Part I of our interview series based on the recently released book –The CIA on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State, edited by Dr. Philip Zwerling, co-hosted with Sibel Edmonds of BoilingFrogsPost.comProfessor Philip Zwerling joins us to discuss his recently released book on how years after covertly funding the National Students Association, spying on suspect faculty, and dosing unsuspecting students with psychedelic drugs, the CIA is back, funding conferences on ‘intelligence ethics’, subsidizing courses for academic credit, and recruiting operatives among some the of the poorest students in the nation under the guise of protecting the “homeland” and combating terrorism. He describes various incentives that drive the faculty and administrators at campuses nationwide to cooperate with this new CIA-campus targeting operation. Zwerling talks about the “pilot program†authorized under the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act to establish the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP), and how the PRISP students’ identities are secret as are the classes they attend, how the CIA’s funding provided to universities may explain an absence of articles critical of CIA activities in academic journals, and more!
Philip Zwerling is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Texas Pan American in Edinburg, Texas. He is the author of more than 200 magazine and newspaper articles and two books, Nicaragua: A New Kind of Revolution, and After School Theatre Programs for At Risk Teenagers, and is the editor of The CIA on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State
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