Henry Farrell has an interesting post about whether universities ought to be making themselves useful to intelligence services--not in a cloak and dagger way, but insofar as the intelligence services want their employess to learn more about the places they're analyzing. There's a live debate about it going on AOTW at the Chronicle of Higher education. [UPDATE: So far it seems to be a chat with a bot who responds to every question by saying, "The United States is at war."]
One remark: Henry says,
I do think that there are real risks attached to a tighter relationship between intelligence services and universities, although they’re rather more subtle than CIA or FBI monitoring of what professors say in class (which I suspect is almost entirely a bogus concern).
Incidentally, in case any CTers read this, I can't comment there; I get to the preview screen, but when I hit "submit" a blank screen shows up and my comment never materializes. I hope this isn't deliberate. (I'm using IE 5.5 on a Windows ME machine.)
Posted by Matt Weiner at March 23, 2005 11:11 AM