AMERICA

An Academy

Goes to War

From MURRAY KEMPTON

NEW PORK HE higher learning in America accepted its I social responsibilities in the 'thirties, its military responsibilities in the 'forties, and its imperial responsibilities in the 'fifties. In the 'six- ties, it can only confront its consequent con- fusions.

The highest point in the development of the American educational institution as an imperial presence is Michigan State University, which annually sends out more than 200 faculty mem- bers to instruct and advise the governments and peoples of thirteen different countries. `Classroom teaching is a tame business,' Ralph Smuckler, dean of MSU's Center for Inter- national Programs. has explained. 'And anY' body who doesn't see how his discipline fits into the overseas operation of the university is already obsolete.' The confusions attendant upon the obsolc- cence of ancient disciplines arose to embarrass the MSU's Center for International Programs this week when it became known that its Vietnam project, for four of its seven years' service in

Saigon, had served as a cover for the Central In- telligence Agency.

The Vietnam project was the glory and foundation stone of Michigan State's inter- national programme. It was organised by Wesley Fishel, an assistant professor of political science, who had known the unfortunate Ngo Dinh Diem in his days of exile and who was called to assist him in the organisation of his government. The, Vietnam project has three great monuments: the constitution of South Vietnam, which MSU's political scientists wrote: the Vietnam Bureau of Investigation, which MSU's Police Administra- tion School organised; and the headquarters of the Center for International Programs itself, which was constructed from the million dollars a year paid by our own government for the University's Vietnam programme.

Last week Stanley K. Sheinbaum, who had been campus co-ordinator for this academic expedition, revealed that at least five of the fifty' Michigan State faculty members who had served in Saigon had been assigned to the project by the Central Intelligence Agency and introduced to him as former `investigators' or 'records specialists' for the Department of the Army.

The CIA division of the MSU Vietnam Project was listed on the University's staff chart as 'The

Internal Security Section of the Vietnam Bureau

of Investigation' and its members were enrolled in the University faculty by vote of the board

of trustees. `Some of the CIA guys attained faculty status at MSU—some as lecturers, some as assistant professors. depending on their salaries,' Sheinbaum said. 'I know, because I remember signing the papers that gave them faculty rank.'

The details of this academy's engagement with real history were set forth extensively last week

by Ramparts, a West Coast magazine, and at once

denounced as unworthy of formal reply and con- ceded to be substantially accurate by the university's officials. The Michigan legislature talked about an investigation: what public out- rage there was centred on the CIA's affront to

the dignity of the American university, which was a pity because the most useful and compelling aspect of the Ramparts article was its revelation of how little dignity the American university has left to be affronted.

There are these reports by members of the Vietnam project on their researches in Saigon : April 27. 1956: The training of commando squads of Saigon-Cholon police in riot control formations has continued during the month . . . . A report on riots and unlawful assembly is nearing completion.

June 5, 1957: Training of the Presidential Security Guard in revolver shooting began during the month. Thirty-four VBI agents com- pleted the revolver course.

September 11, 1957: Eight hundred pairs of Peerless handcuffs arrived in Saigon, but dis- tribution is being delayed pending arrival of 400 additional cuffs.

Technical assistance of this sort is so basic to MSU's vision of the imperial university that Dr John A. Hannah, its president, has been proud to say that he can `tap his campus specialists, and get an answer for most government or research groups within thirty seconds.'

Michigan State seems to have supervised the purchase of $15 million worth of police hardware for President Diem and to have organised the society so intimately that every Vietnamese citizen had a laminated identification card. As his life grew more confusing, the President found these devices an immensely clarifying resource; by 1959, a few members of the Vietnam project. disturbed by the triumph of the laboratory techni-

ques of the University's Police Administration School they had seen in the streets of Saigon, had come home to write pallid criticisms of the Diem administration in the American journals. The President at once invoked a clause in his contract with the University which forbade its staff members to use materials gathered on the project `against the security or the interests of Vietnam.' Having lost poor Diem's trust, Michigan State withdrew its expeditionary force.

It must have been a loss deeply felt in that academy. Service in Saigon had been worth $19,000 a year to instructors who were now re- duced to $9,000 a year for teaching in Michigan. And these voyagers had earned a respect for their essay into the real world which the university would hardly have rendered them if they had stayed on the campus and taught and studied; Wesley Fishel, as commander of the force, went to Saigon a mere teaching assistant and, by 1957, had been appointed a full professor at a univer- sity which had barely seen him since.

Michigan State's intellectual curiosity ceased with its subsidy. There are no courses in Vietnam- ese history on its curriculum; the research reports of its project are not even catalogued; they lie in warehouses: nothing lives from this massive intellectual effort except General Ky's palace guard. And the reflection that the American academy. in this case at least, has finally placed itself, with no edges overlapping, in the history of the American entrepreneurial system.