The Ivy League and its peer institutions have long been cozy with the CIA. These ties conflict with the purported cosmopolitan ethos of the Liberal Arts model, or maybe tell us something about the inherent moral bankruptcy and logical instability of higher education.
It’s a nice deal if you can swing it: sign up for a short-term research contract proposed on a gorgeous letterhead that reads “External Research Staff.” Or take on a well-funded fellowship with a series of questions that probe applicants’ alliance with national security organizations. Or, upon graduation, submit work to a major literary magazine like the Paris Review, which Peter Matthiessen—a CIA agent—funded, organized and curated. Or take a class at Harvard with an undercover CIA officer, which the university allows. Or graduate from Smith, like Gloria Steinem, with your eyes on a career in women’s lib; take a big check at the CIA and fly around the world to serve as a mouthpiece for anti-Soviet operatives.
I could talk about Smith’s Khan Liberal Arts Institute hosting Valerie Plame Wilson, a Smith grad and CIA operative, in 2011, and the various CIA graduates the college has hosted over the years. I could also present photos of the Chicago Boys, a curated group of neoliberal economists at the University of Chicago. They engineered the program responsible for the 1973 evisceration of a budding revolutionary socialist independence in Chile, a violent experiment in globalized laissez-faire policy that the CIA would later cop to funding. But then I would be getting my perspectives confused, because I just finished a paper on the social permissibility of photography at scenes of violence, which I wrote for a Smith class.
I could talk about Nancy Pelosi’s CIA declassifications that demonstrate her discreet knowledge of enhanced torture techniques—read: those viscerally horrific photos from Abu Ghraib. But then I would be getting my perspectives confused, because I just finished a paper on the contemporary photo as a site of gendered play, with which I supplemented an old article of Sontag’s from The Partisan Review. A publication that was, oh Jesus, funded by the CIA in the 50s and 60s to shape public intellectual opinion.
I could always shift my frame of reference, or maybe take a class or two in a different field, but then I might start talking about Norman Holmes Pearson, who designed the American Studies major—one of those liberal arts degrees that attracts thousands of applicants—in order to use scholarship to promote CIA interest and fight the communist threat.
If nothing else, higher ed is a marketing scheme. Smith, like its peers, makes a yearly effort to emphasize the excellence of its programming, and especially the Ivy-adjacent liberal arts model, which promises to form high-minded, well-rounded students, prepared for virtuous work in any sector. And sure, many graduates have gone on to do great things, even morally substantial ones. But the dissonance between the humanist ethos of the liberal arts college, a cultural relic and mainstay of Fordist 20th Century America, and the coziness of that ethos with the imperial core, is good evidence of a sort of collegiate self-delusion. Meanwhile, 40%of graduating Harvard students take a job in finance, consulting or government intelligence. And some of the most reputed and lauded critical thinkers of our time—writers I have always looked up to—like Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous and Donna Haraway, have sought positions at The European Graduate School, which is a fully independent program of political and philosophical study that failed to get American funding.
“I wish I could get drunk and run around the catacombs in a linen shirt, and quote Tolstoy” my friend Gabrielle, frustrated with the cyber-Judeo-Christian-necro-patriarchy, or what you will, recently whined. I get what she means—the past thirty years of economic austerity and constraint (we are both 9/11 babies, I feel like adding) have made things feel pretty bleak. Getting into top colleges is less about intellectual rigor and more about learning to market yourself as an asset to a business, convincing Harvard or Smith or wherever else that you’ll deliver a good return for their investment portfolio if they pick you. Like anyone with ambition, I cringe violently every time I think of the students of old putting down their $17 for an academic term at schools whose costs have now breached mortgage-level amounts. But the linen shirt of academia, as comfortable as it sounds, is a little hard to square with the knowledge that the Ivy League, and the “women’s Ivy League,” have always been imperially funded. So, I guess I’m saying that Gabrielle’s nostalgia is misguided; the commercialization of all things intellectual and the winnowing PhD prospects are not accidents of an economic crash. Rather they help to separate the wheat from the chaff and form humanistic, worldly, super-people for American operatives to scoop up, just as stakeholders have long planned.
So how do I write the paper about the atrocity with the paper and pen from the atrocious?
