David A. Hughes, “Academia and the National Security State”

academia and the national security state.

In this presentation, I trace a century of corruption of U.S. academia from its reliance on Wall Street and foundation funding through the militarization of scientific research during and after World War II, the academy's deep embeddedness in the U.S. national security state that emerged in the late 1940s up to the present day.

My thesis is that academia in the United States and elsewhere has betrayed its civic duty and the public trust invested in it by becoming an embedded mercenary force serving the interests of the establishment.

By the mid-1930s, all the most prestigious universities in the United States had fallen under the control of Wall Street.

As the former Emeritus Professor of International Political Economy, Kees van der Peel observes, Harvard, with the largest endowment at the time, had a J.P. Morgan management.

Its largest donor was Standard Oil, including its key owner families, the Whitney's, Harkness's and Rockefeller's.

Yale, with the second largest endowment, had essentially the same donor base, though slightly more dispersed, and was under Morgan-Rockefeller joint management.

The University of Chicago, fourth largest endowment was of course an original rockefeller run institution mit seventh was under dupont management and so on and so forth carol quickly in tragedy and hope notes that the large endowments of these institutions required constant consultation with the financiers of wall street the heads of those institutions moreover usually owed their jobs to those financiers Anthony C Sutton observed in 1976 that it is understandable that universities and research organizations dependent on financial aid from foundations that are controlled by the same New York financial elite would hardly want to support and to publish research on certain aspects of international politics.

The bravest of trustees is unlikely to bite the hand that feeds his organization.

Academic knowledge production thereby gets skewed towards the interests of finance capital, meaning that anti-establishment literature is rare in academia.

The impact of funding from the major foundations on academia is hard to overstate.

For example, political science professor Harold Lasky observed in 1930 that the foundations do not control simply because, in the simple and direct sense of the word, there is no need for them to do so.

They have only to indicate the immediate direction of their minds for the whole university world to discover that it always meant to gravitate swiftly to that angle of the intellectual compass.

By 1934 in the United States, foundation funding exceeded federal spending on education, with the majority of it, 61%, being targeted at higher education.

The educationalist Eduard Lindemann wrote in 1936 that those who live in anticipation of receiving foundation grants are the more servile.

Indeed, it is hard to see how academics in receipt of major grant funding can take any critical distance from the centres of power in their research.