THE DIRTY TRUTH ABOUT WHO CONTROLS AMERICAN UNIVERSITY CURRICULUM

[T.Ruth2power]

The Growth of International and Area-Studies Programs after 1945

The Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations played their leading roles in creating the major international and areastudies programs at American universities because, in the words of a Ford officer during the period, they recognized "the need to improve the capabilities of the United States in meeting its responsibilities in world affairs-more especially for maintaining the strength of the non-Communist nations and for assisting the social and economic development of the new emerging nations." The first major effort to this end was in 1945 when the Rockefeller Foundation granted $250,000 for the creation of a Russian Institute affiliated with Columbia University's new School of International Affairs. Other large Rockefeller grants to Columbia soon followed, as did several from the Carnegie Corporation, which in 1947 made a series of grants to enable several universities to further their efforts in international affairs and area-studies programs. The most significant of these was a $740,000 grant to Harvard University for the establishment of a Russian Research Center. By 1952 the two foundations had granted several million dollars to strengthen international and area-studies programs. Significant as these efforts were however, they were dwarfed by the subsequent Ford Foundation appropriations for the same purpose.


Carnegie Foundation History
Founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered in 1906 by an act of Congress, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has a long and distinguished history. It is an independent policy and research center, whose primary activities of research and writing have resulted in published reports on every level of education. Eight presidents have guided the Foundation through its history, each bringing unique shape to its work.


The Ford Foundation was chartered on January 15th, 1936 by Edsel Ford and two Ford Motor Company executives “to receive and administer funds for scientific, educational and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare.” During its early years, the foundation operated in Michigan under the leadership of Ford family members and their associates.




Ford's interest in strengthening American competency in international affairs was first mentioned in a 1952 internal document that suggested possible program areas for the recently reorganized foundation. Although the study focused on Ford opportunities in Asia, it soon became the basis for most of the foundation's overseas activities. Carl Spaeth, the report's author, recognized that "America's power to overcome Asian misunderstanding and to contribute to the shaping of events in these areas can only be in proportion to the extent of her knowledge of the characteristics of the region in which she operates, and the availability of competent, trained personnel to carry out her intentions there." He concluded by noting that "the development of American knowledge about Asia and an increase in the number of men skilled in dealing with her problems could well prove to be the key to the of Asia and its relation to world peace." The resultant funds to train these specialists were channeled through the foundation's International Training and Research Program. By the mid-1960s the Ford Foundation had allocated the staggering sum of $138 million to a limited number of universities for the training of foreign-area and international-affairs specialists.



There was agreement among foundation personnel that these specialists should make available to foreign-policy decision makers their knowledge of the nations that they studied. The national security of the United States demanded no less. Consequently, the foundations frequently acted as the intermediaries between area specialists and government agencies in matters pertaining to national security. One example of this was discussed at a 1953 meeting of Ford's Board of Overseas Training and Research. The draft minutes of that meeting record that "the feeling was expressed that long-term studies undertaking to evaluate the vulnerability of ... to Communist influence were greatly needed and should be undertaken. ... suggested that the staff work out appropriate and adequate liaison with the government ." Professor George M. Kahin of Cornell University submitted a proposal that detailed how such a study would be conducted in Indonesia.

Several years later Charles Fahs of the Rockefeller Foundation commented on the important role to be played by foundation-supported international-affairs specialists in the furtherance of United States foreign-policy objectives. In a memorandum to Rockefeller president Harrar, Fahs argued that "wherever possible, programs should be subcontracted to non-governmental agencies, e.g., universities. An effort is long overdue to correlate overseas contracts with area study competence in the contracting institutions in order to assure greater knowledge of the local situation."

The Ford Foundation almost singlehandedly established the major areas- studies programs in American universities.

Between 1959 and 1963, for example, Ford made direct grants of approximately $26 million to support non-Western language and area-studies programs at fifteen universities Boston, California, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Indiana, Michigan, Northwestern, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Stanford, Washington, Wisconsin, and Yale. These same universities are the leaders in the production of Ph.D. degrees and, because of their prestige, generally manage to place their graduates in the upper echelons of the American corporate, political, and academic strata, from which their graduates' ideas frequently dominate their respective fields.



The area-studies programs were designed to develop American scholars' expertise in specific areas, e.g., Africa, Latin America, the Near East, South Asia, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The foundations also supported the growth of more general programs in international affairs during the 1950s and 1960s, and the funding was equally generous. The most important of these included Harvard's Center for International Affairs, the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Center for Strategic Studies at Georgetown University, the Institute of International Studies at Berkeley, the Stanford University Institute for Communications Research, and the Center for International Studies at Princeton University. Nor were these programs limited to the United States. The Graduate Institute of International Affairs in Geneva has been supported from its inception largely by the Rockefeller Foundation. The Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and St. Antony's College, Oxford, have also been sustained over the years by funds from the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations.



The links among the foundations, some subsidized university centers, and foreign-policy formulation are suggested by noting just a few of the key individuals associated over the years with these foundation- supported international programs. The first director of MIT's Center for International Studies was Max Milliken, a former assistant director of the CIA. An equally influential member of the center staff was W. W. Rostow, who subsequently became a key foreign-policy advisor to President Kennedy and Johnson and an architect of the Vietnam war. Individuals associated with Harvard's Center for International Affairs over the years have included Robert R. Bowie, head of the State Department's policy planning staff; Henry A. Kissinger, secretary of state in the Nixon administration; McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor to presidents Kennedy and Johnson and later Ford Foundation president; and James A. Perkins, vice-president of the Carnegie Corporation and a director of the Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank.

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