1997

Asia, Asian Studies, and the National Security State: A Symposium

• Mark Selden - Introduction

• Bruce Cumings - Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and
International Studies during and after the Cold War
• James K. Boyce - Area Studies and the National Security State
• John Lie - Moral Ambiguity, Disciplinary Power, and Academic
Freedom
• Chalmers Johnson - The CIA and Me
• George McT. Kahin - The Making of Southeast Asian Studies:
Cornell’s Experience
• Tani E. Barlow - The Virtue of Clarity and Bruce Cumings’s
Concern over Boundaries
• Moss Roberts - Contra Ideocracy
• Stanley J. Heginbotham - Round Up the Usual Suspects: Cumings’s
Misdirected Search for Post-Cold War Enemies of Academic
Independence
• L. A. Peter Gosling - The Association for Asian Studies and the
National Security Education Program: Scholarship or Tabloid
Journalism?
• Asian Studies, Ideology, and the National Security State: Articles in
the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars
• Documents Relating to Government-Academic Liaison
• Ravi Arvind Palat - Reinscribing the Globe: Imaginative
Geographies of the Pacific Rim; Coming Full Circle: An Economic
History of the Pacific Rim, by Eric Jones, Lionel Frost, and Colin
White; Global Production: The Apparel Industry in the Pacific Rim,
ed. Edna Bonacich, Lucie Cheng, Norma Chinchilla, Nora
Hamilton, and Paul Ong; What Is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives
on the Pacific Region Idea, ed. Arif Dirlik / review essay
Short Review
BCAS/Critical Asian Studies
• Prasenjit Duara - After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and
www.bcasnet.org
Postcolonial Displacements, by Gyan Prakash
 CCAS Statement of Purpose

Critical Asian Studies continues to be inspired by the statement of purpose

formulated in 1969 by its parent organization, the Committee of Concerned
Asian Scholars (CCAS). CCAS ceased to exist as an organization in 1979,
but the BCAS board decided in 1993 that the CCAS Statement of Purpose
should be published in our journal at least once a year.

We first came together in opposition to the brutal aggression of

the United States in Vietnam and to the complicity or silence of
our profession with regard to that policy. Those in the field of
Asian studies bear responsibility for the consequences of their
research and the political posture of their profession. We are
concerned about the present unwillingness of specialists to speak
out against the implications of an Asian policy committed to en-
suring American domination of much of Asia. We reject the le-
gitimacy of this aim, and attempt to change this policy. We
recognize that the present structure of the profession has often
perverted scholarship and alienated many people in the field.

The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars seeks to develop a

humane and knowledgeable understanding of Asian societies
and their efforts to maintain cultural integrity and to confront
such problems as poverty, oppression, and imperialism. We real-
ize that to be students of other peoples, we must first understand
our relations to them.

CCAS wishes to create alternatives to the prevailing trends in

scholarship on Asia, which too often spring from a parochial
cultural perspective and serve selfish interests and expansion-
ism. Our organization is designed to function as a catalyst, a
communications network for both Asian and Western scholars, a
provider of central resources for local chapters, and a commu-
nity for the development of anti-imperialist research.

Passed, 28–30 March 1969

Boston, Massachusetts
 Vol. 29, No.1 / Jan.-Mar. 1997

Contents
Asia, Asian Studies, and the National Security State: A Symposium
guest editor Mark Selden
Mark Selden 3 Introduction
Bruce Cumings 6 Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International
Studies during and after the Cold War
James K. Boyce 27 Area Studies and the National Security State
John Lie 30 Moral Ambiguity, Disciplinary Power,
and Academic Freedom
Chalmers Johnson 34 The CIA and Me
George MeT. Kahin 38 The Making of Southeast Asian Studies:
Cornell's Experience
Tani E. Barlow 43 The Virtue ofClarity and Bruce Cumings's
Concern over Boundaries
Moss Roberts 47 Contra Ideocracy
Stanley J. Heginbotham 50 Round Up the Usual Suspects:
Cumings's Misdirected Search for Post-Cold War
Enemies ofAcademic Independence
L. A. Peter Gosling 53 The Association for Asian Studies and the
National Security Education Program:
Scholarship or Tabloid Journalism?
56 Asian Studies, Ideology, and the National Security State:
Articles in the Bulletin ofConcerned Asian Scholars
57 Documents Relating to Government-Academic Liaison

Ravi Arvind Palat 61 Reinscribing the Globe: Imaginative Geographies

of the Pacific Rim; Coming Full Circle: An Economic
History ofthe Pacific Rim, by Eric Jones, Lionel Frost,
and Colin White; Global Production: The Apparel
Industry in the Pacific Rim, ed. Edna Bonacich, Lucie
Cheng, Norma Chinchilla, Nora Hamilton, and
Paul Ong; What Is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives
on the Pacific Region Idea, ed. ArifDirlik / review essay

Short Review
Prasenjit Duara 70 After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and
Postcolonial Displacements, by Gyan Prakash

72 Books to Review

© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org

 Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and
International Studies during and after the Cold War

It is a curious fact of academic history that the first great center of area studies
... [was] in the Office of Strategic Services .... It is still true today, and I hope it always
will be, that there is a high measure ofinterpenetration between universities with area
programs and the information-gathering agencies of the government.
McGeorge Bundy, 1964'

by Bruce Cumings*

In this article I propose to examine the displacement and can discern both the original strengths and weaknesses of the
reordering of the boundaries of scholarly inquiry in the postwar "area" boundaries, the disordering occasioned by watershed
period in two phases: the ftrst, the determining burst ofacademic changes in power politics and the world economy, and emergent
work that began during World War II but vastly expanded in the new relationships between power and knowledge.
early years ofthe Soviet-U.S. confrontation, which is the neces­ If the ftrst phase has been much studied, it is still rare to
sary prelude to understanding the second phase, namely the fmd an acknowledgment of the often astonishing levels of col­
contemporary revaluation ofAmerican studies of the rest ofthe laboration between the universities, the foundations, and the
world occasioned by the end ofthe Cold War and the collapse of intelligence arms ofthe U.S. state that accompanied this phase. 3
Western communism. My position is that the ultimate force If the second phase unfolds intermittently before our eyes (and
shaping scholarly studies of what used to be called "the non­ with only partial information, much as in the late 1940s), it is
Western world" is economic and political power, but the most remarkable how central the intelligence function has been to it.
interesting effects of such power are often the least observed, Since I propose to offer an assessment of such relationships,
taking place" at those local points or ''ultimate destinations" (in among others, let me say that in this article I do not assume a
Foucault's phrase) where power "becomes capillary,"2Iike uni­ moral position, nor do I wish to indict individual academics or
versities and academic departments, and the organizations that take to task the foundations or SSRC, nor am I involved in
mediate between academe and the foundations-for example, conspiracy theory. In earlier public presentations of versions of
the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). In this process of this article4 such comments have predictably come up: I must be
power-becoming-capillary but in newly rearranged rivulets, we

2. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other

*1 presented some ofthe ideas in this paper at the Association for Asian Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books,
Studies (AAS) in 1993, on a panel held in honor of the twenty-fifth 1980), p. 96.
anniversary ofthe Committee ofConcerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) and 3. Barry Katz has written an informative, well-researched book that
its Bulletin ofConcerned Asian Scholars (BCAS). 1 presented a much­ nonetheless barely scratches the surface in examining the problems
revised version at the 1996 AAS meetings, and future versions with inherent in professors doing intelligence work; furthermore, he ends his
different emphases will appear in books to be edited by Christopher story in the late 1940s. See Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis
Simpson (for the New Press) and by H.D. Harootunian and Masao in the Office ofStrategic Services, 1942-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Har­
Miyoshi (for Duke University Press). For their helpful comments I vard University Press, 1989). Robert B. Hall's seminal study done for
would like to thank Arif Dirlik, Bill and Nancy Doub, Harry Haroo­ the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in 1947 still makes for
tunian, Richard Okada, Moss Roberts, Mark Selden, Chris Simpson, interesting reading, but Hall, of course, would not have had access to
Marilyn Young, Masao Miyoshi, and Stefan Tanaka. Obviously I am classified intelligence documentation on the government's relationship
responsible for the views presented herein. to area studies. See Hall, Area Studies with Special Reference to Their
1. Bundy'S 1964 speech at John Hopkins, quoted in Sigmund Dia­ Implications for Research in the Social Sciences (New York: SSRC,
mond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities 1947).
with the Intelligence Community (New York: Oxford University 4. See the asterisked footnote in the previous column for details about
Press, 1992), p. 10. the earlier presentations of this article.

© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org

 faculty the United States could assemble
to defeat Hitler. (The luminous names do
not provide their own justification for such
service, of course; Charles Beard set a
different sort ofexample when he resigned
from Columbia University in protest of
Woodrow Wilson's drafting ofcollege stu­
dents in World War I, and then interrogated
Franklin Roosevelt's prowar policies in
publications written both before and after
World War II.)
A commentator argued that by saying
such things I had given up a principled po­
sition of academic independence: working
for the state was always wrong. I disagree;
to offer one's expertise to the Research and
Analysis Branch of the OSS does not com­
promise academic integrity, in my view, if
we stipulate that (1) the war is one of total
mobilization against an enemy clearly deter­
mined to take away all our freedoms, includ­
ing academic ones; (2) one takes a leave of
Marxist economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy. shown here in the New York office of absence from the classroom to serve this war
the Monthly Review a number ofyears after World War II. were among the more than effort, establishing a clear difference be­
nine hundred leading thinkers. promising young scholars. and other diverse profession­ tween the two domains of the state and the
als who were conscripted during World War II to use their academic training to work in
university, and (3) classified work does not
the Research and Analysis Branch ofthe Office ofStrategic Services (OSS) to analyze
war and potentials for peace. Although the OSS is considered the forerunner of the continue after reentry to the university.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). and the participation ofthese scholars to have set the These same principles, ofcourse, argue for
stage for future government involvement with academia. many feel that their work was a complete separation of intelligence and
difJerent-and commendable-because it took place during a crisis that threatened all academic functions in ordinary times. Noth­
ofhumanity. This picture isfrom and courtesy ofthe Monthly Review Foundation. ing should be more sacred to faculty offered
tenure-to-the-grave security and full legal
protection for their viewpoints, however
trying to single out and blame scholars who worked at some point heretical, than honesty and full disclosure before their colleagues
in their careers for the government, and in so doing I must be and students-something unavailable to those who sign agree­
asserting an evil conspiracy. Rather, what I wish to do is evaluate ments never to speak or write about what they do for intelligence
contemporary boundary displacements in the unblinkered light agencies. 6
ofwhat we now know about the early years of area and interna­ These prefatory points are necessary because it was the
tional studies. OSS director William "Wild Bill" Donovan who established in
Perhaps I should also make clear my position on academ­ 1941 the rationale for employing the nation's best expertise "to
ics in government service. In an earlier draft of this paper I collect and analyze all information and data which may bear
stated that working for the government against Hitler was upon national security"; present at this creation were repre­
different from doing the same type of thing during the Cold sentatives ofSSRC and the American Council ofLearned Socie­
War: the difference, it seems to me, is that between a crisis ties (ACLS) who helped Donovan come up with "a slate of
that drew nearly every American to the effort against the Nazis [academic] advisors" for the OSS.' Donovan's relationship to
and Japan in conditions of total war, to Washington and left-leaning academics was similar to General Leslie Groves's
overseas posts distinct from campus positions, and the very collaboration with Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Pro­
different requirements placed upon scholars and universities ject, but it yielded a political spectrum in the OSS from anticom­
in peacetime: to uphold their independence and academic munist Bulgarian emigre Philip Mosely to the Marxist founders
freedom, and to make full disclosure of possible biases deriv­ of the Monthly Review, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy. The re­
ing from clandestine sponsorship and privileged access to search and analysis branch of the OSS also presented a model
research funds. To join, say, an Office of Strategic Services for postwar collaboration between intelligence and academe,
(OSS) inhabited by Paul Baran, Cora DuBois, John King
Fairbank, Hajo Halborn, Charles Kindleberger, Wassily Leon­
tif, Herbert Marcuse, Barrington Moore Jr., Franz Neumann,
and Paul Sweezy' was almost to be asked to join the best 6. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), for example, enjoins its
employees from ever writing about anything to do with their work for
the agency without a prior security vetting, and forever prosecutes or
hounds employees who write about their experiences anyway (like
Frank Snepp and Phillip Agee).
s.. Katz, Foreign Intelligence, pp. 11,29,99, 115. 7. Katz, Foreign Intelligence. pp. 2-5.

7
© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
and influenced the division of the Central Intelligence Agency major foundations traced these boundaries by directing schol­
(CIA) into separate research and operations branches. In many arly attention to distinct places and to distinct ways of under­
ways it also helped to create the basic division between the standing them (for example, communist studies for North
academic disciplines and something that soon came to be called Korea and China and modernization studies for Japan and
"area studies." g South Korea). To be in "Korean studies" or "Chinese studies"
For a generation after World War II the bipolar conflict was to daily experience the tensions that afflicted Korea and
between Moscow and Washington and the hegemonic position China during the long period ofthe Cold War. Over the decades
of the United States in the world economy drew academic of the Cold War this revaluation by power gave us two tropes,
boundaries that had the virtue of clarity: "area studies" and yielding an entire inventory of East and Southeast Asia. The
"international studies," backed with enormous public and private first trope was "Red China," and the second (accomplished by
resources, had clear reference to places or to issues and processes a Nixonian transition in the 1970s in response to defeat in
that became important to study. The places were usually coun­ Vietnam) was "Pacific Rim." Each trope valued and revalued
tries, but not just any countries: Japan got favored placement as East and Southeast Asia, as Westerners (mostly Americans)
a success story of development, and China got obsessive atten­ recognized and defined it, in ways that highlighted some parts
tion as a pathological example ofabortive development. The key and excluded (or occluded) others.
processes were things like modernization, or what was for many When East Asia was "painted Red" it held an apparent
years called ''political development" toward the explicit or im­ outward-moving dynamic whose core was "Peiping." Accord­
plicit goal of liberal democracy. ing to Dean Rusk's 1960s scenario, 400 million Chinese armed
with nuclear weapons threatened nations along China's rim
with oblivion: South Korea, South Vietnam, Taiwan, Indone­
sia, Thailand, and the big enchilada, Japan. "Pacific Rim" was
the post-1975 artistry, an era offorward movement and back­
ward occlusion, as Americans sought to "put Vietnam behind
What I wish to do is evaluate contemporary bound­ us." "Pacific Rim" thus heralded a forgetting, a hoped for
ary displacements in the unblinkered light ofwhat amnesia in which the decades-long but ultimately failed U.S.
we now know about the early years of area and effort to obliterate the Vietnamese revolution would enter the
international studies. realm of Korea, ''the forgotten war." But more importantly, it
looked forward: suddenly the rim became the locus of a new
dynamism, bringing pressure on the mainland of Asia.
Rimspeak, like modernization theory, continued to look
with curiosity ifnot disdain upon anyone who did not privilege
the market. The many working-class and antisystemic move­
The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) was the first ments of the region in the past decades remained poxes,
"area" organization in the United States, founded in 1943 as irrationalities that illustrate immature "political deveH>pment"
the Far Eastern Association and reorganized as the AAS in in the rim. Organized into the new inventory were ''miracle''
1956. Before 1945 there had been little attention to and not economies in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Ma­
much funding for such things; but now the issues were to be laysia, and Singapore, with honorable mention for Thailand,
ones that would bring contemporary social science theory to the Philippines, Indonesia, and post-Mao (but pre-Tiananmen)
bear on the non-Western world, although not on the classic China (signified by ''Beizhing,'' which is the Ted Koppel-ap­
ones of Oriental studies, often examined through philology;9 proved way to say Beijing). The centerpiece in the region was
political scientists would begin talking to Orientalists, and in Japan, a newly risen sun among advanced industrial coun­
return for their sufferance, the Orientalists would get vastly tries-indeed, ''Number One" in Ezra Vogel's perfectly timed
enhanced academic resources (positions, libraries, language book,1O published in 1979. From the 1950s through the late
studies)-although a certain separation came from the social 1980s it was almost heretical to utter a critical word about
scientists inhabiting institutes of East Asian studies, whereas postwar Japan, or to point out that in the midst of the Korean
the Orientalists occupied departments ofEast Asian languages "miracle" Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan were beating
and cultures. This implicit Faustian bargain sealed the postwar the brains out of thousands of workers and students, jailing
academic deal-and meant that the Orientalists didn't neces­ and torturing professors, and bivouacking their troops on elite
sarily have to talk to the political scientists after all. university campuses.
Countries inside the containment system, like Japan or When the Cold War ended and Western communism
South Korea, and those outside it, like China or North Korea, collapsed in 1989-91, a third revaluation unfolded. One set of
were clearly placed as friend or enemy, ally or adversary. In rationales for studying "areas" (or areas in particular kinds of
both direct and indirect w'!ys the U.S. government and the ways, namely communist studies) collapsed, while another­
"development," whether economic or political-deepened. In
effect the previous boundaries disappeared as the framework

8. Ibid., pp. 159-61; see also Robin Winks, Cloak and Gown:
Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New York: William Morrow,
1087), pp. 60-115.
9. Immanuel Wallerstein, "Open the Social Sciences," Items (New York, 10. Ezra F. Vogel, Japan as Number One: Lessons/or America (Cam­
Social Science Research Council), vol. 50, no. 1 (Mar. 1966), p. 3. bridge, Harvard University Press, 1979).

© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org

of inquiry distended to approximate the reach of the world changed quickly: a Kremlinological opinion about "China
market; the dawning "world without borders" collapsed area after Mao or Deng" was less interesting than informed judg­
studies into international studies. Even the "Pacific Rim" gave ments on "China's economic reforms: whither the old state
way to a new globalism, as Japan's economic bubble burst and sector?" and the like. The entire field of communist studies
the United States finally emerged as the mature hegemonic found itself alone with the intelligence agencies and the
power of the century. It turned out that we were now living in Pentagon, searching for a function after the object of their
a world economy, something that radicals had written about desire had rolled itself back to nothing. A government publi­
for decades but that now materialized as the essential domain cation that had exemplified the age now exemplified the
of U.S. activity and academic endeavor. transition: to change ''Problems ofCommunism"to "Problems
The state and the foundations were the quickest to sense of Post-Communism" delimits and even announces a certain
this displacement and to redirect practical and scholarly ef­ post-Cold War marginality.
forts. The Clinton administration moved toward a major em­ As postwar history unfolded, in other words, scholars
phasis on foreign economic policy, and the foundations moved caught up in one historical system and one discourse that
to attenuate their support for area studies, emphasizing instead defined discipline, department, area, and subject suddenly
interregional themes like "development and democracy." found themselves in another emerging field of inquiry, well
SSRC and ACLS, long the national nexus for raising and in advance of imagining or discovering the subject them­
administering funds for area studies, found their very exist­ selves. To put a subtle relationship all too crudely, power and
ence threatened and began a major restructuring for the first money had found their subject first, and shaped fields of
time in more than thirty years. inquiry accordingly. I will now revisit in more detail the
The source of power had shifted in the 1990s from the origins of area and international studies in the early Cold War
state's concern with the maintenance of Cold War boundary period, examine how both changed with the end of the Cold
security to transnational corporations that, as the organized War, and suggest how we might rethink boundaries of area
expression of the market, saw no geographic limit on their and discipline and reengage our minds with the task of under­
interests. Sponsors' expectations of area experts likewise standing the world outside U.S. boundaries.

In the Cold War decades after World War II the u.s. position in the world economy and rivalry with the Soviet Union
determined what was important to study and how it was funded and studied in the United States. Missing from much
of the literature extolling the South Korean economic "miracle," for example, was the fact that thousands of its
workers and students were being beaten and professors tortured andjailed by their government. This picture shows
army troops leading away roped-together students on 27 May 1980 after protests in Kwangju, South Korea, led to
the indiscriminate massacre ofan estimated 1, 000 or more civilians. This photo and information about the K wangju
Massacre are from AMPO: Japan-Asia Quarterly Review (Tokyo), vol. 12, no. 2 (1980).

© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial

9 use only. www.bcasnet.org
Area and International Studies in the Early Cold War McGeorge Bundy, however, was much closer to the truth in
linking the underpinnings of area studies to the intelligence
The channel is more important than that a lot of water agencies-the OSS, and subsequently the CIA. William Dono­
should be running through it. van may have directed the wartime OSS and then returned to
McGeorge Bundy Wall Street, but he was also in many ways the founder of the
CIA.IS In his papers, combed through by the CIA and then
After World War II ended, the new area programs and
deposited at the Army War College, there is a brief account of
associations (like the AAS) instantly confronted the existing
the original development of "foreign area studies," in which
boundaries of the social science and humanities disciplines;
Donovan, George F. Kennan, and John Paton Davies played
this often made for interesting intellectual confrontation as
the major roles. Davies had a plan to transform area stu~ies
well. William Nelson Fenton was present at the creation of
and bring enormous amounts of government and foundatIOn
area studies and in 1947 he wrote that area programs "faced
funding into U.S. universities through what was originally to
fierce resist~nce from the 'imperialism of departments' since
be an institute of Slavic studies, but which subsequently
they challenged the fragmentation of the hu~an scienc.es by
became a model for the organization of studies ofthe commu­
disciplinary departments, each endowed With a particular
nist world of threatened Third World areas.
methodology and a specific intellectual subject matter." 11
Donovan who was then with the Wall Street firm Dono­
van Leisure ~as at the center of this effort, working with
The anthropologist Cora DuBois thought that the collabo­
rative work ofthe OSS during the war was the prelude to a new
Da;ies in 1948 and helping him to get foundation funding.
era of reformist thinking on an interdisciplinary basis: "The
The organizers specified that the government was not to be
walls separating the social sciences are crumbling with increas­
involved publicly in developing area studies, thus to allay
ing rapidity.... People are beginning to think, as well as feel,
suspicions that such programs were little more than "an intel­
about the kind of world in which they wish to live." 12 Postwar
ligence agency." Their work should be "impartial and objec­
area studies, much maligned as the precinct for atheoretical
tive," clear of conflicts of interest, and so on. (Indeed, the files
navel-gazing and Orientalia, was beginning to c~allenge the
on this project are full ofconcern with academic independence
parochialism ofthe disciplines in the name ofa umfied knowl­
and proper procedure.) However, in a letter to Donovan,
edge.
Clinton Barnard of the Rockefeller Foundation-which with
Still, these were not the power lines that counted. The
the Carnegie Corporation funded this effort at the beginning­
state was less interested in the feudal domains of academe than
wrote, ''the most compelling aspect of this proposal is the
in filling the vacuum ofknow ledge about a vast hegemonic and
intelligence function which the Institute could perform for
counterhegemonic global space; it was the capillary lines of
government." 16 •
state power that shaped area programs. This was effected in the
Sigmund Diamond greatly expanded our understandmg
first instance by the relocation of the OSS's Soviet division to
of the establishment of area studies centers during the early
Columbia University as the basis for its Russian Institute,
years of the Cold War in his book Compromi~ed Campus.
which opened in September 1946, and in the second instance Diamond paid particular attention to the RUSSian Research
by a Carnegie Corporation grant of $740,000 to Harvard to
Center at Harvard, which, following upon Columbia's Russian
establish its own Russian Research Center in 1947.13 Soon the
Institute and Davies' Slavic studies institute, became a model
Ford Foundation put in much more money, a total of $270
million to thirty-four universities for area and language studies
from 1953 to 1966. 14
This munificent funding created important area programs
throughout the country, and provided numerous fellowships 15. See Betty Abrahamson Dessants, "The Silent Partner: The Academic
that allowed scholars to spend years in the field acquiring Community, Intelligence, and the Development of Cold War Ideology,
difficult languages and other forms of area knowledge. 1944-1946 " annual meeting of the Organization of American Histori­
ans (28-31'Mar. 1996). Katz (Foreign Intelligence. pp. 57-60) main­
tains there was a break between the antifascist politics of the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS) and the anticommunist politics of the CIA, but
a close reading of his text suggests many continuities into the postwar
11. William Nelson Fenton, Area Studies in American Universities: For period, in the persons of Alex Inkeles, Philip Mosely, W. W. Ros~ow,
the Commission on Implications ofArmed Services Educational Pro­ and numerous others; an alternative reading would be that the antIfas­
grams (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 19~7), cists, many of them left-liberals, were either weeded out or ~e~l by the
wayside, distressed at the tum taken by U.S. Cold War poliCies after
paraphrased in Ravi Arvind Palat, ''Building <?as~les on Crumb.llng
Foundations: Excavating the Future ofArea Studies In a Post-Am~ncan 1947.
World" (University of Hawaii, Feb. 1993). I am grateful to Ravi Palat 16. The letter is dated 28 Oct. 1948. Those who wish to pursue this
for sending me his paper. matter can find additional documentation in the William Donovan
12. Cora DuBois, Social Forces in Southeast Asia (Minneapolis, MN: Papers, Carlisle Military Institute, box 73a. Others in~luded in this
University of Minnesota Press, 1949), pp. 10-11, quoted in Katz, effort were Evron Kirkpatrick, Robert Lovett, and Richard Scam­
Foreign Intelligence. p. 198. mon, among many others. Christopher Simpson terms this. same
operation "the Eurasian Institute," listing it is ~ .special proJe~t of
13. Katz, Foreign Intelligence. p. 160. Kennan and Davies, in which Kirkpatrick participated. See Simp­
14. Ibid.; and Palat, "Building Castles on Crumbling Foundations"; also son's Blowback: America s Recruitment ofNazis and Its Efficts on
Richard Lambert et aI., Beyond Growth: The Next Stage in Language the Cold War (New York, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), p. 115n.
and Area Studies (Washington, D.C.: Association ofAmerican Univer­ Diamond also has useful information on this matter in Compromised
sities, 1984), pp. 8-9. Campus. pp. 103-105.

10
© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
 center had established a mutually satisfactory relationship with
the local FBI office: indeed, results of the Russian Research
Center's work were ''made available to the Bureau officially
through contact with President James B. Conant of Harvard
University, who has on occasion indicated his respect for the
Bureau's work and his understanding for its many and varied
interests in connection with internal security matters." At
roughly the same time Conant also negotiated basic arrange­
ments between Harvard and the CIA. IS
I frequently chide myself for running afoul of what I might
call the fallacy of insufficient cynicism. I had not, for example,
thought that J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed being wined and dined by
major figures in organized crime, or that the Mafia had black­
mailed him (either because of his closet homosexuality or his
gambling debts) into refusing for years to investigate organized
crime, even into denying that there was such a thing. 19 Nor had
I imagined the lengths to which the FBI would go to investigate
even the most trifling aspects oflife in academe in the early Cold
War period. It is only a bit ofan exaggeration to say that for those
scholars studying potential enemy countries, either they con­
sulted with the government or they risked being investigated by
the FBI; working for the CIA thus legitimized academics and
fended off J. Edgar Hoover (something particularly important
for the many scholars born in foreign countries, or the many
Nadav Safran, above, was one ofthe thousands (approximately one-time communist emigres now engaged in anticommunist
5,000 in the late seventies) of academics in the United States research).20
working secretly for the CIA. In 1986 he stepped down as the
director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Affairs after it
was discovered that he was on the CIA payroll. He had been paid
$107,000 by the agency to write a book about Saudi Arabia, and
$45,000 to organize a university conference on Islam. His contact
with the CIA specified that he conceal the source ofhis funding Why did so many ofthe major figures in academe
and submit his book to the agency for censorship. It has been
estimated that while about 60 percent ofthe academics working
andthe foundations, andparticularly the leaders of
for the CIA know that is what they are doing, the others do not. area centers, have CIA ties and background?
This photo and the information about Safran and other academics
working for the CIA are from Ami Chen Mills, "Covert Hand in
the Academic Cookie Jar, .. CovertAction Information Bulletin
(Washington, D.C.), no. 38 (fall 1991}, pp. 18-19.

Diamond's papers contain large files of the Freedom of

for other area programs on Eastern Europe and China. It was Information Act (FOIA) material on nationwide FBI investi­
also a model of cooperation with the CIA and the FBI. gations of academics in the early fifties. Although most of the
Although Diamond's government documents on Harvard files are still thoroughly blacked out by "declassification"
in this period have been greatly expurgated-and Harvard's censors (in truth there has been hardly any declassification on
own papers remain closed to scholars under a fifty-year rule­ this issue), there is enough to indicate that any hearsay, any
he was able to document that the Harvard Russian Research wild charge, any left-of-center organization joined, any name
Center was based on the wartime OSS model (like Columbia's);
that the center was deeply involved with the CIA, the FBI, and
other intelligence and military agencies; that several founda­
tions (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford) worked with the state and
the center to fund projects and, in some cases, to launder CIA 18. Boston FBI to FBI Director, 9 Feb. 1949, quoted in Diamond,
funding; that the same scholars who undertook this activity Compromised Campus, p. 47; see also pp. 109-110.
often were themselves subjects ofFBI investigations; that some 19. Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of
of these scholars, in tum, were responsible for denouncing J. Edgar Hoover (New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1993). Summers's
other scholars to the FBI; and, fmally, that these academics evidence on Hoover's cross-dressing homosexual encounters is thin
were major figures in the postwar development ofRussian area and is offered mainly to titillate, but hi!t)extensive information on
studies in the nation as a whole. 17 By 1949 Harvard and the Hoover's suborning by organized crime seems undeniable.
20. For example, the Sigmund Diamond Papers (at Columbia Univer­
sity) contain an enormous file on Raymond A. Bauer's inability to get
a security clearance to consult with the CIA in 1952-54 because he had
once been an acquaintance of William Remington, whom the FBI
17. Diamond, Compromised Campus, chaps. 3 and 4. thought was a communist (see box 22).

11
© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
entered on a petition for whatever cause unacceptable to the Mosely at Columbia
FBI (like peace or racial integration), any subscription to a
magazine the FBI didn't like (for example, the Nation or the If Harvard's Russian Research Center were the only place
New Republic) was enough to get an entry in the file. The FBI where such intelligence ties and government interference went
routinely checked the credit records of academics, tailed them on, it could be dismissed as an aberration. Unfortunately it was
around, monitored their lectures, questioned their colleagues a central model for area programs around the country, as was the
and students, and sought out reliable campus informants (Wil­ one at Columbia University. Philip Mosely ran Columbia's Rus­
liam F. Buckley, Jr. distinguished himselfat Yale by becoming sian Research Center for many years; an OSS Research and
an important source for the FBI, as did Henry Kissinger to a Analysis branch veteran, he was one of the most important
lesser degree at Harvard).21 figures in Russian studies and U.S. foreign policy in the 1950s.
In addition to directing Columbia's center, he was head of the
Council on Foreign Relations from 1952 to 1956, a member of
various boards and committees at the Ford Foundation, and a
prominent leader ofthe American Political Science Association.
His papers raise the same question Sigmund Diamond raises in
The rise of the rational choice and formal theory his book: Why did so many ofthe major figures in academe and
paradigms ofsocial science inquiry have put at risk the foundations, and particularly the leaders ofarea centers, have
the subfields ofeconomic history, historical sociol­ CIA ties and background?
ogy, and comparative politics, and the entire area Although Mosely's papers contain little formerly classified
material, his nearly constant involvement with secret government
studies project. agencies is clear from the late 1940s through his retirement from
Columbia in the late 1960s. 2s The sketchy and incomplete nature
ofhis papers make it impossible to know exactly what he did for
the CIA and other agencies, or whether he had such clearances
at all times. But his continuing relationship with intelligence
One FBI memorandum on Harvard goes on for forty-two groupings is clear. One example would be his communication
pages with a detailed account of its courses on the USSR, with W. W. Rostow in 1952 about which portions of Rostow's
complete with syllabi, teachers, and the content ofthe courses. 22 "classified project" on the "dynamics ofSoviet society," a project
Another has extensive reports on lectures at Harvard sponsored
by the John Reed Club (which future Japan scholar Robert
Bellah chaired, and which had as its members future China
scholars Albert Feuerwerker and Franz Schurmann).23 Academ­ 25. Mosely's files show that in 1949 he worked with the Operations
ics working on East Asia, of course, were particularly vulner­ Research Office of Johns Hopkins on classified projects; that he had a
able to FBI harassment; those working on the USSR were as top secret clearance for CIA work in 1951 and 1954; that in 1957 he had
well, but more Asianists seemed to have come to the FBI's CIA contracts and was a member of the "National Defense Executive
attention. The reasons for this were deeply involved with the Reserve" assigned to the "Central Intelligence Agency Unit," and that
history of those fields-the fact that the USSR never inspired he renewed his contracts and status in 1958; that he worked on an
unnamed project for the Special Operations Research Office ofAmeri­
much sympathy among academics in the postwar period, but
can University in i958;that he was cleared for top secret work by the
China, pre- and post-1949, did. The Korean War, for example, Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA, a major academic arm of govern­
had an immediate impact on Harvard's policies toward the John ment security agencies) in 1961; and that in the same year he kept Abbot
Reed Club. Two months after the war began Harvard banned Smith of the CIA informed about his travel to the USSR in connection
the club from using Harvard facilities, unless it went through with ACLS/SSRC work on academic exchanges with that country. See
a lot of formalistic procedures (membership lists, sources of Philip Mosely Papers, University of Illinois, box 13, Operations Re­
funds, and so forth) not required of other groups. In the same search Office to Mosely, 28 Feb. 1949 and 2 Nov. 1949 (the latter memo
period Harvard security people blocked China-hand Israel refers to "the optimum use of the social sciences in operations re­
Epstein from speaking at a club gathering. An FBI informant search'). See also ''National Defense Executive Reserve, Statement of
in the Reed Club reported that the war in Korea was the cause Understanding," signed by Mosely on 19 Dec. 1957 and renewed on
26 June 1958 (the latter memo also refers to a "contract" that Mosely
of this new policy, and that some club members did not want
has with the CIA, separate from his activities in the "Executive Re­
to register with Harvard for fear that their names would be serve''). And see Mosely to Abbot Smith, 10 Mar. 1961. Mosely begins
turned over to the government. 24 the letter to Smith: "In accordance with the present custom I want to
report my forthcoming travel plans." Smith, an important CIA official
and colleague of Ray Cline and William Bundy, among others, is not
here identified as a CIA man. But he is so in Ludwell Lee Montague,
General Walter Bedell Smith as Director a/Central Intelligence (Uni­
21. Diamond Papers, box 15. versity Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992], pp. 138­
39, where information on Abbot Smith's CIA work can be found. In
22. Memo from SAC Boston to J. Edgar Hoover, 7 Mar. 1949, Diamond
Papers, box 13. 1961 Mosely worked with the IDA on a secret project, "Communist
China and Nuclear Warfare" (S.F. Giffin, Institute for Defense Analysis,
23. Boston FBI report of 1 Feb. 1949, ibid. to Mosely, 24 Nov. 1961, and Mosely to Giffin, 6 Dec. 1961). See also
24. Boston FBI report oft Nov. 1950, ibid. Box 14 also has an extensive various memoranda in box 2, including a record of Mosely's security
file on Robert Lee Wolff's security check before he became a consultant clearances. Mosely was an American of Bulgarian extraction; unlike
to the CIA in 1951. most Bulgarians, he hated the Soviets.

12
© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
Mosely was an adviser for, should be released for publication.26 recommended Lucian Pye for work on guerrillas in Malaya, and
Another would be Frederick Barghoorn's letter to Mosely in the suggested "a broadly conceived" study ofBurmese govemmentand
same year, asking for Mosely's help in getting government work politics (which Pye also did somewhat later, although he was not
for the summer: "In addition to some sort of official interview recommended for it in this memorandum). Langer also wanted a
project or intelligence operation, it has occurred to me that study of Turkey as "a special case in the Near East" of "smooth
perhaps I might obtain some connection with the State Depart­ development toward democracy" and immunity "to the appeals of
ment's educational exchange project.,,27 communism." Among other scholars, he thought Dankwart Rustow
In 1955 John T. Whitman of the CIA wrote to Mosely, would be good for the task; Rustow, together with Robert Ward,
asking that Mosely schedule recruitment interviews for him with later published a central work on how Japan and Turkeymodemized
students at Columbia's Russian Institute, "as you so kindly did successfully.32 (There is no evidence in these memoranda that Pye
for Messrs. Bloom, Bradley and Ferguson last year." Mosely was or Rustow knew that they were under consideration for such tasks.)
happy to oblige.21 Meanwhile Mosely was an active partisan in Later in 1953 the Ford Foundation sponsored a Conference
the politics ofthe McCarthy era, testifying before the Subversive on Soviet and Slavic Area Studies to discuss a program of
Activities Control Board in 1953, for example, that an unnamed fellowships in that field. Major academic figures in Soviet stud­
''respondent's'' views and policies "do not deviate from those of ies like Mosely, Merle Fainsod, Cyril Black, and Frederick
the Soviet Union." This testimony was part ofthe Justice Depart­ Barghoorn attended; also attending was China specialist George
ment's attempt to get the Communist Party-U .S.A. (CP-USA) to Taylor. Government figures present included George Kennan,
register under the McCarran Act, whereupon its members could Paul Nitze, Allen Dulles, and several CIA officials. Pendleton
be jailed.29 Herring of SSRC attended as well. 33 Among other things, the
Mosely was a central figure at the Ford Foundation through­ conferees fretted about "loyalty" checks on grantees, and there­
out the formative years of U.S. area studies centers. On 5 May fore suggested denying fellowships to "partisans of special So­
1953 Ford's Board on Overseas Training and Research approved viet movements and recognized supporters of political parties
an agenda for implementing a program of "Coordinated Country inimical to the best interests ofthe United States." Although this
Studies." Shortly thereafter Paul Langer wrote to Mosely stating stricture was directed primarily at the CP-USA, the language was
that the frrst item in regard to implementation would be consult­ broad enough to include, say, supporters of Henry Wallace's
ation with CIA director Allen Dulles. After suggesting that a Progressive Party; the Carnegie Corporation also extended such
person high in the foundation should consult with Dulles, the concerns to a variety of liberal academics. 34
other items to be discussed were listed as follows: One apparent result ofthis program was a CIA-sponsored
(b) In what terms are the projects to be presented to the CIA? (c) To
study entitled "Moslems of Soviet Central Asia" done by
what extent will the Foundation assume responsibility toward the Richard Pipes, a well-known Harvard historian ofRussia who
government in regard to the political reliability ofthe team members? eventually became responsible for Soviet affairs on Ronald
(d) Should mention be made of the names of persons tentatively
selected? (e) Should the directors ofthe proposed study projects be
informed ofthe fact that the CIA has been notified? 30
Another memorandum from the Ford Foundation con­ 32. "Report Submitted by Paul F. Langer to the Director ofResearch,
cerning "implementation of the proposed country studies" 31 Board on Overseas Training and Research, the Ford Foundation,"
15 Apr. 1953, ibid. The books Pye later authored were Guerrilla
said in the second paragraph that "Carl Spaeth [of Ford] Communism in Malaya. Its Social and Political Meaning (Princeton,
offered to call Allen Dulles to explain in general terms the NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956); and The Spirit of Burmese
nature of the proposed studies," to be followed up by a more Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT, Center for International Studies
detailed presentation of the projects in a meeting between [CIS, or CENIS], 1959). One could also include in this group Daniel
Cleon Swayze, also ofFord, and Allen Dulles. (Here, however, Lerner's The Passing of Traditional Society (New York: The Free
the purpose of these contacts with the Central Intelligence Press, 1958), another central text in comparative politics; Lerner had
Agency was said to be ''merely to keep interested government worked with Pye, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and other political scientists
agencies informed. '') at MIT's Center for International Studies on projects dealing with
Other memoranda in Mosely's files show that plans for these communications and society, insights that were later used in the
CIA's Phoenix program in Vietnam. Much of this research was
"country studies" spawned some ofthe most important works later funded under CIA or government contracts for psychological war­
published in the field ofcomparative politics; for example, Langer fare. On this see Christopher Simpson, ''U.S. Mass Communication
Research and Counterinsurgency after 1945: An Investigation ofthe
Construction of Scientific 'Reality,'" in William S. Solomon and
Robert W. McChesney, eds., Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives
26. Ibid., box 4, letter from W. W. Rostow, Massachusetts Institute of in u.s. Communication History (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Technology (MIT), to Mosely, 6 Oct. 1952. Minnesota Press, 1993).
27. Ibid., Frederick Barghoorn, Yale University, to Mosely, 17 Jan. 1952. 33. The conference was held 9-10 Oct. 1953. See the list ofthose who
28. Ibid., Whitman to Mosely, 5 Oct. 1955; Mosely to Whitman, 10 Oct. attended, Mosely Papers, box 18.
1955. 34. Ibid, box 18. As Diamond shows, such considerations extended
29. Ibid., box 13, Nathan B. Lenvin, U.S. Department of Justice, to to Carnegie's acknowledged policy of excluding scholars who were
Mosely, 20 Apr. 1953. "way to the left, "which at one point led to worries about Derk Bodde
and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and major fretting about Gunnar Myrdal;
30. Ibid., box 18, Langer to Mosely, 11 May 1953. however, these cases paled before Carnegie'S concerns about the
31. Ibid. Paul F. Langer to Mosely, Carl Spaeth and Cleon O. Swayze, Institute of Pacific Relations and Owen Lattimore (Compromised
17 May 1953. Campus. pp. 299-301.)

13
© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
Reagan's first and most ideologically committed National That Mosely provided a working linkage among Ford, the
Security Council.'s In 1953 and 1954 Langer, Mosely, and CIA, and ACLS/SSRC well into the 1960s is suggested by
others also sought to develop Chinese studies along the lines Abbot Smith's 1961 letter to him, referring to lists of possible
oftheir previous work in Russian studies. 36 The Ford Founda­
tion's decision in the late 1950s to pump at least $30 million
into the field of Chinese studies (to resuscitate it after the
McCarthyite onslaught, but also to create new China watch­
ers) drew on the same rationale as the Russian programs 35. Mosely Papers, box 18, George B. Baldwin to Mosely, 21 Dec. 1954.
examined above: "The investment strategy was based on the 36. Ibid., Swayze to Mosely, 21 Oct. 1954; Langer said he was involved
model designed just after World War II by cooperation on the in developing Chinese studies in Langer to Mosely, Spaeth and Swayze,
part of the Carnegie Corporation ofNew York and the Rocke­ 17 May 1953.
feller Foundation in supporting Soviet studies, initially and 37. Joint Committee on Contemporary China (JCCC), Report on the
principally through grants to Columbia and Harvard Univer­ Conference on the Status ofStudies ofModern and Contemporary
sities." 37 China (New York: SSRC, Mar. 1968), quoted in ibid., p. 98.

This 1970s "Nonman Rockwell"fake

of an American-as-can-be Norman
Rockwell drawing shows the typical
good-old-boy rifle and U.S. flag in the
cab ofa Ford truck with a blanked-out
license plate; the truck is carrying off
a painting that is possibly of Jesuit
missionary Matteo Ricci and a Confu­
cian official. Is this drawing saying
that the U.S. multinational Ford Motor
Company and the Ford Foundation it
financed were taking traditional China
and China studies for a ride when the
foundation agreed to collaborate with
the CIA in setting intellectual agendas
in the 1950s? The drawing originally
appeared on the back cover ofthe Bul­
letin of Concerned Asian Scholars
(BCAS), vol. 3. nos. 3-4 (summer-fall
1971). the front cover of which used
the subtitle "How the Foundations
Bought the Field" to announce the is­
sue s controversial "Special Supple­
ment: "Modern China Studies. "

14

© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org

new CIA area studies consultants whom he wished to clear with knowledged as such-made up more than 75 per cent of the
Mosely, William Langer, and Joseph Strayer. (Smith was de­ annual budgets of institutions such as Paul Lazarsfeld's Bu­
scribed as the director of the CIA's "consultants' group.')3K In reau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University,
Mosely's response he recommends among other people China Hadley Cantril's Institute for International Social Programs at
scholar John M. Lindbeck of Columbia, A. Doak Barnett Princeton, Ithiel de Sola Pool's CENIS [the Center for Inter­
(China watcher then with the Ford Foundation but soon to join national Studies, earlier known as CIS] program at MIT, and
the Columbia faculty), and Lucian Pye of Massachusetts Insti­ others." Official sources in 1952 reported that ''fully 96 per
tute ofTechnology (MIT) (''my first choice ').39 In 1962 Mosely cent of all reported [government] funding for social sciences
told James E. King ofthe Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA, at that time was drawn from the U.S. military. ,,43 My own work
a major academic arm of government security agencies), who in postwar U.S. archives over the past two decades has taught
had proposed a three-year program of some sort to Ford, that me how many books central to the political science profession
"ofthe major foundations, only Ford has shown a willingness in the 1950s and 1960s emerged first as internal classified
to mingle its money with government money, and even it is government studies.
rather reluctant to do so;" Mosely counseled King that "the
question of'end-use,'that is, whether classified or publishable,
is important to the foundation."4O Other evidence suggests that
Columbia professors like Mosely and Zbigniew Brzezinski
worked closely with the IDA, both in supporting students 42. I refer for example to the "Studies in Political Development" series,
completing dissertations, like former CIA employee Donald sponsored by the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social
Zagoria, and in bringing IDA people into Brzezinski's Research Science Research Council, yielding by my count seven books, all
Institute on Communist Affairs.41 published by Princeton University Press in the mid-1960s and all of
which became required reading in the political science subfield of
comparative politics: Lucian W. Pye, ed., Communications andPolitical
Development. 1967; Joseph LaPalombara, ed., Bureaucracy and Politi­
cal Development. 1969; Robert Ward and Dankwart Rustow's Political
Modernization in Japan and Turkey. 19XX; James S. Coleman, ed.,
'There is no making sense of the world by those Education and Political Development. 1966; Joseph LaPalombara and
Myron Weiner, eds., Political Parties andPolitical Development. 1966;
ignorant 0/ local context-specific issues; and there Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba, eds., Political Culture and Political
is no making sense ofthe world by those indifferent Development. 1965; Leonard Binder (along with Pye, Coleman, Verba,
to cross-regional and global/orces. " LaPalombara, and Weiner), eds., Crises and Sequences in Political
Development. 1971; and also the Little Brown series in comparative
politics edited by Almond, Coleman, and Pye. Gabriel Almond and
James S. Coleman authored the ur-text in this literature, The Politics of
the Developing Areas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960).
Almond also was an academic participant in intelligence projects at the
This incomplete but important evidence from the Mosely time. Documents in the Max Millikan Papers at MIT show that Almond
papers suggests that the Ford Foundation, in close consultation was a member of the classified ''Working Committee on Attitudes
with the CIA, helped to shape postwar area studies and im­ toward Unconventional Weapons in 1958~ 1, along with Air Force Gen.
portant collaborative research in modernization studies and Curtis LeMay, Harvard academic Thomas Schelling, and MIT's Ethiel
comparative politics that were later mediated through well­ de Sola Pool, among others. The committee studied "a variety oftype.s
known Social Science Research Council projects (ones that of unconventional weapons, nuclear, biological, and chemical, for use
in limited war." The social scientists were expected to find ways of
were required reading when I was a graduate student in the
''minimizing'' unfortunate reactions by target peoples to the use of such
late 1960s).42 According to Christopher Simpson's study of weapons-or as Millikan put it in his letter to Almond inviting him to
declassified materials, however, this interweaving offounda­ join the committee, the committee would discuss measures to be taken
tions, universities, and state agencies (mainly in intelligence that ''might reduce to tolerable levels the political disadvantages of the
and the military) extended to the social sciences as a whole: use of a variety of such weapons," and how to use weapons of mass
"For years, government money ... not always publicly ac­ destruction and still have "the limitability oflimited conflict. " (Millikan
to Almond, 3 Nov. 1958, Max Millikan Papers, box 8.) Millikan's long
memorandum of 10 Jan. 1961 to the committee stated clearly that use
ofsuch weapons might include crop-destroying agents that would cause
38. Ibid., box 13, Smith to Mosely, 28 Feb. 1961; see also notations on general famine; the covert use ofthis and other unconventional weapons
Mosely to Smith, 10 Mar. 1961. would be accompanied by overt denial that the United States had used
them. The key case he mentioned would be use ofsuch weapons against
39. Ibid., Mosely to Smith, 16 Mar. 1961. a conventional Chinese attack on a country in Southeast Asia (Millikan
40. Ibid., Mosely to King, 17 Apr. 1962. Papers, box 8).
41. Ibid., Mosely to John N. Thomas of the IDA, 19 July 1963, where 43. Simpson, ''U.S. Mass Communication Research and Counterinsur­
Mosely refers to RAND Corporation funds going to help Zagoria gency." Simpson has long lists of social scientists who worked for the
complete his dissertation, and Institute of Defense Analysis funds that OSS and other intelligence agencies during the war: they include Harold
helped support Zagoria for a postdoctoral project; see also Mosely to Lasswell, Hadley Cantril, Daniel Lerner, Nathan Leites, Heinz Eulau,
Brzezinski, 20 Aug. 1963. In his book The Institute ofPacific Relations: Elmo Roper, Wilbur Schramm, Clyde Kluckhohn, Edward Shils, Morris
Asian Scholars and American Politics (Seattle, WA: University of Janowitz, and many others; after the war, "a remarkably tight circle of
Washington Press, 1974), John N. Thomas later castigated CCAS men and women" continued to work for the state, including Lasswell,
scholars for their biases. Lerner, Cantril, Janowitz, Kluckhohn, and Eulau.

15

© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org

Allen and Taylor at Washington
The University ofWashington
in Seattle has one of the oldest area
studies centers, with parts of it es­
tablished well before World War II.
But the Cold War transformed it as
well, beginning with a case that
made headlines all over the coun­
try. In January 1949 the Board of
Regents ofthe University of Wash­
ington fIred three tenured profes­
sors for their political views: two
because they initially denied and
then later admitted membership in
the Communist Party, and one­
Ralph Grundlach, a national figure
in the discipline of psychology­
who was not a party member but
was a radical who was uncoopera­
tive with university and state legis­
lature inquiries. Ellen Schrecker,
author of the definitive account of
McCarthyism on the campus, Although the USSR did not inspire much sympathy among academics in the post-World War II
period, China did. This is one reason the China experts attracted much more attention from the
wrote that this decision "had na­
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In 1949 President Raymond B. Allen and the Board of
tionwide repercussions," not only Regents ofthe University of Washington, shown above with Allen seated second from the right,
as the first important academic fired three tenured professors for their political views. This first major academic freedom case in
freedom case in the Cold War pe­ the Cold War period established a pattern for purges at many universities thereafter. This photo
riod, but one that also established a is by and courtesy ofthe Seattle Post Intelligencer.
model for purges at many universi­
ties thereafter. President Raymond
B. Allen was the prime mover behind this influential case; disturbing aspects of this case, therefore, begin at the top: not
Schrecker takes particular note of how careful Allen was to in what this president did in the early Cold War period to
assure that proper academic procedure be followed in all political protect academic freedom and threatened faculty or to arouse
cases. 44 the suspicions of the FBI, but in what he did to facilitate such
There is no suggestion in Schrecker's account, however, suspicions and deliver up such faculty.
or in the more detailed study of this case by Jane Sanders,4' I came across Donovan's role in shaping Allen's argument
that Allen had extensive contact with J. Edgar Hoover and his in the former's papers,47 but the FBI's involvement was much
close aides in the FBI as the case unfolded, or that he was greater. For unknown reasons the FBI file on the University of
advised by William Donovan on the crucial matter of how to Washington (hereafter UW) is relatively unexpurgated. 4' This
construct a model argument against these professors, one affair apparently began with President Allen's request to meet
consistent with contemporary doctrines of academic freedom with Hoover or a top assistant in May 194849 to express his
that would stand up in a court of law:6 By far the most concern that the so-called Canwell Committee (Washington
state's early and vicious version of the House Un-American
Activities Committee) was not abiding by agreements he had
made with it. Allen had instructed UW faculty to assist in
44. Ellen Shrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities Canwell's investigation, and to speak with Everett Pomeroy,
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 97-104, 125. one of Canwell's chief investigators whom Allen wrongly
45. Jane Sanders, Cold War on the Campus: Academic Freedom at the believed to be a former FBI agent. In return, Allen said, Canwell
University of Washington, 1946~4 (Seattle, WA: University of Wash­ had agreed to tum over-the names offaculty to be hauled before
ington Press, 1979). In her index he has two entries for J. Edgar Hoover
and three for the FBI, none related to the 1949 case.
46. Allen's influential argument-"soon [to] be embraced by the
academic world"-was, in Schreck~r's presentation, "that academ­ 47. See Donovan's advice to President Allen in the Donovan Papers,
ics 'have special obligations' that 'involve questions of intellectual box 75A, item 889, handwritten notes dated 3 Feb. 1949 (the advice was
honesty and integrity.' Communism, because of its demand for given earlier than this date). George Taylor also worked with Allen in
uncritical acceptance ofthe party's line, interferes with that quest for devising an effective strategy for firing communists and radicals. See
truth 'which is the first obligation and duty of the teacher.' ... [Thus] Sanders, Cold War on the Campus, p. 79.
Allen concluded that ... 'by reason of their admitted membership
in the Communist Party ... [the two teachers were] incompetent, 48. See Diamond Papers, box 15.
intellectually dishonest, and derelict in their duty to teach the truth'" 49. Diamond Papers, box 15, Lew Nichols to Charles Tolson, 18 May
(ibid., p. 103). 1948.

16
© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
his committee so that the UW could carry out its own internal executed. (FBI files on these cases were closed when I sought
investigation first and thus avoid public embarrassment. access to them several years ago.)
Allen was also interested in an arrangement that he Declassified documents demonstrate that George Taylor
thought obtained at the University ofCalifornia at Los Angeles did indeed collaborate with the FBI. An example is a conference
(UCLA), whereby an on-campus FBI representative "cooper­ he helped to organize in 1955 (the same year that, in a cele­
ates with university officials"; he wished to have a similar brated case, the University ofWashington canceled a speaking
arrangement at the University of Washington so that he could invitation to Robert Oppenheimer 52). At first the conference
get current FBI infonnation on UW faculty, and check the was to be titled "World Communism and American Policy";
names ofpotential new faculty with the FBI. Hoover scrawled Taylor invited a local FBI agent to attend while assuring him
on this document, ''make sure this isn't being done" at UCLA, that "there would be no improper interference from the pres­
apparently a comment for the file since the FBI proceeded to ence of the agent," and offering to synopsize the conference
set up for Allen what can only be called the arrangement Allen for the FBI. Subsequently the name of the conference was
asked for-the one he persistently thought existed at UCLA changed to "American Policy and Soviet Imperialism," with
in spite ofFBI denials-one which provided him the infonna­ conference fliers using verbiage such as the following to invite
tion he wanted on UW faculty. By November 1948 an FBI the public to attend:
agent was seeing Allen weekly, and Allen in return was giving
DO YOU KNOW that over half your income taxes are due to the
him privileged infonnation on what the relevant faculty com­ aggressive nature of Communist imperialism?
mittee and the Board of Regents were likely to do about the
DO YOU KNOW what Lenin and Stalin intended regarding world
suspect professors. Allen even provided the FBI with the entire
domination?
transcript of the university's internal proceedings, including
privileged testimony assumed to be strictly confidential.'o DO YOU KNOW the kinds of private American Cold War opera­
tions and what they are doing? 53
One only begins to understand the early Cold War period
by learning that Taylor and his colleague Karl Wittfogel were
also attacked as left-wingers or communist sympathizers by
right-wing groups who noted Wittfogel's past communist affili­
The evidence suggests that the Ford Foundation, ations and Taylor's presence alongside China-hand John Service
in close consultation with the CIA, helped to shape in the Office ofWar Infonnation and Taylor's membership in the
postwar area studies and important collaborative Institute of Pacific Relations. President Allen chose to stand by
research in modernization studies andcomparative them, however, and shortly afterwards Allen accepted the direc­
politics that were later mediated through well­ torship of the Psychological Strategy Board, a CIA position
known Social Science Research Council projects.

50. Diamond Papers, ibid.; see also other memos in this file in May
1948, and FBI Seattle to Hoover, 4 Nov. 1948. Allen met with Hoover
on 6 May, and made several subsequent visits to the FBI in 1948 and
In a case of particular interest to the Korean field at the 1949. According to Clyde Tolson's memo to Nichols of 19 May 1948,
University ofWashington (an area that it has specialized in since a Los Angeles FBI agent named Hood had no special relationship with
1945), Allen told the FBI that "although Harold Sunoo appeared the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), but was "person­
to be an innocent dupe of the Party, he [Allen] was not entirely ally friendly with the Dean and just a few days ago the Dean wrote him
satisfied with the infonnation available with respect to Sunoo," regarding an individual and wanted certain infonnation ...." The memo
and asked for more from the FBI.'1 Dr. Sunoo taught at the says Hood didn't give him the infonnation. When President Allen later
university in the early Cold War period, and subsequently was asked the local FBI agent responsible for contacts at the UW to furnish
forced to resign. Many years later he told me that he thought infonnation on six professors, however, Tolson told the agent to give it
George Taylor, for decades the director of the Russian and Far to him (see Tolson to Nichols, 21 June 1948). Allen also asked the FBI
for infonnation on Melvin Rader, a stalwart radical whom I remember
Eastern Center at the university, had turned him in to the FBI as
from when I taught at the UW, and who was never accused of being a
a security risk because of his membership in a small faculty member of the Communist Party-although as FBI infonnation shows,
group critical ofthe Syngman Rhee regime. Allen told the FBI he thought Rader was "closely' connected with the
I later verified that infonnation independently with an­ Communist Party"-while offering no evidence. Later it developed that
other Korean employed by the University of Washington at the the Canwell Committee had faked evidence on Rader (Sanders, Cold
same time. He had participated in the same group, and he said War on Campus, p. 86).
that Taylor's denunciation of him to the FBI was responsible 51. Diamond Papers, box 15, Seattle FBI to Director FBI, 26 Jan. 1949.
for getting him fired (from a department having to do with the 52. On that episode, which tarnished the UW's reputation among
arts and thus utterly unrelated to any possible security prob­ scientists for years thereafter, see Sanders, Cold War on Campus,
lem). For nearly two decades thereafter he was unable to obtain pp.138-42.
a passport. Worse happened to other Koreans who ran afoul of 53. Ibid., Seattle FBI to Director, FBI, 8 June 1955; Seattle FBI to
the FBI in other states: according to Dr. Sunoo and other Director, FBI, 24 Aug. 1955. The invited conference guests included
Korean-Americans whom I have spoken with from that era, representatives from the State Department, the Voice of America, and
some Koreans who were active politically in the United States Radio Free Europe; Alex Inkeles was a featured speaker, as were Taylor
were deported to South Korea where they were subsequently and historian Donald Treadgold.

© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial

17 use only. www.bcasnet.org
 Parsons was his big backer), he soon went to the University of
Washington. There George Taylor introduced him to Benjamin
Mandel-the chief investigator for the House Un-American
Activities Committee, and later for the subsequent McCarran
inquisition ofthe China field; Mandel at the time was preparing
a perjury indictment against Owen Lattimore. None of this
came out at the time of Poppe's testimony against Lattimore,
and Lattimore's role in blocking a U.S. visa for Poppe until
1949 on the grounds that he had been a Nazi SS officer also
remained unknown."

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the new

SSRCIACLS restructuring and the apparent new
direction of the major foundations, is the absence
ofany reference to the basic motivationfor so many
ofthe new tendencies in the 1990s world that they
hope to adapt themselves to, namely, the global
corporation.

Graduate Dara O'Rourke unfurling a banner after receiving his

diploma at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) s
commencement exercises in June 1989. In the early 1950s the CIA International Studies during the Cold War
underwrote MITs Center for International Studies, almost as a
subsidiary enterprise. But this was only a beginning, and only "International studies" has been a more muddled field
one aspect of MIT's involvement with the U.S. government and than area studies, although for many the two labels are syn­
military. In May 1985, for example, the Pentagon earmarked $ 70 onymous. S6 One can count on most members of area programs
million annually for Star Wars research at the school. This photo
is by Michael Franklin, and it accompanied Rich Cowan's "Cap to have competence in those areas, but international studies is
and Gown as Camouflage, " CovertAction Information Bulletin, such a grab bag that almost any subject or discipline that
no. 38 (jail 1991), pp. 50-52. crosses international boundaries can qualify for inclusion. The
annual meetings ofthe International Studies Association have
an extraordinary range of panels, with political scientists
Taylor had turned down in 1950.'4 (Once again one senses that predominating but with a profusion of disciplines and sub­
in this period you either consulted with the CIA or got investi­ fields typically represented on the program. It is anything and
gated by the FBI.) everything, perhaps with a bias toward international relations
Nikolai Poppe also taught for decades at the University of
Washington. Originally a specialist on Mongolia, he defected
from the USSR to the Nazis on the first day they arrived in his
town in 1942, and "actively collaborated" with the quisling
government in the Karachai minority region in the Caucasus­ 54. Sanders, Cold War on Campus, p. 94.
the first acts ofwhich consisted ofexpropriating Jewish property, 55. Simpson, Blowback, pp. 118-22; Robert P. Newman, Owen
followed by a general roundup of Jews for gassing. He later Lattimore and the 'Loss' of China (Berkeley, CA: University of
worked at the Nazis' notorious Wannsee Institute in Berlin, California Press, 1992), pp. 363-64. On Taylor's introduction to
Mandel, see Diamond, Compromised Campus, p. 308. (Poppe has
identifying ethnic peoples ofthe USSR and Eastern Europe. He
always denied that he was an SS officer, saying that as a foreigner
was picked up after the war frrst by British intelligence, and then he could not have joined the SS; he also claimed that his "research"
by U.S. intelligence as part ofOperation Bloodstone to make use had nothing to do with the "final solution"-which was announced
ofNazis who might aid the United States in the developing Cold at a conference in Wannsee in January 1942 by SS leader Reinhard
War struggle. Heydrich, with Adolph Eichmann in attendance. See Simpson, Blow­
Poppe was brought to the United States in 1949 as part of back, p. 48n.)
the area studies program described above that was presided 56. See, for example, Richard D. Lambert, Points of Leverage: An
over by John Davies and George Kennan. Placed first in Agenda for a National Foundation for International Studies (New York:
Harvard's Russian Research Center (where sociologist Talcott Social Science Research Council, 1986).

18
© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
and policy-relevant research. International studies is an um­ work was not in its ''magnitude'' or in the number of books
brella under which just about everything gathers, from fine produced, but in the connection itself: "The channel is more
work and fine scholars to hack work and charlatans. important than that a lot of water should be running through it. "
Among the earliest and the most important of international Lovett acknowledged that there could be ''very damaging
studies centers was MIT's Center for International Studies, or publicity" ifit were known that the CIA was funding and using
CENIS. In its early years in the 1950s, the CIA underwrote this CENIS, since the CIA provided "a good whipping board;" he
center almost as a subsidiary enterprise; CENIS grew out of thought they could set up a "fire wall" by making the National
"Project Troy," begun by the State Department in 1950 "to Security Council (NSC) "our controlling agent with [the] CIA
explore international information and communication patterns. " the administrative agent." Killian responded that "I have a
It later broadened its agenda to "social science inquiry on inter­ strange animal instinct that this is a good time to get ourselves
national affairs," S7 but narrowed its sponsorship mostly to the tidied up. We shouldn't take the risk on this." Another partici­
CIA. This is evident in the transcript of a visiting committee pant named McCormack said he had always thought ''that
meeting at MIT in May 1959, attended by MIT faculty like W. W. others would front [for] the CIA;" a participant named Jackson
Rostow, Ithiel de Sola Pool, Max Millikan, and James Killian said that the NSC could be "a wonderful cover." In the midst
(president ofMIT for several years); the visitors included Robert of this discussion (which recalls Hollywood versions of Mafia
Lovett, McGeorge Bundy, and several unidentified partici­ palaver), card-carrying "Wise Man" Robert Lovett provided
pants. sa the bottom line: "If this thing can be solved you will frod it
Queried as to whether the center served just the CIA or a easier to get more money from the foundations. "S9
larger group ofgovernment departments, Millikan remarked that
over the five years of the center's relationship with the CIA, Area and International Studies after the Cold War
"there has been some continuing ambiguity as to whether we
were creatures of [the] CIA or whether [the] CIA was acting as Perhaps there is enough detail above to convince inde­
an administrative office for other agencies." He also admitted pendent observers that several major U.S. centers of area and
that the center had ''taken on projects under pressure" to have international studies research came precisely from the state/in­
work done that the CIA wanted done (these were among ''the telligence/foundation nexus that critics said they did in the late
least successful projects" from MIT's standpoint, he thought). At 1960s, always to a hailstorm ofdenial then, always to a farrago
one point in the transcript Millikan also says that "[Allen] Dulles of "why does this surprise you?" today. CIA-connected faculty
allowed us to hire three senior people, " suggesting that the CIA were so influential in the 1960s that they made critics who stood
director had a hand in CENIS's hiring policies. The center for academic principle look like wild-eyed radicals, if today
provided an important go-between or holding area for the CIA, critics merely appear to have been naifs who didn't know what
since ''top notch social scientists" and "area experts" had no was going on.60
patience for extended periods ofresidence at CIA headquarters: If we now fast forward to the 1990s we frod that the first
"A center like ours provides a way of getting men in academic proponents of the state's need for area training and expertise
work to give them [sic] a close relationship with concrete prob­ (thus to meet the challenges ofthe post-Cold War era, and so on)
lems faced by people in government." decided to put the intelligence function front and center, with a
This transcript predictably shows that the two big objects requirement that recipients of governnlent fellowships consult
of such work were the Soviet Union and China, with various with the national security agencies of the same government as a
researchers associated with the center doing internal classified quid pro quo for their funding. I refer, of course, to the National
reports that subsequently became published books-for example Security Education Act (NSEA, also known as the Boren Bill,
Rostow's Dynamics o/Soviet Society. The primary impetus for after former senator David Boren). Several area associations
this, of course, was the professorial desire to "get a book out of went on record in opposition to this program, and it nearly fell
it." But Millikan also noted another motivation: "In an academic beneath Newt Gingrich's budget-cutting ax in 1995.
institution it is corrosive to have people who are supposed to be In a useful summary61 of the issues that scholars raised
pursuing knowledge and teaching people under limitations as to about the NSEA, the administrator in charge of the program in
whom they can talk to and what they can talk about." One way 1992, Martin Hurwitz (whose background is in the Defense
to remedy that problem was to take on no project "whose Intelligence Agency, an outfit that makes the CIA look liberal by
material we can't produce in some unclassified results [sic]."
McGeorge Bundy, however, thought that the value of classified

59. Ibid.
60. Professor Diamond begins each ofhis chapters on Harvard's Russian
57. Guide to the Max Franklin Millikan Papers, MIT. Research Center with the "official stories" given out to the public about
58. This transcript was provided to me by Kai Bird, who got it from its activities: ''we have no classified contracts," "all our research is
David Armstrong, who is writing a dissertation on the Rostow brothers. generated out of our own scholarly interests," the various centers and
I am grateful to Kai for alerting me to the transcript. The first few pages institutes were established by disinterested foundations, and that, in
of the original document are missing, and so some of the participants general, all views to the contrary reflect some sort of conspiracy theory
are hard to identify; furthermore their statements were truncated and (Diamond, Compromised Campus, pp. 50-51,65).
paraphrased by the transcriber. The meeting was held on 18 May 1959. 61. The summary is by Anne Betteridge, executive officer ofthe Middle
All quotations in the text come from this transcript. Millikan was an East Studies Association, and is to be found in the publication of the
assistant director ofthe CIA in 1951-52, and Director ofCENIS from Association for Asian Studies, the Asian Studies Newsletter (June-July
1952-1969, the year he died. 1992), pp. 3-4.

19
© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
contrast) suggested that everyone should be open about the from Defense Department control. Gosling closed his statement
intelligence aspects of the program: "the buffer approach is by saying that the AAS has "made clear the desirability of
'traditional clandestine tradecraft,'" Hurwitz wrote (and as we distancing this program from Department ofDefense design and
saw in the CENIS transcript), but "aboveboard is the way to go" control. "
for the NSEA. At least three major area associations (for the Middle East,
The NSEA was not completely "aboveboard," however, Latin America, and Africa) refused participation in this program,
since its public board was supplemented by a "shadow board," as we have seen. Anne Betteridge, an officer of the Middle East
and some complained that "aboveboard" was not quite descrip­ Studies Association, argued that "academic representatives do
tive of the Defense Intelligence College that was to house the not wish to obscure the source of funding, but do wish to assure
NSEA. They thus hoped to fmd non-Pentagon housing and call the integrity of academic processes." Others commented that
the new office "The David L. Boren Center for International some academics worry that students in the program "may appear
Studies," but with no substantive changes otherwise. On 14 F eb­ to be spies-in-training," and that the program would compromise
ruary 1992 three area associations (not including the Association field research in many countries around the world: "Area schol­
for Asian Studies) wrote to Senator Boren expressing worries ars are extremely sensitive to the damage that can be done to
about "even indirect links to U.S. national security agencies." their personal reputations and to their ability to conduct scholar­
Each ofthose three organizations had extant resolutions on their ship abroad when they come to be perceived as involved with
books urging members not to participate in defense-related re­ intelligence or defense agencies of the U.S. govemment."61
search programs. A fair reading ofthese statements, it seems to me, suggests
that Betteridge and the area associations from Latin America,
Africa, and the Middle East raised important objections to the
NSEA, whereas the secretary-treasurer of the Association for
Asian Studies seemed concerned primarily with (1) getting the
money, (2) showing AAS members how important the NSEA
On 14 February 1992 three area associations (not
would be for Asian studies, and (3) evincing no concern what­
including the Association for Asian Studies) wrote ever for the "traditional clandestine tradecraft" that makes "re­
to Senator Boren expressing worries about "even granting agencies" mere window dressing-perhaps because of
indirect links to U.S. national security agencies. " a different "tradition" in Asian studies: that of intelligence­
Each ofthose three organizations had extant reso­ agency support for Title VI funding, a tradition that I, for one,
lutions on their books urging members not to par­ had never heard about.
ticipate in defense-related research programs. Important changes have also come to SSRC and ACLS in
the 1990s. These organizations have been the national joint
administrative nexus ofU.S. academic research since the 1930s.
SSRC has not been a center of social science research as most
social scientists would defme it (the Survey Research Center at
Michigan, for example, would come much closer), but a point at
The secretary-treasurer of the AAS, L. A. Peter Gosling,
which the existing disciplines fmd meeting ground with "area
introduced the issue to the membership as follows: "The goal of
studies." (Over the years I have walked on that ground many
our continued discussions about and with the NSEA [sic-he
times myself, as a member of various SSRC committees and
refers to discussions with Martin Hurwitz] has been to make it
working groups.) As such, of course, it is a more important
as useful and acceptable to the scholarly community as possible,
organization than any ofthe area associations. Therefore we can
which in tum involves insulating it as much as possible from the
hearken to how the SSRC vice-president, Stanley 1. Hegin­
Department of Defense where it is funded and located" [my
emphasis]. 62 botham, appraised the NSEA.64
First, he welcomed it by saying that ''new forms offederal
Gosling went on to fret that "there are no [sic] other sources
support for higher education" have been "extremely difficult
now, nor in the immediate <future" for funding international or
to mobilize" in the recent period of spending cuts, budget
area studies, and that although the NSEA only supplemented
deficits, and the like. Senator Boren, he explained, wanted the
Title VI funding, "there are those who fear that the traditional
Defense Department/intelligence community whose support has NSEA to facilitate area studies education at the graduate and
undergraduate levels, and had hoped the program would be
so often saved Title VI funding from extinction may [now] be
part of an independent governmental foundation. However,
less motivated to do so." Gosling thought the program would
the Office of Management and Budget blocked this, and
benefit Asian studies at both the undergraduate and graduate
instead ruled that for defense funds to be disbursed for the
levels, and noted that all Asian languages were included in the
NSEA under the 1992 Intelligence Authorization Act it would
NSEA's list of priority languages (and isn't that wonderful, and
have to be located in the Department ofDefense. Heginbotham
so on). Even though the NSE Board "sets the priorities for the
added in a footnote that Boren decided to further strengthen
program," this can be mitigated by "the use ofre-grant organi­
zations" in administering parts of the program, such as perhaps
the Fulbright program; such modalities might enable an escape

63. ''The National Security Education Program," Items. vol. 46, nos. 2-3
(June-Sept. 1992), p. 22.
62. Asian Studies Newsletter (June-July 1992), pp. 4-5. 64. Ibid., pp. 17-23.

20

© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org

''the credibility ofthe program in academic circles" by putting Department of Defense funding; his calls for merit review,
the administration of the program under the Defense Intelli­ academic independence, recognition ofthe difference between
gence College; ''few observers were reassured by this provi­ scholarship and government "service," and so on, would seem
sion," Heginbotham wrote, but the Defense Intelligence to be basic principles for any kind of fund raising, and were
College retained what he called a ''nominal'' role in the pro­ the ones I observed in action on several SSRC committees.
gram. Heginbotham should be praised for enunciating them again­
Heginbotham expressed particular concern about ''merit even if few seem to be listening, as sources in South Korea,
review" provisions in the NSEA: ''the academic and scholarly Taiwan, and Japan have become maj or funders ofAsian studies
communities need firm assurance that selection processes will in this country, usually without proper peer and merit review. 66
be free from political or bureaucratic interference beyond assur­ Still, the same principles did little to hold back the proliferation
ing compliance with terms of reference.... It would not seem of CIA-service faculty and students during the earlp years of
acceptable [my emphasis], for example, to have candidates the Cold War.
screened on the basis oftheir political views ... [or] their ability The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (BCAS) has
to obtain security clearances ..." provided periodic coverage of the NSEA, whereas (so far as I
Heginbotham went on to recommend that grants to indi­ can tell) the other alternative journal in the field-positions: east
viduals be made by "independent panels of scholars," and that Asia cultural critique-has been silent.67 In 1992 Mark Selden
the academics on the "oversight board" be selected by a means argued correctly in BCAS that the NSEA "poses anew the issue
''transparently independent" ofthe state agencies making up the of scholarship and power that lay behind the origin" of the
same board. But ''most worrisome," Heginbotham wrote, were Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars and its Bulletin, and
the service requirements ofthe NSEP. He described the postgrant noted that unlike earlier such activities, this one "saw no reason
requirements for individuals as follows: to conceal the military and intelligence priorities and powers
shaping the field." BCAS drew particular attention to article 3 of
Finally, the legislation includes important but ambiguous "service"
requirements for individuals who receive funds .... Undergraduates the ''purposes'' section ofthe NSEA, which call for it ''to produce
receiving scholarships covering periods in excess ofone year, as well an increased pool of applicants for work in the departments and
as all individuals receiving graduate training awards, are required agencies of the U.S. Government with national security respon­
either to serve in the field of education or in government service for sibilities." BCAS also noted the similarity between the issues
a period between one and three times the length of the award. The posed by the NSEA and those that the Columbia chapter of
legislation also prohibits any department, agency, or entity of the CCAS took up in regard to the contemporary China committee
U.S. government that engages in intelligence activities from using ofSSRC in a controversial set of articles in 1971.68
any recipient offunds from the program to undertake any activity on As a graduate student I participated in preparing that report,
its behalf while the individual is being supported by the program. 65 the main author ofwhich was Moss Roberts. We were interested
Heginbotham suggested that the postgrant term be limited to a in Ford Foundation funding of the China field, SSRC's Joint
year, and limited not just to positions in "government and edu­ Committee on Contemporary China (JCCC), and an organiza­
cation," but enabling any employment that used the training to tion formed in the State Department in 1964 to coordinate
benefit the nation's international needs. government and private area studies research, the Foreign Areas
Heginbotham's analysis is similar to Gosling's in three Research Coordinating Group (FAR). From our inquiry it ap­
respects, but superior in others: first, the analysis andrecommen­ peared that FAR played a role in shaping the field of contempo­
dations are almost entirely procedural; neither Heginbotham nor rary Chinese studies in line with the state's needs and with Ford
Gosling defend independent academic inquiry as essential in Foundation funding. It did this by suggesting appropriate re­
itself, or international and area studies as important apart from search and dissertation subjects, in the hope that, together with
what the state (let alone the "intelligence community'') may Ford funding, the expertise ofthe government's China-watching
want. Both also leave the impression that any funds of such size apparatus would be enhanced (with obvious benefits also to
are ipso facto worth having, regardless ofprovenance, assuming China watchers in academe).
that the procedures can be "as good as possible" in Hegin­ We were able to establish that FAR had grown out ofthe
botham's words. And, of course, the guarantees that Hegin­ army's concern for the "coordination of behavioral and social
botham asks for have not only been routinely bypassed and used
as a cover by the state and area studies academics that we
examined above, but even powerful Senators complain that the
very "oversight" committees responsible for monitoring the CIA
66. See Amy Rubin, "South Korean Support for U.S. Scholars Raises
have been ignored and subverted-especially in the most recent Fears of Undue Influence," The Chronicle o/Higher Education (4 Oct.
period (I refer mainly to the revelations of the "Iran/Contra" 1996), pp. 10-11.
scandal and the murders of Americans by CIA-associated mili­
67. Mark Selden, James K. Boyce, and BCAS editors, "National
tarists in Central America). Security and the Future of Asian Studies," Bulletin 0/ Concerned
The SSRC's Heginbotham, however, seems both more Asian Scholars, vol. 24, no. 2 (Apr.-June 1992), pp. 84-98. See also
responsible and more concerned than the AAS's Gosling about the updated information in the Bulletin o/Concerned Asian Scholars,
"re-granting agencies" being little more than laundries for vol. 24, no. 3 (July-Sept. 1992), pp. 52-53.
68. See the report of our work, a response by John Fairbank, a further
response by Moss Roberts, and David Horowitz's essay, "Politics and
Knowledge: An Unorthodox History of Modern China Studies," in the
Bulletin 0/ Concerned Asian Scholars, "Special Supplement: Modem
65. Ibid., p. 19 China Studies," vol. 3, nos. 3-4 (summer-falI1971), pp. 91-168.

21
© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
 In 1992 Mark Selden pointed out in BCAS that the 1991 National Security Education Act proposed by Senator
David Boren ''poses anew the issue ofscholarship and power that lay behind the origin" ofthe Committee of
Concerned Asian Scholars and its Bulletin, but that unlike earlier such activities this one 'saw no reason to
conceal the military and intelligence priorities and powers shaping the field. " In fact, the bill clearly states that
its purpose is "to produce an increased pool ofapplicants for work in the departments and agencies ofthe u.s.
Government with national security responsibilities. .. This drawing is from the Liberation News Service and
previously appeared in BCAS, vol. 3, nos. 3-4 (summer-fall 1971), p. 168, and again in vol. 21, nos. 2-4
(April-December 1989), p. 115.

science" in and out of government, which had long been spon­ budgets: thus the NSEA appeared to get what it deserved,
sored by the Special Operations Research Office of Johns Hop­ namely, a quick burial. No doubt Newt thought the NSEA was
kins University. FAR had been in contact with JCCC, which had just another boondoggle for academia (and maybe he was
been one of many beneficiaries of the Ford Foundation's deci­ right). At first Congress cut all its funds, but then restored some
sion to reconstitute the China field. Our report also drew atten­ of them--or so it seems, since NSEA scholarships were again
tion to the first chair of JCCC, George Taylor of the University available to students in early 1996. Still, the NSEA is limping
ofWashington, who, we argued, was a partisan in the McCarthy­ along into the post-Gingrich era.
McCarran inquisition, which had nearly destroyed the China Ifgovernment funding for area studies seems to be drying
field. Taylor testified together with two ofhis colleagues Wittfo­ up, so is that from foundations. One result is the contemporary
gel and Poppe against Owen Lattimore-and therefore a strange restructuring ofthe Social Science Research Council. For forty
choice to preside over a committee hoping to heal wounds and years SSRC and ACLS committees have been dermed mostly
reconstitute the field. We questioned as well why non-China by area: the Joint Committee on ... China, or Latin America,
scholars like Philip Mosely were included on the first JCCC.69 or Western Europe; there were eleven such committees as of
The report brought a vituperative response from John early 1996. That is all changing now under a major restructur­
Fairbank of Harvard, a response that evokes in me today the ing plan.'· SSRC has justified this effort by reference to the
same emotions it did in 1971: it was a political attack, designed global changes and challenges of the post-Cold War era, the
to ward off such inquiries rather than to provide a sincere and
honest response to the many questions of fact that we raised.
He began by saying our report ''raises an issue of conspiracy
rather than an issue of values," and ended by accusing us of 69. Ibid., p. 127.
offering "striking parallels to the McCarran Committee 'in­
70. Ibid., p. 105.
vestigation,'" that is, we were left-McCarthyites. In between,
precious few of our questions were answered.'o Ultimately a 71. I have seen drafts of the restructuring plan and some of the various
precise specification ofthe relationship to and responsiveness Joint Committee responses, all dated in late 1995 and early 1996, but
ofFAR and JCCC to government or intelligence agendas could cannot cite the documents under the terms oftheir provision to me; this
is not because of secrecy so much as the provisional and evolving nature
not be judged in the absence of access to classified materials. ofthe restructuring itselfas SSRC administrators respond to suggestions
But the issues are strikingly similar to those raised by the and complaints about their new plans. I will also refer to Kenneth
NSEAtoday. Prewitt's ''Presidential Items," in the March 1996 issue of the SSRC's
In November 1994 the cunning of history gave us the newsletter, Items, which reflect the essence of the restructuring drafts I
"Gingrich Revolution," and a chain saw approach to cutting have seen.

22
© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
 "boundary displacements" that I began this article with. These history, historical sociology, and comparative politics, and the
include (I) a desire to move away from fixed regional identities entire area studies project. Why do you need to know Japanese
(that is, the area committees), given that globalization has made or anything about Japan's history and culture if the methods of
the '''areas' more porous, less bounded, less fixed" than pre­ rational choice will explain why Japanese politicians and bu­
viously thought;72 (2) to utilize area expertise to understand reaucrats do the things they do? 73 If some recalcitrant research
pressing issues in the world that transcend particular countries, problems nonetheless still require access to Chinese or Swahili,
which is the real promise of area studies in the post-1989 era; why not get what you need from a graduate student fluent in
(3) to reintroduce area knowledge to social science disciplines those languages, rather than an academic expert on China or
that increasingly seem to believe that they can get along with­ Africa? The "soft" rational choice practitioner may in fact have
out it (this is an implicit reference to the rational choice language and area training, or if not, will still find value in the
paradigm and to "formal theory" in economics, sociology, and work of area specialists; they are the spelunkers who descend
political science), (4) to integrate the United States into "area into the mysterious cave to mine a lode of ''facts,'' which the
studies" by recognizing it as an "area" that needs to be studied practitioner will then interpret from a superior theoretical van­
comparatively, and (5)to collapse the SSRC and ACLS projects tage point. The formal theorist, however, has no use for either of
themselves, given the increasing cross-fertilization between them.
the social sciences and the humanities. (I do not know if the Item 4 proposes to tum the United States into an "area,"
restructuring will actually yield just one organization, but refer and were it ever to succeed it would also transform the disci­
only to the justifications I have seen for the new plans). plines. Research on the United States is indeed an "area study"
Major funding organizations like the Mellon Foundation just like any other; but then it's our country and has all manner
and the Ford Foundation have recently made clear their declining of idiosyncrasy and detail that the nonexpert or foreigner could
support for area studies and their desire to have cross-regional never possibly understand--and following upon that insight
scholarship, so in that subtly coercive context item I in this plan you arrive at the dominance of Americanists in almost any
becomes obligatory (some say that SSRC has been teetering on history, political science, or sociology department. That they
the edge of bankruptcy for several years). Item 2 is no different might be as blithely ignorant of how the world beyond U.S.
from the original justification for area studies. Items 3 and 4 are borders influences the things they study as any South Asian
laudable, however, for anyone conversant with the daily life of area specialist makes no dent on their departmental power.
the social sciences in U. S. universities in the 1980s and 1990s. Much more importantly, the ancient injunction to "know thy­
Rational choice theory is the academic analogue of the self' and the doctrine that there is no ''thing in itself," makes
"free market" principles that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald comparative study obligatory. So, to have a "Joint Committee
Reagan represented in the 1980s, and that are now offered to on the United States" under the SSRC/ACLS rubric would be
the "world without boundaries" as the only possible paradigm a big step forward.
of economic development. Like the putative free market, ''ra­ Kenneth Prewitt, president of SSRC, wrote that for all
tional choice" collapses the diversity of the human experience the aforesaid reasons, and no doubt others that I am not aware
into one category, the self-interested individualist prototype of, SSRCIACLS has come to believe ''that a number ofdiscrete
that has animated and totalized the economics profession in the and separated 'area committees,' each focused on a single
United States. As this paradigm now proposes to colonize world region, is not the optimum structure for providing new
political science and sociology, it has no use for (and indeed insights and theories suitable for a world in which the geo­
views with deep hostility) anyone who happens to know some­ graphic units of analysis are neither static nor straightfor­
thing about a "foreign area," or, for that matter, the United ward." 74 Instead of eleven committees, the new plan will
States: they are all threats to the universality of this model, apparently have three, under the following general rubrics:
which can explain everything from how Japanese Diet mem­ area studies and regional analysis; area studies and compara­
bers control the Ministry of Finance to why Indian widows tive analysis; area studies and global analysis. There may also
throw themselves onto funeral pyres-with every explanation be a fourth committee designed to support and replenish the
contingent on the listener knowing little or nothing about the existing scholarly infrastructure in the United States, and to
subject itself. develop similar structures in various other parts of the world.
So-called formal theory takes the rational choice paradigm Nonetheless Prewitt still envisions an important function for
one step further: if "soft" rational choice seeks to verify the area specialists: " ... if scholarship is not rooted in place-spe­
claims ofits model empirically through the collection and testing cific histories and cultures, it will miss, widely, the nuances
of data, the estimation of regression coefficients, and the like, that allow us to make sense ofsuch phenomena as international
"formal theory" is a simpler matter of the researcher staring at labor flows, conflicting perspectives on human rights ... [and
the game-theoretic mathematical formulas that appear on the so on]. 7'
computer screen, thus to determine how the real world works. If As this restructuring project got off the ground (before
the theory does not explain political, social, or economic phe­ Prewitt became president in 1996), the SSRC's Heginbotham
nomena, it is the real world's fault.
The rise ofthe rational choice and formal theory paradigms
ofsocial science inquiry has put at risk the subfields ofeconomic
73. See Chalmers Johnson and E. B. Keehn, ''Rational Choice and Area
Studies," The National Interest, no. 36 (summer 1994), pp. 14-22.
74. Prewitt, "Presidential Items," p. 16.
72. Prewitt, ibid., p. 15. 75. Ibid.

23
© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
sought to justify it by referring to the unfortunate Cold War by funding agencies and does not require security clearances (as
shaping of area studies in the early postwar period, and the the NSEA clearly does). The post-1960s SSRC, in my limited
need for "rethinking international scholarship" now that the experience, has managed the nexus where state power and
Cold War is over. 76 This odd return of repressed knowledge scholarship meet about as well as could be expected, assuming
stimulated a sharp response: several scholars associated with that there is some necessity to do it in the first place if the
Soviet and Slavic studies weighed in to deny that political organization hopes to be funded as a national organizer ofsocial
pressures deriving from the Cold War agenda of U.S. foreign science research; many SSRC research projects and even a
policy had much effect on their field, which often produced couple of its joint committees (notably the Latin American
scholarship "strikingly independent of assumptions driving group) have had clear counterhegemonic agendas, and produced
U.S. political preferences." Various area institutes may have scholarship of enormous relevance to political struggles around
been formed "partially in response to the Cold War," but the world. 79
nonetheless were able to conduct scholarship "without com­ The SSRC/ACLS area committees have also been fertile
promising their academic integrity." The authors also argued ground for interdisciplinary scholarship: for decades they of­
that the new SSRC framework " ... will tear international fered a rare venue where one could see what a historian thought
scholarship from the rich, textured empirical base that has of the work of an economist, or what a literary critic thought of
been assiduously developed through decades of research, behavioralist sociology. Meanwhile my own experience in the
moving it instead to a nebulous 'global' framework for re­ university has led me to understand that an "area specialist" is
search. ,,77 as unwanted in the totalized world ofFriedmanite economics as
This is a nice statement of the likely outcome of the azek (Gulag resident) would be at a meeting of Stalin and Beria.
current SSRCIACLS restructuring, but as we have seen Hegin­ To the extent that the more diverse discipline ofpolitical science
botham is clearly right about the state's role in shaping the has produced any lasting knowledge about the world beyond our
study of "foreign areas;" honest and independent scholarship shores, it has almost always been done through the contributions
was possible in the early area institutes, but the academic of area specialists to the subfields of comparative politics and
integrity of the institutes themselves was compromised by a international relations. 80
secret and extensive network of ties to the CIA and the FBI. In 1994 Northwestern University won a grant from the
It is a bit much, of course, for SSRC to acknowledge this only Mellon Foundation to run two year-long interdisciplinary
now by way ofjustifying its new course, when it spent all too seminars in the hope that they would bridge the areas and the
much time in the 1960s and 1970s denying that the state had disciplines. I participated in writing that grant proposal, and
any influence on its research programs. 78 More important, in 1995-96 directed the first seminar, "The Cultural Construc­
however, is the contemporary denial of the same thing, and tion of Human Rights and Democracy." The results of this
here SSRC's critics had a point. effort are not yet completely in, but it seems to me that this
If the current U.S. administration has one "doctrine," it is funding succeeded in providing a useful and important forum
a Clinton doctrine of promoting U.S.-based global corporations for interdisciplinary work, getting people to talk to one another
and U.S. exports through the most activist foreign economic across areas and disciplines, and I hope that the book growing
policy ofany president in history. Clinton's achievements in this out of it will be valuable. To the extent that the Mellon
respect-the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA), Foundation views such seminars as an addition to the funding
the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the new World of existing area programs, they are wonderful. To the extent
Trade Organization, and many other alphabet-soup organiza­ that they represent a redirection of funding away from area
tions, and the routine daily use of the state apparatus to further studies, the seminars are no substitute for the training ofpeople
the export goals of U.S. multinationals-are all justified by who know the languages and civilizations ofparticular places.
buzzwords that crop up in the new SSRC plans: a world without You win with people, as football coach Woody Hayes used to
borders, increasing globalization, the wonders ofthe Internet and say, and had there not been people already steeped in the
the World Wide Web, the growth ofmulticulturalism, the result­
ing intensification of subnationalloyalties and identities, and so
on. Furthermore the SSRC drafts of its restructuring plan make
clear the concern not just for scholarship, but for policy relevance
and encouraging better capacities for ''managing'' the new global 78. Heginbotham wrote: "those who shaped the emerging institutions
issues of the 1990s-a clear rationale for scholarship and "area of international scholarship in the early years of the Cold War should
have been more attentive to a range of issues involving the autonomy
expertise" to be atthe service of national security bureaucrats.
and integrity of scholars and scholarly institutions." The response of
I am by no means a purist on these matters, and see nothing Huber, Ruble, and Stavrakis to this truth was to ask Heginbotham to
particularly wrong with scholars offering their views on policy name names: "Which individuals were inattentive to scholarly auton­
questions so long as the practice is not openly or subtly coerced omy and integrity?" they ask, since such people should have "an
opportunity to defend themselves."
79. One good example is a book that grew out ofa conference sponsored
by the Latin American committee, David Collier, ed., The New Authori­
76. Stanley J. Heginbotham, "Rethinking International Scholarship: The tarianism in Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
Challenge of Transition from the Cold War Era," Items, June-Sept. 1979).
1994. 80. Heginbotham's critics refer to "the damage done by the exception­
77. Robert T. Huber, Blair A. Ruble, and Peter J. Stavrakis, "Post~old ally strong behavioral wave that swept through the social sciences in
War 'International' Scholarship: A Brave New World or the Triumph of America thirty years ago, " but the damage has been at least as great from
Form Over Substance?" Items, Mar.-Apr. 1995. the rational choice wave ofthe 1980s.

24
© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
 are
worth the combined
income of 45~ of the
planet's population,
the 2.5 billion
people on the bottom•

.,\" "

,
With the end ofthe Cold War, u.s. government/intelligence priorities have focused much more openly on what has
probably been the underlying priority all along: protecting u.s. interests and power in the world. A major part of
this is promoting u.s. -based global corporations and exports, with the free market "world without borders" as the
i
t
accepted paradigm for economic development. For u.s. research institutions supporting government/intelligence
priorities this involves collapsing the diversity ofhuman experience into an assumed universal self-interested desire
for material development. Even without the Cold War, then, there is a need to separate academic and government
functions so that there can be truly free inquiry and opinions, with the opportunity to explore a diversity ofparadigms.
This drawing is by and courtesy of Matt Wuerker and is from a J 996 subscription appeal for the CovertAction
I
Quarterly (Washington, D.C.).

regions we studied, inventing them would have been impos­ specialists in communist politics, the oracle bone or Sanskrit
sible-or at least forbiddingly expensive. or Hinduism specialist got a tenured sinecure and (usually) a
In one of the SSRC restructuring plans there is this handful of students in his or her classes. The state, the foun­
sentence: "There is no making sense of the world by those dations, and the universities supported scholars who spent
ignorant of local context-specific issues; and there is no their entire lives translating the classics of one culture or
making sense of the world by those indifferent to cross-re­ another into English, often with next to no interaction with
gional and global forces." I think this is true, even if! would their colleagues. Many were precisely as monkish and un­
phrase the point differently. Although "area programs" trained yielding to the intellectual life outside their narrow discipline
many scholars and made possible a rare interdisciplinary as a microeconomist. I have never thought it too much to ask
intellectual program, the sad fact is that most area specialists that a person like this find something to teach that would attract
were not interested in it. There is no reason, of course, why a enough students into the classroom to pay the bills, but it
person working on Chinese oracle bones should have anything happens all the time, and now the area studies programs are
in common with an expert on the Chinese Communist polit­ paying the price; often representing enormous sunk costs, the
buro; their common habitus in a Chinese studies program was faculty and the sinecures are very expensive now and unlikely
the result of a historical compromise between the universities to be sustained at anything like current levels in the future. If
and the state in the early Cold War period. In return for not we end up having no Sanskrit, no Urdu, no oracle bones, and
complaining about the predominance of Kremlinologists or no Han Dynasty history, it will not just owe to the ignorance

25
© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
of the foundations, the government, and the university admin­ Conclusion
istrators, but will also reflect the past privilege of the hide­
bound narrow scribblers themselves. What is to be done? Immanuel Wallerstein recently of­
Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the new fered some useful, modest suggestions, which I fully support:
SSRC/ACLS restructuring and the apparent new direction of encourage interdisciplinary work by requiring faculty to re­
the major foundations is the absence of any reference to the side in two departments, bring faculty together for a year's
basic motivation for so many of the new tendencies in the work around broad themes, reexamine the epistemological
1990s world that they hope to adapt themselves to, namely, underpinnings of the social sciences in the light of the eclipse
the global corporation. 81 This is the motive force and modal of the Newtonian paradigm in the hard sciences, and reinvent
organization for "globalization" and the technologies that a university structure so that it is no longer strongly shaped
speed it. Bill Gates's Microsoft is as dominant in this new by the conditions ofthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 82
sphere as John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil was a century I have some additional modest suggestions, in the interest of
ago; and no doubt our grandchildren will vote for various continuing discussion and debate:
governors and senators, if not presidents, named Gates-and 1. Abolish the social sciences and group them under one
the ones who become academics will go to the "Gates Foun­ heading: political economy (if economics will not go along,
dation" for their research grants. Another symbolic U.S. cor­ connect it to the business school).
poration, Coca Cola, has become the first U.S. multinational
to place overall corporate management in the hands of its 2. Regroup area studies programs around a heterodox collec­
world office rather than at its historic national center in tion of themes that allow us all to stand "off center" 8l from
Atlanta. In that sense, SSRC is merely following Coca Cola's our native home and the (foreign?) object of our scholarly
lead by making the United States of America just another desires.
subsidiary, just another "area committee." All the globally 3. Raise funds for academic work on the basis ofthe corporate
competitive U.S. corporations are all-out for multiculturalism, identity ofthe university as that place where, for once, adults
multi-ethnic staffs, a world without borders and the latest high do not have to sell their souls to earn their bread, but can learn,
technology no matter what its impact on human beings, some­ write, produce knowledge, and teach the young as their es­
thing evident in their media advertising: "Oil for the Lamps sential contribution to the larger society.
of China" may have been Standard Oil's slogan for selling
kerosene worldwide, but now Michael Jordan as the high-fly­ 4. Abolish the CIA, and get the intelligence and military
ing, globe-trotting logo for Nike might as well be the logo for agencies out of free academic inquiry.
the United States, Inc. (Jordan and his Chicago Bulls are Ifwe began this article with McGeorge Bundy, it is best
particularly popular in "Communist China"-just as they are to close it with words from one of the few scholars to speak
in my household.) out against the FBI purge in the early postwar period-and for
This is not a matter of SSRC raising a challenge to the his efforts to suffer his due measure of obsessive FBI attention:
global corporation, which is hardly to be expected, but it is a historian Bernard A. DeVoto. In 1949 he wrote words as
matter of not abandoning hard-won scholarly knowledge and appropriate to that era as for the "National Security Education
resources that we already have-and here I am not speaking Act" and the "globalized" world of today:
simply of the existing area programs. Because of the ferment
ofthe 1960s, social science scholarship ofthe 1970s met a high The colleges ... have got to say: on this campus all books, all
standard of quality and relevance. In political science, sociol­ expression, all inquiry, all opinions are free. They have got to
ogy, and even to some extent economics, political economy maintain that position against the government and everyone
else. If they don't, they will presently have left nothing that
became a rubric under which scholars produced a large body
of work on the multinational corporation, the global monetary is worth having. 84
system, the world pool of labor, peripheral dependency, and
U.S. hegemony itself. A high point ofthis effort was Immanuel
Wallerstein's multivolume Modern World-System, but there
were many others.
81. Also noteworthy is the similarity between the rhetoric ofglobali­
I would say that one of the shocks of my adult life was to zation that Ken Prewitt uses to justify the new SSRC course, and that
see the alacrity with which many social scientists abandoned this used a decade ago by Richard Lambert in his Points o/Leverage (for
political economy program, especially since the abandonment which Prewitt wrote the preface; see for example pp. 1-2,7,27-31).
seemed roughly coterminous with the arrival of the Reagan and "Globalization" may be the new mantra, but maneuvering to find
Thatcher administrations. Often the very social scientists who ways to meet the needs of our global corporations is getting old by
produced serious scholarship in political economy in the 1970s now.
became the leaders of a march into the abstractions of rational 82. Wallerstein, "Open the Social Sciences," pp. 6-7.
choice and formal theory in the 1980s. One of the SSRC com­ 83. I use Masao Miyoshi's phrase in his OffCenter (Cambridge, MA:
mittees that sought to sustain this 1970s agenda was the States Harvard University Press, 1993), suggestive of a stance placing the
and Social Structures Committee (my bias since I was a mem­ scholar neither in his native country nor on the ground he studies,
ber); it was summarily eliminated by a new SSRC president in but in a place "off center," yielding a parallax view essential to new
1991. Be that as it may, there remains afme body ofwork in U.S. knowledge-about anything. Miyoshi made his scholarly reputation
political economy that could be the basis for a revival of schol­ as a literary critic ofElizabethan novels, and now writes about Japan
arship on the global corporation and the political economy ofthe (and the United States) with a rare insight born ofa rare experience.
world that it creates before our eyes. 84. Quoted in Diamond, Compromised Campus, p. 43.

26

© BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org