Abstract
Contrary to claims about “academic freedom,” Anglo-American academia has been deeply embedded within the national security state since World War II at least, when scientific knowledge was secretly harnessed by the military, e.g., in the Manhattan Project. After the war, 70% of research funding in the United States came from federal agencies, with most of the rest coming from foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie.
The CIA exerted a powerful influence, as, for instance, when 44 US universities participated in MKULTRA research, or through the CIA’s covert control of social science research at leading universities to find more efficient ways of controlling human behaviour through “social engineering.” A new breed of “defence intellectuals” arose whose purpose was to serve power rather than apply any kind of critical thinking that might benefit society. They included war apologists, counterinsurgency experts, and specialists in psychological operations.
When the extent of these problems was revealed in 1967/68, there was an outcry, yet decades later the capture of academia remains evident in its refusal to apply critical thinking to deep structural events such as “9/11” and “Covid-19” and its cheerleader role for official narratives. This marks a significant failure in academia’s much-vaunted civic duty and gives the lie to the idea that academia speaks truth to power in any fundamental sense.
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