Spies on Campus

a sobering examination of political surveillance in the once-inviolate groves of academe

In comparison with most student protests held before and since, the one staged on the evening of February 9, 1967, at State University College at Brockport in Upstate New York was singularly uneventful. Instead of a prolonged marathon involving hundreds of students, the demonstration--in the form of a sit-in, held at the student union--attracted only a handful of students and lasted a scant 15 minutes. Sponsored by members of a group called the Campus Committee of Concern, the sit-in protested nothing so lofty as Vietnam, civil rights or academic freedom. The students involved simply wanted the union to remain open awhile longer at night, so they could drink Cokes and talk there. Even the local press, knowing a nonstory when it saw one, devoted only a short item to the action the next day.

But before the month was over, it was clear that this minidemonstration had, like the first element in an (continued on page 118) Spies on Campus (continued from page 107) elaborate Rube Goldberg device, set in motion a series of more complicated events that ended in the exposure of an extensive network of FBI spying and political surveillance on the Brockport campus.

The story of the snooping--perhaps even more alarming because Brockport is hardly known as a hotbed of political activism--was brought to the surface by the widely respected Reverend John Messerschmitt, ecumenical chaplain to the college and a faculty advisor to the group that sponsored the sit-in. Speaking on February 23 to a hushed meeting of the local American Association of University Professors, Messerschmitt revealed that the morning after the sit-in, a member of the Brockport administrative staff, during a conversation with Messerschmitt about the Campus Committee of Concern, began making remarks about Dr. Ernst A. Wiener, then associate professor of sociology and also a faculty advisor to the C. C. O. C. The administrator asked if Messerschmitt was aware of Wiener's involvement with civil rights, the peace movement and various New Left groups that the staff member "Knew" to be Communist fronts. When Chaplain Messerschmitt protested that without evidence such accusations were irresponsible, the administrator confided (according to the chaplain's notes, recorded shortly after the conversation): "John, I know I can trust you with this information. I'm in regular contact with the FBI. There are four or five of us on the campus--two with the FBI and three with the CIA. We've been asked to watch Wiener very closely. Believe me when I tell you he has quite a background. Be careful." Messerschmitt responded by telling the man he could hardly believe he was actually working for the FBI and that if he was, his position "was in contradiction to what the university stood for and extremely dangerous to the civil liberties of all the individuals he was keeping under surveillance."

For a half hour, the two men argued the subject. "Wouldn't you do this FBI work if your country requested it of you?" asked the nameless administrator. "How can you attack the FBI when it's only trying to protect you? ... This surveillance work is occurring on every campus in the country .... Those who are being watched shouldn't have anything to hide of what they are doing and saying is aboveboard ... Don't think I get paid for this; I don't. I was asked to do this and I agreed as a service to my country."

From the conversation, the surprised chaplain learned not only that such campus spying was common but that both the FBI and the CIA were regularly in touch with friendly Brockport faculty members, who were instructed--in the words of the administrator--"to kind of keep an eye on things on a permanent basis."

"Finally," Chaplain Messerschmitt concluded, "I told him our conversation had left me no less shocked at his disclosure. I was sorry he had assumed a confidence of me without first asking, but because this news was absolutely incompatible with what I understood higher education to be, I could not be quiet about it."

Nor was he. With the fuse lit by his subsequent disclosures, reactions exploded in swift succession. Convinced and outraged by what they had heard but prevented from direct legal action by the fact that the conversation was unwitnessed, the Brockport chapter of the American Association of University Professors passed a resolution strongly condemning undercover operations on the campus--as a threat of "faculity intimidation" and "thought control." Within the next month, the Brockport faculty senate and the State University Federation of Teachers at Brockport passed similar resolutions. The CIA responded by labeling the Brockport charges "nonsense" and stated that it "does not engage in spying in the United States." The FBI's authority is not so circumscribed, however. A few weeks later, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, in a letter to Chancellor Samuel Gold, the administrative head of the New York State University System, admitted the charges. "I would never permit the FBI," Hoover wrote, "to shirk its responsibilities. I feel certain that you, as a responsible educator and citizen, would never condone this Bureau's failure to handle its obligations in the internal security field, or that you would have us ignore specific allegations of subversive activity in any segment of our society, including college campuses."

Professor Ernest Wiener--whose activities and views had sparked all the commotion--seemed less surprised at the discovery of a campus spying network than at the fact that it should be concerned with someone as harmless as himself. "I have never attempted to conceal the nature of my political beliefs," he announced. And in what many felt was a moving document, indeed (a letter published March 17 in the Brockport college Paper), he described his participation in the 1965 Selma -- Montgomery March, his concern for the local problems of integration, his opposition to the Vietnam war and his membership in various groups supporting these and similar beliefs. He closed his letter by quoting Socrates: "For of old I have had many accusers, who have accused me falsely to you during many years ... Hardest of all, I do not know and cannot tell the names of my accusers ... and therefore I must simply fight with shadows in my own defense, and argue when there is no one who answers."

Professor Wiener must have thought a good bit about Socrates in the month that followed; for on April 20, he committed suicide. In a letter found after his death, he had written: "It is too painful to continue living in a world in which freedom is steadily being constricted in the name of freedom and in which peace means war, in which every one of our institutions, our schools, our churches, our newspapers, our industries are-being steadily engulfed in a sea of hypocrisy."

The events that grew from the Brockport affair would be tragic enough even if it were an isolated incident, conceived in the overzealous mind of a local FBI agent or his regional chief. But as Director Hoover's letter makes clear, the FBI regards campus spying as a near-sacred obligation. Just about the same time Dr. Wiener killed himself, Ramparts magazine--following up its disclosure that President Ngo Dinh Diem's intrigue-ridden regime in South Vietnam had relied heavily on the expertise of CIA-sponsored faculty members from Michigan State University--exposed a labyrinth of CIA front groups, notably the National Student Association. During the same month, a pseudo coed at the Madison campus of Fairleigh Dickinson made headlines by announcing that she had been planted there by county detectives to spy on a fellow student; and the president of Brigham Young University reluctantly admitted that a group of students had been used to spy on liberal professors. In the past two years, disclosures such as these have appeared with what the agencies involved must find embarrassing regularity; and they provide a small glimpse through the curtain that up to now has concealed a nationally organized, centrally coordinated, undercover campus intelligence operation.

Apologists for this collegiate spying frequently adopt the position of the nameless Brockport vigilante: "Those who are being watched shouldn't have anything to hide if what they are doing and saying is aboveboard." Because the agencies engaged in snooping have yet to use in a court case the mass of information they have gathered, they can easily be viewed as concerned--and relatively ineffective--voyeurs. We are only trying to find out the facts, say the surveiller-informers; we neither enjoin nor punish political expression or association.

But even if the snooping were as benign and nonrestrictive as the agencies suggest, there would still remain the thorny question of academic freedom. In theory, colleges are supposed to be open market places of ideas, where students and teachers are free to say and think what they please. Government agencies violate this principle simply by listening in on what is said, even if they never use the information. Their presence--or just the possibility of their presence--can stimulate (continued on page 144) Spies on Campus (continued from page 118) a self-censorship far more damaging to freedom and learning than most of the restraints against individual liberty currently on the statute books. If a student or a teacher has reason to suspect that Big Brother--or anyone, for that matter--is surreptitiously listening to or recording what he says, he will surely be more circumspect than he would be in complete privacy. Firmly committed students tend to accept political sleuthing as a predictable risk and often use it to support their alienation from society. But it is measurably daunting to the large number of timid, uncommitted but curious students--the samplers, sippers and tasters of the various causes offered on campus. These are the students who most need the opportunity to experiment and examine, an opportunity that our Bill of Rights--and our concept of academic freedom--was designed to protect. As the Brockport student paper asked editorially last March: "How may academic freedom thrive in a classroom in which the instructor may be the patriotic, right-winged informer to the FBI and the CIA? The students are not so naive as to believe that liberal or left-wing sentiments go unnoticed by the FBI." The result is that snooping yields maximum returns of control for a minimum investment of official power; it drastically curbs dissent and, in so doing, it evades judicial review in an area for which the courts have shown a special and commendable concern.

The surveillance-informing system is marvelously efficient because life in American society--particularly on the campus--makes the average "subject" extremely vulnerable to fear when he learns his politics are under scrutiny by the Government, especially by the FBI. The undercover character of the surveillance, the benighted standards of the investigators, the assumed guilt of the subject, the denial of an opportunity to face charges or to offer a defense and the inability to understand the reasons for the investigation can be shatteringly Kafkaesque. Reputations, brittle as glass, are easily smashed beyond repair. "Of what crime was Ernst Wiener guilty," inquired the Brockport campus paper, "to allow the smearing of his name in a local newspaper as 'under investigation'? This is just more evidence of implying guilt by innuendo, while the investigators and smearers are well covered under a muffling cloak of silence."

Critics of campus spying--and they are legion--claim not only that collegiate surveillance is ethically questionable but that there's little legal justification for it as well. Neither the CIA nor any of the state and local vigilante groups described below can cite a single law permitting the sort of political snooping they engage in as a matter of routine. Even the legality of the FBI's activities in this area is suspiciously ambiguous. In 1956, Don Whitehead, J. Edgar Hoover's Boswell, published in The FBI Story a private directive--sort of a "Dear Edgar" letter--sent to Hoover by President Roosevelt in 1939. This letter--which was not an Executive Order--authorized the FBI to engage in "intelligence activities" incidental to its newly acquired domestic spy-catching authority. This informal and obscure note--at best intended as a stopgap measure in an atmosphere of impending war--has become the tail that wags the enormous dog of a permanent FBI surveillance apparatus. Hoover seems to have expanded the vague terms of the directive to confer upon the FBI the power, in Hoover's language, "to identify individuals working against the United States, determine their objectives and nullify their effectiveness." These "individuals," Hoover would say, are those whose activities involve "subversion and related internal security problems." With this murky justification, the FBI has assumed the power to police not acts but opinions, speech and association--and not for the purpose of preparing evidence for presentation at a trial but merely to keep track of nonconformists.

No act of Congress has ever authorized the FBI to exercise these powers. In fact, an act permitting the FBI to trail campus radicals, take their photographs, open their mail, record their license-plate numbers, bug their conversations, penetrate their meetings and associations through decoys and informers and assemble extensive dossiers that include tips and complaints supplied by private (and frequently anonymous) individuals would be about as constitutional as a law creating a hereditary monarchy.

Only since 1960 or so has the security establishment zoomed in on the college campus. According to the snoopers' logic, this new focus makes eminent sense. In the 1960s, the campus has emerged as the spawning ground of the most vigorous--and the most radical--antiwar and political movements. The campus is where the action is. As a group, college teachers now dominate the New Left intellectual community. In faculties and student bodies alike, the young, the restless and the militant abound, openly activist and publicly disdaining what they see as the hang-ups and the subterfuges of their elders. These activists can provoke the messianic instincts in the snoopers themselves, many of whom believe they have a patriotic obligation to "save" students from "mistakes they might regret later on." This protective reasoning expresses the quasi-Freudian thesis that political preferences and attitudes are irrevocably fixed before the age of 20 and that unless a youthful subject subsequently defects or informs, he'll bear watching the rest of his life. On a more practical level, the university has also moved up in the intelligence pecking order because of its increasing financial involvement with the Federal Government, particularly in the area of security-related research projects.

Since 1960, the House Un-American Activities Committee, at least in its public and semipublic endeavors, has been inordinately preoccupied with youth and the college scene. The California Burns Committee--HUAC's Golden State equivalent--has "protected" California by issuing four extensive reports (the first based on files apparently stolen from the offices of a New Left student group at Berkeley) on the activities of California's young. But the most ambitious campaign to unearth subversion in collegiate militancy has been mounted by Hoover and the FBI. Since 1963, Hoover has vainly tried to ban Communist speakers from college campuses, justifying his concern on grounds that even some FBI sympathizers found offensive: that seductive Communist propaganda is too treacherous for naïve student ears. Hoover's campaign reached a high pitch of passion in his annual report for 1966: "In its cynical bid to gain an image of respectability, the Party is directing an aggressive campaign at American youth, claiming to perceive a new upsurge of 'leftist' thinking among the young people."

So it's not surprising that when an admitted Communist visits a college campus, the FBI photographs not only him but his host--and keeps careful watch over anyone who visits either of them. An avowed Communist is presumed to be a conspirator, so anyone who breaks bread with him bears scrutiny, too. All too often, even more tenuous relationships attract the FBI. In 1963, for instance, John McAuliff, then a junior at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, was investigated after he had sent a check to Dan Rubin, a Communist youth leader who had visited Carleton to speak on a program organized by a campus group (organized for the purpose of presenting controversial speakers of every political stripe) that McAuliff happened to head. The path of this investigation led an FBI agent to one of McAuliff's friends in Indianapolis. The friend was questioned about McAuliff's politics and then urged to keep quiet about the investigation. Nonetheless, The Minneapolis Tribune eventually found out about it, published all the facts and wondered editorially how the FBI knew that McAuliff had sent a check to Rubin--unless it had opened Rubin's mail.

In view of the FBI's overpowering obsession with protecting innocent youth from being duped by the wily Communists, it's also not surprising that FBI agents are now familiar figures in the halls of academe. In their legitimate functions--probes to which the student presumably consents, such as to clear him for Federal employment or to support his conscientious-objector claim--FBI agents have routine access to student transcripts (which are not always confined to grades) and also to personal files that may contain political or psychological data. Much of the material in these files is quite unrelated to security matters, but increasingly, colleges keep data on a student's political activities, associations and opinions--because administrators have learned in the past few years that they probably will be asked about these matters.

The presumably legitimate FBI investigations of students and former students have institutionalized the relationship between the Bureau and the universities. The intelligence agent who majors in campus spying develops a soft, friendly relationship with the college staff members with whom he works. The deans, registrars and their assistants know that the agent has "chosen policework as his career" because it is so "challenging." They know that the agent is as concerned as the next man with academic freedom. Didn't he attend college himself, sometimes the very college at which he now spends most of his time? Doesn't he have college-bound youngsters of his own? And, after all, isn't he "only doing his job"?

But when the investigating agents are on a sympathetic, first-name basis with those who keep the records, the shadowy line between legitimate and illegitimate surveillance is not always observed. Early in 1967, Berkeley's admissions officer, David Stewart, admitted that in "three or four cases in the last few months," student records were given to the FBI. These were records of students who had not applied for any Government position, students who had manifestly not consented to a sub rosa examination of their personal histories and political preferences. And even at universities that strive to maintain the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate investigations, the agent's explanation of the reasons for his investigation is almost invariably taken at face value--on trust.

Since the Government itself now keeps dossiers on literally millions of individuals, information from a student's college files frequently finds its way into the Government's master file. Unhappily, the accuracy of the resultant hodgepodge of facts and observations is far from unimpeachable. At a time when the Government is the nation's largest employer and when some sort of security clearance is practically de rigueur for many of the most interesting jobs, the dossier system develops a formidable economic influence. An inaccurate or slanted report of an individual's campus activities--political or otherwise--recorded indelibly in a file the Government consults but that the student can never see, can haunt him with preternatural persistence throughout his life.

As a small but perhaps revealing example: Joseph Tieger, who graduated near the top of his class at Duke in 1963, was denied conscientious-objector status by his New Jersey draft board. The board, it turned out, had referred to a 5000-word biography of Tieger, anonymously written but apparently prepared by the FBI, mostly from information compiled on Tieger while he was at Duke. This revealing document, which Tieger subsequently had the unique good fortune of obtaining from his draft board, does not record that a Duke religion professor had signed a statement asserting that Tieger deserved C. O. status "beyond question." It does mention, however, that Tieger in high school "failed to participate in extracurricular activities which is required to make a well-rounded personality"; that he once showed up at a tea party at Duke "in shorts with his shirttail out and wearing tennis shoes"; and that the university library once "addressed a postcard to the registrant indicating that a book concerning the writings of Trotsky was overdue." As we go to press, Tieger, now a law student, has just received a deferment for one year.

Although the once-invisible CIA is confined by statute to intelligence operations outside the United States, its activities, too, spill over into the groves of academe. Students and professors who receive grants for foreign travel or study are frequently approached by CIA representatives, who request that the prospective travelers do a little moonlighting as unofficial intelligence agents during their sojourn abroad. Returning students are also interviewed and often invited to report or answer questions of interest to the CIA; if they have taken photographs, they might be asked for copies. The CIA stimulates such voluntary contributions by offering a generous "consultation fee"--as well as the prospect of a new grant. Some veterans of these sessions have taken to voluntarily stopping by the CIA office for a "debriefing" after sojourns to such places as Africa, Indonesia or India.

This might seem harmless enough, as long as the moonlighting scholars don't take their role as spies too seriously. But foreign-study grants are also used more directly, as a cover for regular CIA agents with legitimate or fraudulent academic credentials. While such a gambit is undoubtedly very useful to the CIA, its effects on the academic discipline involved are somewhat less salubrious. A weighty report recently published by the American Anthropological Association states that in many parts of the world American anthropologists are suspected of being spies. "There is some basis for these suspicions and beliefs," the report notes, adding that as a result, legitimate anthropological research has been severely handicapped. Some anthropologists, the report continues, after failing to get research grants for projects they view as worth while, "have been approached by obscure foundations or have been offered supplementary support from such sources, only to discover later that they were expected to provide intelligence information usually to the Central Intelligence Agency."

A rather similar example involved an instructor at an Eastern university, who in 1963 was turned down for a Fulbright grant for study overseas. The CIA, which seems to keep good track not only of those who get such grants but of those who don't, approached the disappointed instructor and asked him if he'd like to study abroad anyway. He'd receive the same stipend as a Fulbright fellow and, in return, he would only have to report details about the host country and about the activities of the actual Fulbright scholars there. The instructor reluctantly agreed; but before the deal was closed, he attended an antiwar demonstration, where a student was seen taking pictures of him. The instructor subsequently learned that the CIA had assigned the student to check on the instructor's feelings about the war in Vietnam. The instructor apparently failed his CIA entrance exam, because he never did receive his pseudo Fulbright grant.

Others have been luckier, if you want to call it that. A former Ivy League student who is now a journalist parlayed his impeccable credentials in the Young Republican Organization--which the CIA seems to regard as "safe"--into a jaunt to Europe and then into a free trip around the world. He didn't realize the first trip was at the CIA's expense--until after he returned and was quizzed about it. He reported that all was safe overseas, which must have pleased the CIA, because it sent him back again. After his second return, the CIA never contacted him, so he didn't bother to report at all.

This may be nice work if you can get it, but many of those who succumb to the lure of free travel are not quite as cynical as this chap. Junketeers typically feel they ought to report something, if only to justify the CIA's expense. Many also feel that the juicier the information they give, the more likely they are to receive another "foundation grant" in the future. There are no facts to support this assumption, but it's not beyond belief that some of these part-time agents have filed fabricated or greatly exaggerated reports--perhaps to the disadvantage of whatever individuals and groups about which they were reporting.

Besides the CIA and the FBI, there is a surprising number of local surveillance agencies. These are called "Red Squads" or "Bomb Squads" and most of them sprang up in the early years of this century to keep track of Bolsheviks, anarchists, wobblies and the like. While these particular foes are nowadays hardly more than names out of the history books, the forces that once engaged them in battle are still emphatically alive. In fact, campus demonstrations, student antiwar activities and big-city racial disturbances have made them more robust than ever. On campuses in Berkeley, Chicago and New York City--to name a few--political-surveillance bureaus, directly or indirectly related to local police bodies, have taken it upon themselves to watch leftist opinions and associations.

As an example: On the eve of the 1966 National Student Association Convention, a St. John's (New York) University coed, Gloria Kuzmyak, was visited by detectives from New York City's Bureau of Special Services, known as Boss. Miss Kuzmyak, then an officer in the N.S.A., was planning to attend the convention to be held at the University of Illinois, and the BOSS men solicited her help "to keep a check on demonstrations that were going to take place." Her help in this instance would be confined to giving BOSS the names of all New York N.S.A. students and representatives "associated with the liberal caucus." Miss Kuzmyak declined. After she returned from the convention, she was visited twice, first by the same detectives with a similar plea and subsequently by another of their number, with the request that she "forget all about" the earlier attempts to extract names from her.

Some local Red Squad agents are so well known that they inspire an emotion similar to camaraderie among those they're paid to spy on. Not too long ago, a student "undercover" agent at the University of Texas, whose affiliation with the Texas Department of Public Safety was an ill-kept secret, was elected honorary chairman of the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society--in recognition of his exemplary attendance record and the attentiveness with which he followed the proceedings.

The dean of all campus Red Squad operatives, until his recent retirement, was an inspector at Berkeley who has become something like Mr. Chips to a generation of Berkeley radicals. "This affable, balding gentleman," recalls one nostalgic Berkeley grad, "was so familiar to us that he would come up on the platform ahead of a meeting and ask for a list of speakers." The inspector claimed to have the authority to attend whatever Berkeley meetings he wished, but according to our informant, he usually left when asked to--"in order not to make a scene."

But indulgent sentiment for operatives such as this one, coupled with student notions of the ultimate harmlessness of the activities they engage in, sometimes conceals the fact that the Red Squad wings of local police forces are particularly useful to the higher security establishment, if only because of the ease with which they disregard state curbs on wire tapping and bugging. The authorities have allowed FBI agents to "tune in" only when national security is at stake (though the FBI tends to see national security threatened more frequently than most of us might); but local police tap phones routinely, without recourse to any high-sounding justifications. When discovered engaging in political bugging, they frequently explain their actions in terms of some conventional police function. In recent years, they have magically transformed what objective observers would construe as out-and-out political surveillance into investigations of such nonpolitical offenses as drug or morals violations.

Completing our roster of agencies that engage in campus snooping are the Army and Navy counterintelligence crews (who probe draft-connected security risks) and the R.O.T.C. For years, the Berkeley Navy R.O.T.C. has conducted systematic surveillance of New Left campus groups. Whether such work earns academic credits isn't clear; but Berkeley undoubtedly provides enough radicals and anarchists to keep the N.R.O.T.C. busy. Much of their work involves compiling dossiers and maintaining files of leftish handbills, which are kept in folders marked Confidential--Naval Intelligence--Twelfth Naval District.

Recently the Army R.O.T.C. tried to extend the intelligence operation to encompass the eight Western states in the Sixth Army area. R.O.T.C. instructors at each school in the area were provided with "confidential" educational training kits, which made it easy for cadets to sniff out the bad guys. When a group of professors at the University of Washington learned about the kits, R.O.T.C. officials admitted that the kits had been distributed--but denied that cadets were instructed to snoop. Any spying that had occurred, said the officials, had been done by cadets on their own initiative. But the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which perhaps has learned the hard way that students don't usually undertake spare-time projects if they don't count toward the final grade, commended the University for its action against "political propagandizing" and charged the Army with "serious intrusions into academic life."

As both the R.O.T.C. groups and the CIA seem to have perceived, the best people to do spying work on campus are students themselves. If the student agent keeps his cool, the risks of exposure are minimal. He has perfect protective coloring, because, unlike the more conventional agent, his background, life style and appearance are just like everyone else's. And the role is much less demanding than being a decoy for drug pushers or homosexuals, or other after-school jobs for which students have been recruited. Students whose politics lean to the right tend to regard informing as a civic duty, like giving blood to the Red Cross.

Students who cannot be induced to spy on their cohorts by appeals to patriotism or the lure of free travel will often succumb to the more tangible blandishment of hard cash. Not too long ago, testimony in a court trial revealed that Charles Benson Childs, a student at the University of North Carolina, earned $100 a month, plus expenses--and he received a draft deferment as well.

Today the pay is not as niggardly. When the tiny Advance Youth Organization was on trial in 1963 and 1964 (the Government was trying to compel the group to register as a Communist-front organization), 11 youthful informers testified they had received a total of over $45,000 for brief periods of undercover work. The highest-paid was one Aaron Cohen, whose take from the FBI totaled $6371.65. The sum presumably reflected his extra value as an officer of the organization. Officers, especially secretaries, keep the membership lists, and thus are prime targets for intelligence sleuths. During the 1965 passport-violation trial of three young people who were part of a student delegation that had visited Cuba, several informers--recruited from campuses as far-ranging as San Francisco State and Columbia--surfaced long enough to testify for the prosecution. All admitted they were well paid. One student testified the FBI had given him a $300 bonus for going to Cuba. Another of the informers wasn't even Government sponsored: He turned out to be in the employ of anti-Communist lecturer Gordon Hall, who had planted him in the delegation in order to arm himself with fresh material for the luncheon circuit.

Almost as good a recruit as an actual member is a student who joins a target organization and then leaves it for ideological reasons. As soon as the FBI learns of his defection, he is often offered the opportunity to avenge himself, usually at the expense of his former colleagues. A few defectors become chronic Government witnesses, zealously denouncing their former beliefs and associates. Others, who might be less willing witnesses, are induced to inform more out of a feeling of panic. One day they impulsively join an organization and after weeks of sober reflection, they're stricken with profound regrets. A visit from the FBI at the right moment--or a telephone call by the student himself to the local FBI office--results in a get-together. The experienced FBI agent is predictably adept at manipulating hesitant subjects. He overcomes reluctance to inform by a promise that the information will be kept secret, by patriotic appeals ("Don't you want to help your country?"), by the assurance that "all the kids are doing it," by hints that the agent already possesses compromising information and by expressing sympathy for the humanitarian impulses that led the student into his political lapse. The agent scrupulously avoids the term "informer"; his plea is for "cooperation." The usual result is that the hesitant defector finally identifies other members of his group or pledges to stay on as an informer.

If the soft sell fails, agents do not scorn cruder methods--especially if the potential stoolie seems a worthwhile recruit. If the subject has a job, an agent has been known to confront him there--and threaten to report a refusal to cooperate to the subject's employer. With law and prelaw students, a threat to report them to the bar association's character committee--which must approve all admissions to the bar--can sometimes turn the trick. A similar ploy can be used with students who plan teaching careers. And when all else fails, there's always the possibility of appealing to the subject's parents, to warn them that their offspring is associating with the wrong people on campus.

The recruiter's life is no bed of roses, however: Even though he concentrates on likely prospects, he is often indignantly rebuffed. To the continuing dismay of security types, most students regard informing as betrayal and they regard the invitation to engage in it as a personal insult. Furthermore, student groups persistently refuse to react in ways the security agents are most familiar with. Students, for instance, are unwilling to adopt the closed, Communist-cell-like political associations that agents are so adept at penetrating. Openness is the key to the student's political style. Students feel they have nothing to hide and--especially in their political associations--are largely repelled by secrecy. But the security establishment finds this attitude both perplexing and disconcerting, since it expects its targets to be guiltily concealing everything they do. After all, secret political machinations--loosely interpreted as "conspiracies"--are a key justification for the surveillance system.

The colleges themselves have responded to snooping activities in a variety of ways. A disturbing number of universities have been tacitly cooperative--in ways that greatly transcend the cozy personal relationships that often grow up between Federal agents and the college administrative staffs. Documented evidence supports the charge that some universities--Duke, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan State, Ohio State and Texas, for instance--have actively collaborated with the FBI. In these institutions, a highly security-conscious bureaucracy complies data about their students' politics from such sources as deans, faculty, staff, faculty advisors of campus organizations, fraternity officers, judicial boards, housemothers, housemasters, maids, the press and the police--both campus and local. Often this information is not only complied but interpreted. At Duke, for example, Dean Robert Cox keeps an extensive set of dossiers that have been called "potentially the most explosive of all" by a special university committee headed by Professor John Curtiss, president of the Duke chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

Fortunately, most colleges aren't quite this zealous in lending aid and comfort to the surveillance establishment. But even sins of omission can be grievous enough. Two summers ago, the House Un-American Activities Committee sent subpoenas to Michigan and Stanford universities, requesting lists of officers of campus groups that had criticized the U.S. Vietnam policy. (Many universities require organizations to file membership lists to qualify for registration as an official campus body.) Both schools complied with these subpoenas--though many critics of HUAC, both within the schools and outside, thought that the HUAC action could be challenged as unconstitutional. Similar attempts to secure membership lists from the NAACP had been rebuffed by the Supreme Court, which had held that such enforced disclosures may "constitute as effective a restraint of freedom of association" as more direct forms of interference. The "inviolability of privacy," the Court had said, is "indispensable to the preservation of the freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs." Despite what seemed a perfect precedent for refusal, or at least challenge, neither of the universities even protested or in any way questioned HUAC's mandate. And neither of the universities seemed to realize that they were collaborating in what amounted to a punitive exposure of the individuals on the lists. Whether or not those listed were summoned as witnesses (some were), all the names were permanently dossiered in the Committee's "file and reference service"--available to security blood-hounds and even to the constituents of any Congressman who might ask for them.

To be sure, a few colleges have courageously resisted the intrusions of the surveillance establishment. And with several sorry exceptions--such as California until 1963 and North Carolina and Ohio State until 1965--they successfully resisted the snoopers' attempts to bar Communist speakers from campus. The general response to these two challenges left room for hope that painful memory of the abuses done to dissenting professors in the Fifties would quicken a determination not to collaborate in intimidating the burgeoning student protest movements of the Sixties. But only a handful have lived up to this promise. Following an S.D.S. peace demonstration at Wesleyan University (Connecticut) in the spring of 1966, an FBI agent appeared and asked that college authorities hand over the S.D.S. membership list. College Dean Stanley J. Idzerda refused, saying, "We keep no such lists of any organizations." He added, "We consider the student's activity his own affair. At the same time, it's unfortunate that a climate of suspicion can be created by such activities that might lead some students to be more circumspect than the situation requires. Things like this can be a danger to a free and open community if men change their behavior because of it." The resultant furor brought the FBI agent back to the campus, where he told the dean that there had been a "misunderstanding." No probe of the S.D.S. had been contemplated, but only of "possible infiltration of the S.D.S. chapter by Communist influence." Another agent involved in the case thoughtfully added that the FBI "makes inquiries every day on campuses throughout the country--we investigate 175 types of violations, security as well as criminal." When a Wesleyan student committee subsequently wrote J. Edgar Hoover that the investigation constituted a gross infringement of academic freedom, Hoover replied that the charge was "not only utterly false but also is so irresponsible as to cast serious doubt on the quality of academic reasoning or the motivation behind it."

When the director of the FBI can hint, without too much subtlety, that uncooperative colleges are themselves flirting with subversion or conspiracy, it's not too surprising that the colleges try to avoid such conflicts--even when their vital interests are at stake. Reluctant to act unless absolutely forced to do so, most colleges unwittingly invite the very pressures they seek to avoid--and then respond to these with more evasion and more compromise. Their caution is reinforced by the inbred conformity that seems common to all bureaucracies--collegiate or otherwise--a conformity that assures not only that accommodation to the demands of the security establishment will be mindless and irresponsible but that it will be uniform. As one student correspondent--who must remain anonymous, since he's still in school--puts it:

"Most university administrators operate on the principle of inertia--it's easier to go along with inquiries than to refuse. Why run the risk of being labeled a Commie-hippie school? Most of them cheerfully give out some information, although not all, without ever thinking they may be creating a serious problem. Once they are made aware that they also have a prerogative to refuse, many agree it would be fine if all universities refused, but why should one university risk being labeled 'oddball'?"

But unless it is willing to take this risk, the university will soon find itself on a collision course with "national security." It will not be enough for the university to make informing or secret political surveillance--by faculty or students alike--grounds for immediate censure, discharge or expulsion, though this would certainly be a good beginning. In the long run, it is fatuous, or at least diversionary, to attempt to reconcile academic freedom with national security. They simply cannot be reconciled. The university must reconstruct, on the foundation of academic freedom, an ethos that--no matter what the risks or temporary costs--rejects surveillance altogether. If the university is disturbed by nonstudent attempts to gain a voice in its affairs (as in the Berkeley outbreak), then it should feel all the more threatened by the actions of Big Brother. At a time when the life and values of the university are being subjected to unprecedented stress by "security" pressures, the university, if it is to survive at all, must simply learn to say no--to the FBI, the CIA, the R.O.T.C, the Red Squads, the Congressional committees and the tribe of spies, spooks, snoops, surveillants and subpoena servers they have spawned. In the last analysis, the only real threat to our national security is the mutilation of academic freedom that will inevitably result if the security establishment continues to flourish on our nation's campuses.