The apathy with which this highly suspect area of the CIA's activities has been treated is explicable by a number of factors. The academics involved obviously do not advertise their role. The protests of the students themselves can be easily discredited; and because the agent works over such a long period keeping a low profile, recruitment can be more easily hid from public view.

Faculty members are used for activities other than recuitment. Some analyze material for the agency: Richard Pipes, Baird Professor of History, for example. This seems unobjectionable at first sight, even essential if the agency is to be successful. But it has subtle perils for both the academic and the CIA. The former's academic integrity can be insidiously compromised by the CIA feeding information to him selectively so that any prejudices are reinforced and events become distorted in his interpretation. It is arguable for example that the ideology of certain professors in the social sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has tilted to the right as a result of CIA sponsorship and involvement. Much of the information supplied can come only from intelligence sources and its academic recipient can be manipulated by the agency in the same way as a journalist is controlled by a government official who gives him confidential leaks.

The CIA employs mainly faculty members with conservative and/or hawkish views with dire results for some of its intelligence estimates. If one supports the CIA, the explanation is because liberal academics abhor the CIA and cannot be trusted with secrets. It one opposes the agency, the explanation is the CIA's desire to slant its analysis to the right. On balance, however, I believe links in this area between the CIA and the academic community should not be banned although all contacts should be open.

The universities would gain little from a ban on intelligence gathering under cover of overseas research. It would neither cause foreign countries to release secrets to American professors which they had not revealed before nor grant them any wider freedom of travel or access. Needless to say, strange research projects sustained by the CIA--such as MK ULTRA--discredit the agency and faculty concerned as do attempts by academics to spy on radical groups on campus. Congress must insist these activities cease immediately.

In asking CIA recruiters to reveal their identities, the Harvard guideline is hopelessly unrealistic. Although this rule maintains a spurious facade of respectibility for Harvard, it is unenforceable and helps no one, only embittering relations between the intelligence services and academia. A suitable compromise, however, between the agency and the university over telling the American student that his name is being considered is surely impossible. An anonymous letter should be sent by the professor engaged in the covert recruiting to the student he believes suitable for CIA work, asking for an affirmative reply to be returned to a post office box if the student wishes his name to be forwarded. In this way, the student's name should not even reach the CIA if he does not wish it. Covert recruitment of foreign students, on the other hand, must be opposed on grounds of intelligence efficiency, civil liberties and morality. Strict controls over this practice should be included by Congress in the new CIA charter.

ANOTHER possible menace is to civil liberties. Is not the student being pried upon against his will? Privacy is indeed endangered in many areas of modern society and must be scrupulously protected, but concern for privacy cannot be absolute. Secrecy should also have its (narrowly-bounded) place. The point is the world of difference between telephone taps on an innocent individual and a professor assessing the suitablity of a student for CIA work on the basis of personal opinion and open observation. The latter hardly infringes any significant rights of privacy. The passing-on of the student's name without his permission to the CIA is a different matter because the student becomes automatically subject to an unsolicited security check--a far more serious threat to his rights. That such checks occur independently of covert recruitment is of course no argument to challenge controls over them when they are connected.

Of course all would be well if the CIA could recruit openly by advertising in the newspapers and holding interviews on campus but this ignores the necessary confidentiality to prevent infiltration by foreign intelligence agencies, the great loss of talent resulting from a 'passive' rather than an 'aggressive' search for potential employees and the special qualities needed for intelligence work. The CIA should also admit openly that it engages in secret recruitment on campus although in practice it will only so do if the universities agree the recuiters have the right to remain anonymous in order to forestall pressure to expose the academics concerned.

Idealistic as Harvard's guidelines may be they attest to faculty members' concern about the CIA's activities in the university. One hopes their concern will spread.

Trevor Barnes is a Kennedy Fellow at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences [GSAS]. Barnes, a native of Cambridge, England, has been studying the activities of the CIA.