"Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The main reason the CIA no longer recruits agents from top-ranked schools is because it can't. "The men and women who teach today's college students view the CIA with suspicion, if not disdain," as Beinart put it.
The formulation is, in fact, too mild. The left hates the CIA and regards it as an enemy of all that is humane and decent. To make their case, academic leftists drill the nation's elite youth in a litany of "crimes" alleged to have been carried out by the CIA since the late 1940s-the rigging of the Italian and French elections of 1948 against popular Communist parties (whose aim, unmentioned in this academic literature was to incorporate Western Europe into Stalin's satellite system), the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1951 (whom they fail to identify as a Soviet asset who would have delivered Iranian oil reserves to Stalin), the overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala (whom the left portrays as a Democrat but who was in fact a Communist fellow-traveler who chose to spend his exile years as a privileged guest in Castro's police state), the "Bay of Pigs" (which was the CIA's failed effort to overthrow the most oppressive Communist regime in the hemisphere), and the "Phoenix Program" in Vietnam (which was an attempt to prevent a Communist front set up by the Hanoi dictatorship from overthrowing the Saigon government and establishing a Communist police state in the South.)
In the perverse view of the academic left, the CIA is an agency of torture, death and oppression for innocent masses all over the world that otherwise would be "liberated" by progressive totalitarian forces. Utilizing the powerful resources of the academy, the left has created a vast propaganda apparatus to establish what is essentially the view of the CIA held by America's fiercest enemies. The anti-American propaganda is itself disseminated under the imprint of America's most prestigious university presses including Harvard, California, Duke, and Princeton.
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From the Writings of David Horowitz: May 20, 2010
