As co-chairman of the 2002 Congressional inquiry into the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Sen. Bob Graham heard firsthand how a shortage of Arabic-speaking analysts had contributed to intelligence failures in the FBI and the CIA. So when his Senate colleagues were crafting an intelligence-reform bill two years later, Mr. Graham asked them to include language authorizing a new scholarship program for students who would commit to a career with the intelligence agencies.
The scholarships, the Florida Democrat argued, would help the agencies recruit more speakers of Arabic, Farsi, and other Middle Eastern languages. The chairmen of the intelligence committees in the Senate and the House of Representatives agreed, and legislation creating the scholarships was signed into law by President Bush in December. The funds followed quickly, and a pilot program is set to begin next year. It is unclear how much money is available because the appropriation was included in the classified section of a defense-spending bill.
Some scholars, however, say the program duplicates intelligence scholarship programs already in existence, including the nascent Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program and the established David L. Boren National Security Education Program, known as NSEP, which has awarded grants through the Department of Defense since 1994. Critics of the new effort are also voicing the same concerns they have raised about those two programs -- that they endanger academics abroad, foster the impression that scholars are spies, and could lead to government surveillance on American college campuses (The Chronicle, March 25).
Is It Redundant?
The roots of Mr. Graham’s Intelligence Community Scholarship Program lie in a bipartisan investigation into why the CIA and other intelligence agencies failed to foresee the September 11 terrorist attacks. The 10-month House-Senate inquiry, which was led by Mr. Graham and Rep. Porter J. Goss, a Florida Republican (who has since been appointed to head the CIA), revealed that 35 percent of Arabic-language intelligence had gone untranslated in the months leading up to the attacks, largely because of a shortage of language specialists. The subsequent 838-page report listed the “language problem” as one of 16 “systemic weaknesses” in the intelligence agencies.
“It was apparent that one of the major contributors to 9/11 was the fact that we didn’t have an adequate number of people who understood the languages, history, and culture of the Middle East and Asia,” says Senator Graham, who retired in 2004, at the end of his third term in the Senate. “I saw the scholarship program as a way to jump-start the next generation of intelligence analysts.”
While details of the new scholarships -- including their size -- must still be worked out by the director of national intelligence, Mr. Graham says he envisions a program modeled after the Reserve Officer Training Corps, in which students destined for the CIA and FBI would study languages, cultures, and critical thinking alongside students bound for the State Department, the Energy Department, and other agencies. Such collegiality, he hopes, would foster better communication and collaboration among intelligence agencies.
But detractors say the idea is a virtual clone of the Pat Roberts program, which was authorized less than a year earlier and is being tested; others see overlap with NSEP, which offers undergraduate and graduate scholarships in exchange for service with the Defense Department or the intelligence agencies. Even some supporters of Mr. Graham’s program say it is hard to differentiate among the three.
“You have three different programs named after three different senators, each doing the same thing,” says Gilbert W. Merkx, Duke University’s vice provost for international affairs, who is a former chairman of NSEP’s board of advisers. “If that isn’t duplication, then I don’t know what is.”
It would be more efficient, he says, to simply increase NSEP’s budget and offer three scholarships under the names of the three senators.
Felix Moos, a University of Kansas anthropologist whose ideas formed the backbone of the Pat Roberts program, has another idea: Why not hold a summit, he asks, where higher education, the intelligence community, and the military could get together and settle on a single program? “Certainly all these programs are meritorious,” says Mr. Moos. “But it just seems to me that we should have a common agenda. Rather than having a unified program, we are doing it by bits and pieces.”
But that is not how things work in Washington, says Martin S. Kramer, author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001). A supporter of intelligence scholarships, he says that it would be “wonderful” to do an “overall rationalization” of the programs, but that such a step is not likely to be taken: “There are too many lobbies, too many constituencies, and too many congressmen that have their name attached to a bill.”
Mr. Graham notes that his program will differ from Mr. Roberts’s in that it will award scholarships to groups of students at certain universities, rather than to individuals scattered throughout the country. And while Mr. Roberts’s program has been used to finance advanced academic study for working analysts, Mr. Graham’s would be used solely for undergraduate work.
“I don’t want these to be seen in any way as competitive,” Mr. Graham says. “The need for a rapid increase in the number and diversity of intelligence agents is so great that there should be multiple channels into the intelligence agencies.”
Perennial Concerns
Underlying the discussion of duplication is a larger debate over whether higher education should even be involved in training intelligence agents. Supporters of defense and intelligence scholarships like NSEP’s and those named after Mr. Roberts and Mr. Graham say colleges are uniquely suited to provide analysts with an in-depth understanding of foreign cultures and languages. Some supporters even argue that academe has a duty to supply the intelligence agencies with qualified recruits.
“We owe the United States professionals who meet the requirements of the job,” says Gregory T. Rogers, an assistant professor of intelligence and national security at Point Park University, in Pittsburgh. “If a university is not going to do it, who is?”
Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, argues that academe betrays that duty -- and undermines national security -- when it boycotts such programs.
“These professors can’t see that their decades-long war against defense and intelligence scholarships has endangered the lives of every American,” he says. “Ultimately the academy’s freedom and prosperity are guaranteed by our soldiers.”
But critics of the scholarship programs contend that higher education should be independent of the federal government. Meshing the two, they say, compromises the credibility of academics abroad and gives countries an excuse to ban American field researchers on the grounds that they are spies.
“In a democracy, you’re supposed to have a separation between certain segments of society,” says David N. Gibbs, an associate professor of history and political science at the University of Arizona and an outspoken critic of intelligence scholarships. “It’s sort of a hallmark of totalitarian societies that there is no distinction.”
Others warn of a return to the civil-liberties abuses of the cold war, when the FBI kept files on dissident professors. The critics note that the USA Patriot Act of 2001 has dismantled many of the legal safeguards against domestic spying that were put in place in the wake of that era.
“There are those who suggest the intelligence community will stay within boundaries,” says Ronald W. Cox, an associate professor of political science at Florida International University. “But I don’t think that is a valid argument based on history.”
