Cloak and Classroom

Thanks to Felix Moos for taking time to be here today.

Mr. Moos has asked me to emphasize that although he played an important role in inspiring the Roberts program, he is not directly involved in administering the program today.

The United States is at war, and thus, simply put, the existing cultural divide between the intelligence community, the U.S. military and academe has become a critical, dangerous, and very real detriment to our national security at home and abroad.

The former global symmetry of inter-nation conflict has become the asymmetry of terrorism and insurgency. Long gone are the days where academic anthropology might occasionally be applied to tourism and gender studies but not to critical area and language studies with a direct, practical use to national defense.

James Fallows in the April 2005 Atlantic Monthly puts it well: "Until the United States understands that the 'battle for hearts and minds' is more than a slogan, it will lose. To win, it needs to deal with Iraq on far more intimate terms than are possible from fighter bombers dropping munitions or from armored Humvees. It needs to learn the language, penetrate the culture, recruit spies and sympathizers -- to do the slow and messy work of building support for its side."

All of us have to re-examine our perceptions of each other, rather than simply claiming that the CIA in the United States, if not worldwide, now threatens the fundamental principles of academic transparency.

The multiple challenges to the United States are, and will be, global and evermore persistent.

He left Imperial Germany for a reason! Furthermore, the complexities of modern warfare in 1914 were just becoming evident and were probably not understood by many intellectuals like FB, Franz Boas did not experience Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. What would FB say today?

If there's a danger here, it's the possibility of faculty intimidation of students. The storm at Columbia is a precedent, and if it's known who's made a prior commitment to intelligence work, there's a real possibility that radical professors might target students. I wouldn't accept anyone's assurance that this won't happen. So- called "transparency" sets up students for a radical witch-hunt, which will seek to gut the program by "outing" its participants. (I don't even think the NSEP scholars should be named. I've seen the list, with the foreign countries where they have studied. It's beyond me why an NSEP student who's gone to study Arabic in Syria -- a police state -- should be openly named as a prospective employee of a national security agency.)

Gilbert Merkx, who's familiar from Title VI battles, says there should be an academic advisory board. Advisory boards are good things for government-sponsored programs -- Title VI should have one too -- but why should it be academic? The program matches students with government agencies. If there is to be a board, it should be comprised of representatives of those agencies, some Congressional appointees, academics with a proven track record of cooperation with the intelligence community, and graduates of the program. The model might be the National Security Education Board.

It's encouraging that young people want to serve. And no faculty member is affected in any way by this program. I'd advise the Title VI community, which continues to be funded at unprecedented levels, to watch its step. If area studies associations begin passing resolutions against the Pat Roberts Program, as they did against the NSEP, the backlash against Title VI will grow stronger. It'll certainly be more grist for my mill.

A follow up question relates to the ability of the government to hire the best and the brightest to serve in its ranks. Who in academia can support a position that it is not our responsibility to train the future operatives, intelligence analyist, and agents for the U.S.?

Felix Moos:
    Who indeed can support a position not making the best and the brightest be well trained and available--as volunteers-- to the nation?

"[S]ecrecy shapes PRISP as it takes on the form like a cell-based covert operation in which PRISP students study chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, anthropology and foreign languages without their fellow classmates, professors, advisors, department chairs or presumably even research subjects (creating serious ethics problems under any post-Nuremberg professional ethics code or Human Subject Review Board) knowing that they are working for the CIA, DIA, NSA or other intelligence agencies."

How do you reply to that argument?

Felix Moos:
    PRISP is hardly a cell-based covert operation and must be perceived as a measure of a nation at war. Secrecy is rather difficult to maintain on U.S. college campuses -- or in an open society like our own, and thus David Price's fears seem exaggerated at best.

What would you want to know about this researcher before you would agree to answer his questions? If the researcher was in training to become an intelligence analyst for the Chinese military, wouldn't you want to know that before you decide whether or not to participate in his research project?

And if so, shouldn't the same principles apply to PRISP particpants who go abroad to do fieldwork?

Felix Moos:
    I would attempt to ascertain if the PRC student was a bona fide anthropology student doing ethnography in Kansas. If so, he would have my support. The more this Chinese student would learn about our society the more doubts he might have about his own PRC society.

How can anyone believe that an academic culture alone can stand as a firewall for freedom without the support and commitment of those who willingly lay down their lives so those who chose to live in isolation can protest against the very freedom the government by way of the Department of Defense provide. So we (academia) bite the very hand that affords us the opportunity to demonstrate how intelligent we are to the children of those who serve on the front lines of freedom -- isn't that sweet.

Felix Moos:
    Thanks, you are so right. What world do these intellectuals live in? The U.S. is at war, and that presumably includes U.S. institutions of higher learning.

In your original proposal, the participants' names would have been disclosed. What do you think about Scheuer's argument?

Felix Moos:
    Michael Scheuer my be correct for PRISP scholars. What I am proposing is a new undergraduate-based ROTC-like (or ROTC "second track") program that would be transparent, with students' curriculum and course of study known to all who would be interested.

This program would be voluntary, and students, just like ROTC commissioned Reserve Officers, would only have to serve for a specified time after graduation. Some of these individuals after having fulfilled their service obligation (in return for a four-year scholarship), could well opt for other than Intel careers.

PRISP is specifically tailored at this juncture in time, for individuals already employed within the IC because the need for language and area-qualified individuals has become so critical.

Generally, individuals in their mid-twenties do not learn languages like Chinese or Uighur or Arabic for example, as easily as individuals in their teens. Furthermore, it would be easier for these younger college students to spend summers in foreign settings not as employees or participants in PRISP but as bona fide college students learning a language and an area of their interest.

In his book on the controversy over U.S. anthropologists who indirectly assisted counterinsurgency programs in Thailand, Eric Wakin (a former anthropologist who now works in the financial-services industry) points out that many of the toughest provisions in the 1971 ethics code have been removed since then.

For example, a provision reading, "Anthropologists should not communicate findings secretly to some and withhold them from others" was removed between 1971 and 1990. (The AAA's current code of ethics, approved in 1998, is here.)

Felix Moos:
    The 1971 AAA statement on research ethics was introduced, after the Tet offensive and at the height of the U.S.'s involvement in the Vietnam war. Thus, it must be seen against events happening on U.S. campuses at the time. It should be noted that Margaret Mead, one of the godmothers of American anthropology, and others of equally high standing in anthropology, strongly opposed that statement. Issues at the time were far more complex than the authors of that statement made us believe.

In a 2003 essay on federal financing of anthropology during the early Cold War, David Price wrote: "The dynamic was such that there was not a consistent and direct relationship between funding sources and the political biases or findings of researchers -- but there was a consistent pattern of directed research. The Cold War clearly ushered in a new era of big-money-directed research in which the problems du jour were more often than not selected by agencies with specific agendas than they were selected by independent anthropologists."

How do you reply to that concern?

Felix Moos:
    To a large degree any research is driven by ideas and money, increasingly funding has become the dominant force. Few researchers have the luxury to fund their own research for very long. What is represented by what David Price et al calls "directed research'-- is "it" directed by prevailing political correctness on many US college campuses, or funding agencies. What is the difference if our tax money is re-cycled through the Department of Education or the Pentagon?

David Price apparently lives in a very benevolent world and he wants anthropologists" to speak out against the war on terrorism's threats to the world's indigenous peoples"--the Taliban or Hezbolah?

For the curious -- you can find critical histories of the CIA's role on campus in Sigmund Diamond's The Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955 (Oxford University Press, 1992) and Christopher Simpson's edited volume Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War (New Press, 1998).

On the other side of the coin, here's a quotation from a 1987 speech by Robert M. Gates, who was then the deputy director of the CIA: "A university steps on precarious ground and itself endangers academic freedom if it starts making arbitrary rules about which organizations a scholar may participate in or talk with -- and, I would add, especially if one of those organizations is a branch of our society's own democratically chosen government."

Thanks again to Felix Moos for taking time to do this.