The World Is Their Campus

September 25, 2007

The world of international education has brought together a most interesting subset of the American population. Extrapolate from the operational and political style of the liberal multiversity administration, broaden its domain to include not just a community of students and faculty numbering 30,000 but virtually the entire world, and you have the modus operandi of the IIE. It is a style of sophistication and internationalism. A style which denies the existence of fundamental conflicts of interest, which says that the world can be run just like the college campus -- a controlled environment where people can be channeled in subtle ways, where everyone can be made to believe that he is a participant in a community of free men and where questions of control need never arise and raw uses of power need only be occasional. The men and women who are the trustees of the IIE are the wielders of power in America -- but they are a special breed. They are not the more public and provincial of the powerful; they are the well-schooled and socially prominent. Their style is the same whether in the offices of the foundations and banks or at the meetings of the IIE. A few of the more interesting members are:

Mrs. George A. Braga (described in IIE publications as a civic leader), whose sugar tycoon husband had many of his holdings confiscated in Cuba.

Mrs. Morris Hadley, another civic leader, whose husband was one-time head of the Carnegie Foundation and is now head of the CIA conduit Rubicon Foundation. Through his membership in the law firm of Milbank, Tween, Hadley, and McCloy he has close association with John J. McCloy, once chairman of the board of Chase Manhattan Bank, former chairman of the Ford Foundation, past president of the World Bank, past U.S. High Commissioner to Germany and chairman of the board of the New York International House, a Rockefeller-backed institution dedicated to making the foreign student feel at home.

Mrs. Maurice T. Moore, chairman of the executive committee of the IIE and still another civic leader (do you see a pattern emerging?) Her husband is a past chairman of Time, Inc. and member of the law firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore, attorneys for Time magazine. His brother, George S. Moore, just stepped down from the post of board chairman of the First National City Bank of New York, which Fortune magazine describes as the bank "with the boarding-house reach". The ubiquitous Mrs. Charles N. Englehard, civic leader and wife of the Charles Englehard of South Africa fame -- exploiter of black labor in his gold, platinum and diamond mines, financier of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, director of the Port of New York Authority and model for Ian Fleming's Goldfinger.

Stephen P. Duggan, Jr. of the law firm of Simpson, Thacher and Bartlett, of which two distinguished members are Edwin Wiesl, LBJ's contact in the Democratic Party of New York, and Cyrus P. Vance, U.S. crisis-manager in the Panama Canal Zone, Dominican Republic, Greece and Detroit.

Andrew Heiskell, married to the New York Times (Marian Sulzberger Dryfoos, daughter of the publisher) and Chairman of the Board of Time, Inc. Heiskell is also a member of the Urban Coalition, -a domestic AID program: a voluntary organization, composed largely of business executives, founded in response to the summer ghetto rebellions to formulate a system of government incentives creating an environment in the slums conducive to profit-making.

Mrs. George D. Woods, civic leader, whose husband just stepped down from the presidency of the World Bank to provide room for McNamara.

Ralph J. Bunche, vice-chairman of the IIE and the State Department emissary to it. As the Establishment's most trusted Negro, he is a little bit overworked as a foundation trustee: God Bless America Fund, Field Foundation, Rockefeller foundation, and the Fund for the Advancement of Education, whose principal donor is the Ford Foundation.

C. Douglas Dillon vice-chairman of the IIE, former secretary of the Treasury, former Under-Secretary of State, member of Dillon, Reed and Co., private investment bankers.

Grayson Kirk, president of Columbia University, director of Socony-Mobil Oil Co., IBM Corporation, Consolidated Edison of New York and a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and of the CIA-financed Asia Foundation.

Mrs. Arthur A. Houghton, Jr., another civic leader, whose husband is president of the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs (FYSA) which was the principal conduit for CIA funds to the NSA. He is also president of Steuben Glass, Inc. and a director of Corning Glass Works and U.S. Steel, president of the Metropolitan Museum of art and a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Mrs. Ronald A. Tree, the only woman listed as anything other than a civic leader, former U.S. representative on the U.N. Trusteeship Council and the former Marietta Endicott Peabody of the Massachusetts Peabody family. She was once married to Desmond Fitzgerald, successor to Richard Helms as Deputy Director of Plans for the CIA. Her second marriage was to Ronald Tree. British multimillionaire and Conservative MP. An intimate of Adlai Stevenson' s, she was walking with him in London when he died.

Sol . Linowitz, who turned down an offer to become director of the CIA in order to succeed Ellsworth Bunker as U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States. His motivation, as expressed in Newsweek, was the belief that, "If we don't make it work in Latin America, it won't work anywhere." He is the former chairman of the board of Xerox Corporation, which is rapidly expanding its operations in Latin America.

Kenneth Holland, president of the IIE since 1958. He was a member of the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs and was vice-president of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), a hybrid organization directed and financed by corporation, labor and government (including CIA) leaders whose purpose is to develop company unions in Latin America. He is a sponsor of the World University Service, a body partially financed and staffed by the CIA, set up to coordinate voluntary assistance programs between the U.S. and European university community and the Third World. He worked for five years in the Office of Inter-American Affairs under Nelson Rockefeller, was an official in the State Department where he helped set up the Fulbright Scholarship program, was Associate Director of the American Youth Comission of the;American Council on Education and in 1960 became secretary general of the Council on Higher Education in the American Republics (CHEAR). As secretary of the International Student Service, he made studies of the youth labor camps of Europe and favored modeling the CCC after the pre-Nazi German voluntary Service Camps which he had seen. When he was appointed education adviser to the CCC in the New England area, he was able to put into operation many of his ideas. He is also a trustee of the Corning Museum.

Many pages could be written delineating the cross-connections between the IIE, the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie Foundations, the CIA and the Corning Glass nexus. And there are even more specific examples of the flow o personnel and money between the CIA and IIE: known CIA conduits which have contributed to the IIE are FYSA, the Dodge Fundation, the Hobby Foundation, the McGregor Fund the Aaron E. Norman Fund, and the Rubicon Foundation. But the story is more one of shifting money from one pocket to the other. The most blatant examples are the Houghtons and the Hadleys -- Mrs. Houghton sits on the IIE while her husband presides as president of FYSA which gives money to the IIE; Mrs. Hadley, another trustee, is married to the head of the Rubicon Foundation.

Mrs. Oveta Culp Hobby of the Hobby Foundation was a member of the Southwest advisory board of the IIE. But to pretend that Mrs. Hobby's only interest is her CIA conduit foundation is to sell her short. She was Eisenhower's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, president of the Houston Post, member of the Rockefeller Brothers' Fund for Special Studies Project and member of the National Advisory Commission on the Selective Serviee. A similar example is Robert D. Murphy who was on the 1965 Board of Trustees of the IIE. He is also President of Corning Glass International, Director of Corning Glass Works, and was, in 1959, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. But his major distinction is that of membership on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which oversees the operations of the CIA.

The people of the IIE cannot be explained in terms of the CIA. They must be understood as members of the sophisticated, internationalist elite of the United States. The political assumptions and style of operation of this elite are basically the sane, whether in the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford Foundations, in the IIE or in the CIA.

Tags: Institute of International Education, elite


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