[Paleopsych] Academe: The Academic Elite Goes to Washington, and to War
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The Academic Elite Goes to Washington, and to War
http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05jf/05jflewi.htm
Academe, 5.1-2
Critics of the academy have lambasted faculty doves. History shows
that academia has roosted a flock of hawks.
By Lionel Lewis
______________________________________________________________
It has become part of the conventional wisdom that a decidedly
left-wing slant influences what students are taught at elite
colleges and universities in America, chiefly at Ivy League
institutions. This perception has been common at least since the
congressional investigations in the late 1940s into Communist Party
activities in the United States, and surely since the publication
of William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale in 1951.
Liberal faculty, abetted by permissive or weak academic
administrators, are said to indoctrinate impressionable students
with an un-American ideology passed off as objective inquiry. The
more prestigious the school, the more clear this bias is thought to
be. In the 1950 speech that fixed his place as a national political
force, Senator Joseph McCarthy laid the blame for the threats to
America's democracy on "the traitorous actions" of those "who have
all the benefits" of "the finest homes, the finest college
education, and the finest jobs in government." Buckley's book is a
catalogue of "teachers and texts" at Yale that "assiduously
disparage the individual, glorify the government, enshrine
security, and discourage self-reliance."
Opinion surveys throughout the 1950s showing that professors were
less rabidly anticommunist than members of the public fed this
perception of the radical right. Some extremists still argue that
students or faculty with conservative or traditional views find the
climate on many campuses inhospitable. Shortly after the 2001
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the
conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni prepared a
report detailing over a hundred examples of "how our universities
are failing America." The alleged failures ranged "from moral
equivocation to explicit condemnations of America" on campuses
across the country. "Indeed," the group asserted, "the message of
many in academe was clear: blame America first."
Unscathed by the Ivory Tower
The facts have never supported such fanciful claims. Many, for
example, who have taught and been taught at elite universities have
helped develop America's aggressive and confrontational foreign
policy (a policy resting on the premise that the nation's strength
should be felt around the world) while serving as secretary of
defense or as national security adviser. The secretary of defense
is the president's principal assistant on defense matters and heads
the Department of Defense, a cabinet position established in 1949
to provide the military forces necessary to deter war and protect
the national security. The national security adviser is the chief
counsel to the president on national security issues. This position
was established by the National Security Act of 1947, legislation
passed to give the president and the country mechanisms to
coordinate foreign policy and reconcile diplomatic and military
commitments and requirements to fight the Cold War effectively.
By 1950, the military was unified and placed under the command of
the Defense Department. The creation of the National Security
Council, headed by the national security adviser, kept the White
House's initiatives at the center of foreign policy. All of this
centralized authority existed outside of what had been understood
to be normal constitutional structures of democratic
accountability. It also further lodged American foreign policy in
an establishment. Many of those with ties to this establishment
have passed through or have other connections with a handful of
elite institutions among the more than three thousand U.S. colleges
and universities.
Here are some facts. First, among the fifteen individuals serving
as secretary of defense under ten presidents--from Dwight D.
Eisenhower to George W. Bush--eleven had at least one degree from
an elite university. The current secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, for
example, received a BA from Princeton University. [28]^1 At one
point in their careers, former secretaries Robert McNamara, James
Schlesinger, Harold Brown, and William Perry even spent some time
on the faculty of a prestigious university.
Second, two of the six leading members of President George W.
Bush's foreign policy team who most vigorously promoted the
invasion of Iraq in 2003 have undergraduate degrees from Ivy League
institutions, beginning with Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz,
the deputy secretary of defense, who has a degree from Cornell
University. Bush himself has a bachelor's degree from Yale
University and an MBA from Harvard University. Moreover, two
members of the team have taught and have been academic
administrators at elite universities: Condoleezza Rice, the
national security adviser, at Stanford University and Wolfowitz at
Yale and Johns Hopkins universities. In contrast, the two members
of the team most reluctant to rush into war--before international
arms inspectors had completed their task and without support from
the United Nations--have military backgrounds with no ties to elite
academic institutions: secretary of state Colin Powell and Richard
Armitage, his deputy.
Some believe that the inner circle of the Vulcans--the label often
applied to passionate backers of the Iraq war in the Bush
administration--is somewhat larger than this handful, making it
possible to extend this line of analysis a bit further. In his
book, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, James
Mann notes that "[Lewis] Scooter Libby [assistant to the president
and chief-of-staff to the vice president], deputy national security
adviser Stephen Hadley, undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith,
and undersecretary of state Paula Dobriansky . . . all . . .
qualify as Vulcans." All four have at least one degree from an
elite academic institution. Libby has a BA from Yale and a JD from
Columbia University; Hadley has a BA from Cornell and a JD from
Yale; and Feith has an AB and Dobriansky a PhD from Harvard.
Third, an examination of the educational backgrounds of U.S.
national security advisers since World War II shows that most
earned academic degrees or taught at elite universities. These are
the architects of the muscular American foreign policy that
resulted in the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Desert
Storm, and Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Of the seventeen national security advisers serving ten American
presidents (half of whom themselves earned degrees from Harvard or
Yale), four had military backgrounds, four spent most of their
careers in government service, four came from the private sector,
and five--McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, and Condoleezza Rice--came from academia (Harvard, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia, and Stanford).
Eleven of the seventeen earned fourteen degrees from six elite
institutions: Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the
California Institute of Technology.[29]^2
The five national security advisers from academia proved no less
unapologetic than the other twelve in championing the vigorous
pursuit of America's economic, ideological, and political
interests. Bundy was one of the "wise men" surrounding President
John Kennedy during the misguided American-led invasion of Cuba;
early in his tenure, he was a strong proponent of American
participation in Vietnam. In other government positions before his
appointment as national security adviser, Rostow consistently
recommended the use of force in American foreign policy. He was one
of the first to advocate aerial bombing as a way to quickly end the
conflict in Vietnam and avoid a major Asian war. Not only did
Kissinger press for escalating the Vietnam War even further, but he
also urged controversial bombing campaigns in Laos and Cambodia.
(Many have also accused Kissinger of illegally undermining domestic
policy in other countries, most notably Chile.)
Immediately after his appointment and before he took office,
Brzezinski, described as a "hard-nosed cold warrior," wrote in his
diary of "the need to have somewhat more tough-minded a group in
security and arms-control-oriented areas." To thwart his bête
noire, the Soviet Union, Brzezinski successfully urged support for
the mujaheddin in Afghanistan and helped develop a policy that
promoted Islamist radicalism. The history of Rice's role in
Operation Iraqi Freedom has yet to be written, although she has
publicly defended the policy of waging unilateral preventive war:
"America's power and purpose must be used to defend freedom," and
"we are fighting the war in Iraq for our security,as well as for
the benefit of the Iraqi people."
In other words, little distinguishes the national security advisers
with academic backgrounds from those without them, not even the
possession of an advanced degree, which almost all of the advisers
earned. Not surprisingly, the ideas of those with academic
credentials in world affairs, history, and international relations
were more often published by university or prestigious commercial
presses than those of advisers without such expertise. Brzezinski
and Kissinger established solid academic reputations before
beginning their work in the White House. Both men's work, however,
was more ideologically driven than is typical of much social
science. Rostow wrote many of his major publications after his work
in government. Bundy was an academic administrator with few
publications, most of them co-authored. Also a career academic
administrator, Rice did little serious research after publishing
her dissertation. In short, all had successful academic careers,
but none could be counted as a towering academic figure.
Little Discernible Difference
The putative nonworldliness of academics has long been a subject of
derision and scorn. When asked who could best serve as chancellor
of Germany, longtime chancellor Otto von Bismarck reportedly
replied: "It makes no difference what sort of person becomes
chancellor, provided it isn't a professor." Yet the vigor with
which academic and nonacademic U.S. national security advisers have
advanced America's growing global power suggests that the academics
are no less attuned than their nonacademic colleagues to
realpolitik.
At the core of liberalism is the belief that government
intervention can help solve problems. In this sense, the academic
elite involved in formulating an activist foreign policy might be
called liberal. They, however, would likely reject the appellation
as a sophistic joke. In any case, it is doubtful that they acquired
their ideas about how to further U.S. interests from liberal
"teachers and texts" at America's leading universities.
In fact, almost all of those closely identified with crafting the
post-World War II U.S. policy of containing and confronting
communism around the globe have Ivy League degrees. Many were
called "wise men" by their contemporaries, and all were seen as
part of the "establishment." Graduating from Yale were Dean Acheson
(secretary of state), Harvey Bundy (assistant secretary of state),
William Bundy (assistant secretary of state and assistant secretary
of defense), W. Averell Harriman (ambassador to Russia and
secretary of commerce), Robert Lovett (undersecretary of state and
secretary of defense), and Cyrus Vance (secretary of state).
Studying at Princeton were David Bruce (ambassador to the Federal
Republic of Germany and to Great Britain), Allen Dulles (director
of the Central Intelligence Agency), John Foster Dulles (secretary
of state), James Forrestal (secretary of the navy and secretary of
defense), and George Kennan (a Kremlinologist). The Harvard
graduates were Charles Bohlen (ambassador to the Soviet Union), C.
Douglas Dillon (ambassador to France and secretary of the
treasury), and Paul Nitze (secretary of the navy and deputy
secretary of defense).
The only other foreign policy elites in the decades after World War
II as important as these fourteen men (aside from several
individuals who served as secretary of defense or as national
security adviser) were graduates of institutions only slightly less
prestigious: John McCloy, who earned an Amherst degree (president
of the World Bank and high commissioner for Germany), and Dean
Rusk, a graduate of Davidson College (secretary of state). Of these
sixteen, none attended a public institution of higher learning as
an undergraduate. And of the nine with a law degree, four were
graduates of Harvard Law School.
The advice they dispensed proved to be unwise--for example, that
the United States should work in 1953 to overthrow the government
of Iran; that the following year, it should do the same in
Guatemala; that the Bay of Pigs operation was a good idea; and that
the development of nuclear weapons for massive retaliation would
help stabilize international relations. Still, they gave their
advice in good faith, to enable the United States to pursue what
they saw as its national security interests or to fulfill its
national destiny, not because of a left-wing slant imposed by a
Bolshevistic professoriate.
Indeed, it has long been known that it hardly matters what
professors teach students. What matters is what they come away
with--and that is pretty much what they bring with them when they
first set foot on campus. The broadest range of ideas can be found
on all but the most doctrinal campuses, and students can readily
find a niche without having to change their beliefs. Research
spanning six decades has shown that the effect of college on the
attitudes, values, religiosity, and political views of students, on
elite campuses and elsewhere, is almost nil. In light of this
research, it hardly makes a difference if the professoriate is
mostly liberal or conservative, teaching Leo Tolstoy or Leon
Trotsky.
It is doubtful that there is a causal relationship in the fact that
so many in the highest reaches of government have had ties with so
few private institutions of higher learning. What it reflects is
simply that these individuals have long been members of an
interlocking and interacting social circle. Through their families
and cliques, they have had lifelong access to each other, ranging
from informal activities to common institutional experiences. From
this interaction, sundry opportunities, including career
opportunities, can be created. A cursory examination of the
biographies of the sixteen foreign policy elite exemplifies the
extent of these social ties, all of which existed before their
involvement in government service.
There are family relations by birth (the Bundys, father and sons,
and the Dulles brothers) and by marriage (William Bundy married
Acheson's daughter). Harriman taught Acheson to excel at crew at
prep school. In college, many of the sixteen had similar social
affiliations. Bohlen and Nitze were in the Porcellian Club at
Harvard; Vance and Acheson were in Scroll and Key at Yale;
Harriman, Lovett, and the three Bundys were in Skull and Bones at
Yale.
Harriman's and Lovett's fathers were close business associates, and
they themselves became business partners. Nitze and Forrestal also
had close business ties. Forrestal became president of the
investment bank Dillon's father put together. The son later became
its chair. Bruce not only helped manage the interests of his
father-in-law, Andrew Mellon, but was engaged in business dealings
with Harriman, serving for a time, along with Lovett, as one of the
nine outside directors of the Harriman-controlled Union Pacific
Railroad and as a member of the oversight board of the
Harriman-controlled Aviation Corp. These are not the only instances
in which Harriman, Lovett, Bruce, and McCloy served on the same
corporate boards.
Some among the sixteen were also neighbors, including Forrestal and
Lovett, whose wives were friends and whose children were playmates.
And some spent considerable leisure time together, as did Forrestal
and McCloy, longtime tennis partners.
The conclusion seems obvious: although students who attend elite
institutions need not fear indoctrination by liberal faculty, they
can look forward to opportunities to maintain or to form
equal-status relationships with those with wealth and power in
America.
Notes
1. Other defense secretaries who received degrees from elite
institutions are Neil McElroy (1957-59), BA, Harvard University;
Thomas Gates (1959-61), BA, University of Pennsylvania; Robert
McNamara (1961-68), MA, Harvard; Eliot Richardson (1973), BA and
LLB, Harvard; James Schlesinger (1973-75), BA and PhD, Harvard;
Harold Brown (1977-81), BA and PhD, Columbia University; Casper
Weinberger (1981-87), AB and LLB, Harvard; Frank Carlucci
(1987-89), BA, Princeton University; Leslie Aspin (1993-94), BA,
Yale University, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and
William Perry (1994-97), BS, Stanford University. [30]Back to text.
2. Robert Cutler (1953-55) earned an AB and an LLB from Harvard;
Dillon Anderson (1955-56) and Gordon Gray (1958-61) received LLBs
from Yale; McGeorge Bundy (1961-66) earned a BA from Yale; Walt
Rostow (1966-69) had a PhD from Yale; Henry Kissinger (1969-75)
earned a BA and a PhD from Harvard; Zbigniew Brzezinski (1977-81)
received a PhD from Harvard; John Poindexter (1985-86) earned a PhD
from the California Institute of Technology; Frank Carlucci
(1986-87) received a BA from Princeton; Brent Scrowcroft (1989-93)
earned a PhD from Columbia; and Samuel Berger (1997-2001) received
a BA from Cornell and an LLB from Harvard. [31]Back to text.
Lionel Lewis is emeritus professor of sociology and adjunct
professor of higher education at the State University of New York
at Buffalo.
References
28. http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05jf/05jflewi.htm#1
29. http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05jf/05jflewi.htm#2
30. http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05jf/05jflewi.htm#b1
31. http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05jf/05jflewi.htm#b2
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