The terrorist attacks of 9/11 sent shivers of horror, disbelief, and indignation throughout America, and the American intelligence community was forced to face the tears and recrimination of the nation. Now America has the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, a thee-year pilot program with a four million dollar budget that, by September of 2006, will send a maximum of 150 current or aspiring analysts — most are graduate students — to university programs, generally for two years, to resuscitate what critics have labeled America’s feeble and systemically crippled intelligence community. The question, then, is whether this program is a boon for the nation or a sinister and secret plan. The jury is still out.

The program is clearly designed to meet a near-desperate need of intelligence, as the terrorist attacks in 2001 demonstrated. In 2004 the CIA stated that it aims to increase the number of its analysts by 50 percent, and the organization has undergone numerous personnel reshuffles recently, in addition to the broader changes occurring in the American intelligence community-at-large.

While the program demonstrates an attempt to rectify recent intelligence failures with a larger pool of more focused analysts, there are concerns about the ethics of the program. Importantly, the students enrolled in the Pat Roberts program will be working behind desks and are not actual spies in the field; they seem, however, suspiciously close to spies in the classroom. The students are not obligated to disclose their intelligence affiliations to the academic community or to their professors, and some critics of the program have raised ethical concerns, especially regarding the students’ anthropological fieldwork and work in the social sciences, particularly given previous relationships between social scientists, the CIA, and totalitarian regimes. Associate Professor of Anthropology at St. Martin’s College David H. Price argues that the program may confuse and taint the ethical obligations of the academic with his or her allegiance to the intelligence community. Additionally, he argues that the unannounced presence of an intelligence community member will be tantamount to spying on professors.    

The success and efficacy of the program is still open to debate, and the its four million dollar budget is certainly small; this year’s budget for Title VI fellowships for area studies, which are funded by the federal government, channeled through participating universities, and which carry no government service obligations, is 28.2 million dollars. The issues the Pat Roberts program raises, however, are pertinent and valid; does this program threaten the intellectual and personal freedom of American professors, does it reintroduce an inappropriate dose of secret intimacy between academia and the intelligence community, and would making such a program more transparent compromise its very purpose?

Mimi Hanaoka