Michigan State University prides itself on its service to the government in solving those international problems faced by the ever broadening American empire. A pamphlet selling to the prospective student exactly those aspects of MSU which we’ll be looking at says:
The challenge facing American higher education is an integral part of the widespread and important responsibilities which the American nation now faces abroad. Just as the problems we face as a nation are broad and not tied to a limited number of fields or disciplines, the Michigan State University approach to its technical assistance activities is broadly conceived…we are trying to create an environment and an international dimension which will permeate throughout all relevant segments of the University over the years ahead.*
MSU has a continuing cooperative program with the Sao Paulo School of Business Administration in Brazil, oriented partly toward executive management. Over one thousand businessmen in Latin America are graduates of this EIU-influenced Intensive Course for Administration. One of the policies of most U.S. companies who do business in Latin America is staffing their operations with local executives who are properly trained in the corporate attitudes and virtues. Thus we create elites which are tied to the American presence and conceal that presence behind a local facade. Similarly, MSU has been involved in a project in Turkey financed by the Agency for International Development aimed at upgrading the quality of business administration education.
MSU boasts a number of area studies centers, one in Asian Studies, one in Latin American Studies and one in African Studies. MSU is also putting into operation functional centers: area programs paralleled by functionally oriented centers, in (1) international communications, involving the social sciences (2) education and development, (3) economic development, (4) international agriculture and nutrition, (5) international management, to be developed by the College of Business based on extensive experience in Brazil and field work in other parts of the world, and (6) development politics and administration within the college of social sciences. These programs rely heavily on the Ford Foundation, the State Department and AID for sizeable grants. The University is quite concerned that its faculty should not suffer professionally as a result of their times out of the country (missing conventions, getting behind in reading academic journals) and various of the deans who administer the international programs are given to writing papers on how their men can go to Nairobi or Bogota for two years without loss of academic status or without growing musty in the tropics. They are very concerned to rationalize the careers of their exported faculty.
What are these area studies? They generally involved the social sciences — anthropology, economics, sociology — plus language studies. Just as the social sciences were used internally by the power elite, for instance as in the case of industrial or labor relations, to make workers believe there exists a unity of interest between corporations and workers’ organizations, so the social sciences served the power elite abroad. Area studies tell the government how to gain control of the social processes of another society. They identify the vectors in that society, its weak points, point out the conflicting groups.
A group of academics doing area studies are performing a one-way translation or an alien society into terms graspable by the American government or American business interests. Area studies create a community of people who identify with the alien society and support each other in objective concern with it (the social
scientist relating in a value-free way to his victim data), while remaining within the institutional context of this society and operating professionally according to its values. Thus it is okay to study the elites of Chile or Nigeria and to perceive how power is wielded in those societies, but not all right to study our elites and how power is manipulated here.
The Army Area Handbooks are a production of this kind of work on the part of a collection of social scientists. The social scientists study the natives and translate that society into graphs and analyses and the usable stuff of intelligence, whereby is counterinsurgency efficiently promoted.
One example of the colonial uses to which area studies may be put occurred just after World War II when the Navy was setting up a military government over the recently conquered Micronesian Islands. The Navy, in order to establish a colonial administration, hired a group of anthropologists and sociologists from twenty different universities. Or, to quote the College Placement Manual:
you…your training your special talents…find satisfying expression in a vital career with CIA.
Whether your major interest is in International Relations, Economics, Science, Law Research, whatever…the CIA offers you a chance to work with programs that are constantly changing.
Among the fields specifically mentioned as interest to the CIA are business, economics, finance, foreign languages and area studies, geography, history, international relations, political science, psychology, sociology.
How comes MSU to be so omnipresent abroad, so hyperactive in the American Empire?
The Manifest Destiny of MSU: A Local Development of the Land Grant College
The landgrant college historically belongs in its inception to the period when we were developing our own frontier as we now develop other countries. It provided a vehicle through which a society relying heavily upon technology and characterized by being strongly interrelated, can spread its techniques and ideology.
The land grant college typically has a strong emphasis on developing practical skills, useful (to whom?) arts and sciences, o supporting research that helps raise the level of technology, serving industry, serving local agriculture and now
agribusiness, teaching the skills needed by local corporations and local governments and generally serving the “community needs” as defined, of course, by community leaders.
Statements about education for everyone sound fine, but we must always ask who is being educated for what. What is the context of the education What skills are we being taught and how are they and us going to be used?
Similarly, the university is a seemingly neutral means for spreading technology, science skills, and ideology abroad, but without consideration of who is going to control that technology, who is going to run and profit from the “development” or an underdeveloped country: the same colonial powers, the new colonial super-power, or the people of that country.
With the enormous increase of technology after World War II and the increased U.S. expansion abroad, corporations and the military have come to rely ever more heavily upon the knowledge factories to serve the power structure. Government-sponsored
research has come to dominate universities. Since the needs of the great corporations have carried them increasingly abroad, where the bulk of their profits are to be made, the university, as their partner, has moved abroad too.
Take the “manifest destiny” of Michigan State University and multiply it by the array of American academic institutions — large and small — which are working hand in hand in support of American foreign policy and what you have is a powerful political instrument which is malting itself felt in the most obscure corners of the world. Just to give some idea of how U.S. officials think about university imperialism, here is an excerpt from the U.S. Army Area Handbook for Ecuador (published 1966):
With, the financial support of AID, missions from the University or Pittsburgh, the University of Houston and Saint Louis University have been assisting the Central University, the University of Guayaquil and the Catholic University in Quito, respectively, in improvement programs. The principal areas of activity include the reform of central administration, the institution of basic studies programs for all students before further university work and the strengthening of the facultades dealing in disciplines directly related to social and economic development. Plans also call for the promotion of greater stability and a calmer, more exclusively academic atmosphere.
The IIE is the administrative coordinator for a huge array or other academic ventures into the heart of darkness funded either by AID or the Ford Foundation, both of which have close links with each other and with government intelligence sectors. For example, Ford’s President, McGeorge Bundy was formerly Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. David E. Bell, former Administrator of AID is a Vice-President of the Foundation, Ford Trustee Stephen D. Bechtel of the Bechtel-McCone Corp. is the principle business partner of John McCone, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Ford Trustee Eugene Black is former head of the U.S. controlled International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank) and a director of the Chase Manhattan Bank.
*All quotes in this section are from M.S.U. promotional materials except where otherwise stated.
