The CIA college tour: The Ivy League

MuckRock – by J Pat Brown

As part of back-to-school week, we combed through the CIA archives to find connections between colleges and the Agency. Today, we’re looking at the Ivy League.

Brown University

The “Jabberwocky 13” disrupt a speech by former Director William Casey by reciting the Lewis Carrol poem

Columbia University

Agency used front groups to secretly fund students and faculty research

Cornell University

20 people are arrested in protest of CIA recruitment on campus in the wake of Nicaragua, leading one student to quip “You’ve got a policy about doors but not about murder”

Dartmouth College

Judging by the sizable number of letters of recommendation in the CIA’s archives, there was a pretty strong Dartmouth-to-Agency pipeline from the ’50s through the ’80s

Harvard University

The fact that in 1977 Harvard published a report entitled “Report of the Committee on Relationships Between The Harvard Community and the Central Intelligence Agency” should tell you everything you need to know

University of Pennsylvania

Ramparts magazine calls university’s Institute for Cooperative Research “a school for spies,” a charge the university flatly denies

Princeton University

2001 conference entitled “CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947-1991” leads to the release of thousands of pages of Agency activity during the Cold War, dubbed “the Princeton Collection”

Yale University

As part of program targeting “black militant groups,” Agency monitors meetings of University’s Black Student Alliance

This is only a small sampling, so we encourage you to dive in yourself. If you find anything interesting, or if you have suggestions on where the CIA college tour should go next, let us know on Twitter or at info@muckrock.com

MuckRock

2 thoughts on “The CIA college tour: The Ivy League”

“if you have suggestions on where the CIA college tour should go next, let us know on Twitter or at info@muckrock.com”

Oh, just about every college in every town in the nation.
And some colleges that aren’t, technically, in the nation.

galen says:

September 11, 2017 at 10:34 am

Yep, a few years ago they came to our town’s university. A few of us protested, it was quite a moment. But most of the students were eating up what the C.I.A. guy was offering: a promising career with world travel, a chance to help the world!! The students didn’t like the protesters being there interfering with their opportunity. Dollar signs were placed in their eyes, prestige afforded. After leaving there I had to take a shower. Few places as toxic as universities.

.

Reply