Sigmund Diamond—a historian and sociologist who studied and briefly worked at Harvard during this period—chronicled the extent of the alliance. According to Diamond, although the center received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, it reported directly to the State Department and other intelligence agencies.
Its mission was clear: to produce scholarly research and expert analysis useful to the government’s ideological warfare against the Soviet Union. This included studies on the attitudes of Russians toward their homeland in relation to the rest of the world—the sources of Russian patriotism, attitudes toward authority, and how Russians felt about the suppression of individual freedom. With this knowledge, the government could exploit discontent, foster instability, and leverage dissent against Soviet policies.
The center at Harvard was just one example; there were others at universities across the nation.
In the early 1960s, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy delivered a lecture at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He emphasized the strong connections that “bind the world of power and the world of learning,” arguing that “there is gain for both the political world and the academy from an intensified process of engagement and of choosing sides and of engaging in the battle.” The government, in his view, would benefit greatly from historians whose work illuminated a “deeper sense of the realities of power and its use.”
But the government’s alliance with the academic community came with risks. If critical scholarship could dissect the enemy and boost American Cold War efforts, it could also be turned inward. Research disciplines that probed into the historical, political, social, and cultural vulnerabilities of other nations could also cast a critical eye on the U.S., raising sobering questions about American history and the nation’s unflattering record on civil rights, social unrest, imperialism, and more.
That made universities dangerous, and in the anti-communist hysteria of Cold War America, the government viewed them with suspicion. As molders of the nation’s youths, educators were under scrutiny lest they indoctrinate students with radical ideas. Government officials stoked this paranoia. “Countless times,” remarked Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy—perhaps the era’s most prominent red baiter—in 1952, “I have heard parents throughout the country complain that their sons and daughters were sent to college as good Americans and returned four years later as wild-eyed radicals.”