Columbia’s Military Ties Have Shifted From Ideas to Investment

Once upon a time, Columbia University’s president carried a gun in a holster to work.

That was from 1948 to 1953, when General Dwight Eisenhower was University president. But though the name Eisenhower bore a tight connection to the army, his presence was more emblematic and his work here distant from the nitty-gritty activities of the student body. Ultimately, the man who coined the phrase “military-industrial complex” was not the president who directly involved Columbia with military activities at the center of the 1968 protests.

These issues have come to the fore once again as questions about responsible investments and military research in the Iraq War have echoed concerns from 40 years ago, when the United States was entrenched in the Vietnam War. 1968 marked a turning point in the military-academic complex, and Columbia’s relationship with the U.S. military. The University’s ties with the Navy Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and military think tanks were severed after the student uprising. Columbia maintains different types of ties to the military now, consisting primarily of investments in companies that openly state that their businesses benefit from America’s involvement in Iraq.

Eisenhower’s presidency had little bearing on Columbia’s relationship with the Army because he was hired by trustees who sought political prestige connected to the Eisenhower name, according to Barnard history professor Robert McCaughey, author of Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York. Eisenhower reluctantly took the job during the gap between his public service and his presidential run in 1952 (which, interestingly enough, was headquartered at the President’s House at 60 Morningside Dr.).

It was Eisenhower’s successor Grayson Kirk who made Columbia’s first overtures to an organization connected to the Department of Defense. In 1959, Columbia became an institutional member of the military think tank Institute for Defense Analyses, which advised the Department of Defense on how to carry out potential projects. The IDA also counted Columbia trustee William Burden among its board members, and by December 1959, in addition to institutional membership and Kirk’s and Burden’s posts, about 300 faculty members worked as part-time consultants for the IDA.

“Grayson Kirk, in a sense, was a far more efficient president in getting up and selling Columbia’s virtues to possible funders than Eisenhower,” McCaughey said.
In 1945, less than 1 percent of Columbia’s budget was related to defense-related projects, and by 1968 the figure totaled 48 percent.

The University never kept its IDA affiliation a secret, but according to McCaughey, very few knew about it. For instance, when Columbia became an institutional member of the IDA, the board of trustees passed an unpublicized resolution without informing the student body or faculty.

In March 1967, Students for a Democratic Society member Bob Feldman—who never graduated from Columbia due to his suspension after being arrested for occupying Hamilton Hall—discovered the Columbia-IDA connection in documents while doing research for a paper in Butler Library. “It was news to me, because we had been demanding an end to all contracts between the military and Columbia, but the administration had never mentioned that it was institutionally involved with something called the Institute for Defense Analyses,” he said.

Once SDS got wind of the IDA, protesters began to demand Columbia’s disassociation from the institution, as well as Kirk’s and Burden’s resignations. “It was evident that Columbia University was part of a think tank that was doing work that was directly relevant to the war that the Pentagon was waging against these people,” Feldman said of the Vietnam War. “This wasn’t basic research or something abstract. This was research being done, and IDA was boasting about it in its annual reports.”

In terms of specific projects for the Vietnam War, Feldman learned that the IDA guided the development of the electronic battlefield, a high-tech weapon wall that caused civilian casualties near the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Other studies focused on counterinsurgency, tactical air warfare, airborne television reconnaissance at night, and remote-area conflicts. “The report describes specific stuff—defoliation, stuff on the worth of target-kill assessment,” Feldman said.

In what became a public-relations disaster for the University, Columbia changed its story about its precise involvement with the IDA several times. “At some point they seemed to deny it, then they seemed to deny the significance of it, then they made some blanket statements about secret research being done or not being done,” McCaughey said. “It was ... probably the most effective undertaking of SDS.” After the 1968 protests, Columbia disassociated from the IDA, and it now bans any classified research.

Since the University severed ties with the IDA, the shape of its involvement with military research has shifted. Columbia is involved in dual-use research, according to Callie Maidhof, an anthropology student pursuing a master’s degree at Columbia. For example, Columbia has a contract with the British aerospace company BAE Systems. Civilians can work on BAE research because the technology needed to run highly sophisticated weapons also works everyday utilities.

Columbia’s modern military links also lie in its investments. “Rather than carry out this research at Columbia, Columbia instead is deeply invested in companies that carry out this research,” Maidhof said. Ties to large companies that conduct military research, such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, add up to over $4 million in investments. One such company states in its contracts that it would lose profit if America leaves Iraq. Much of the money Columbia uses to fund its own research and fellowships comes from returns on these investments.

joy.resmovits@columbiaspectator.com