Obama's CIA-on-Campus Program

CHRISTOPHER SERRA

The CIA-off-campus protests of the 1980s may need to be revived--this time addressed to President Obama. The administration has asked Congress to establish a new "intelligence officer training program" at colleges and universities. The proposal, buried in the 2010 intelligence authorization bill, would invite schools to apply for grants for courses that would "meet the needs of the intelligence community." Students taking the courses would have to receive security clearances, according to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, and their participation would be kept secret. After graduating, they would be required to work for the CIA or another intelligence agency.

Obama clearly wants a better CIA and hopes universities will help. But mandatory security clearances and secrecy conflict with universities' commitment to openness and free inquiry. Yale, for example, says "the principles of openness, trust, and free inquiry...are fundamental to the autonomy and well-being of a university."

The CIA's problems have included domestic spying, in violation of its charter; assassination plots against Castro and others; and coups that overthrew governments in Iran, Guatemala and elsewhere. These were exposed in the 1970s by Frank Church's Senate committee, but in the Reagan years covert activities returned with a vengeance, and renewed protests focused on campus recruiters. As The Nation reported in 1988, "students at more than seventy colleges and universities have organized energetically: physically barring recruiters from campus, disrupting interview sessions, taunting C.I.A. representatives, holding sit-ins and demonstrations to protest university decisions."

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