Description:
Grounded in extensive research and reporting, Spy Schools reveals how academia has emerged as a frontline in the global spy game. In a knowledge-based economy, universities are repositories of valuable information and research, where brilliant minds of all nationalities mingle freely with few questions asked. Intelligence agencies have always recruited bright undergraduates, but now, in an era when espionage increasingly requires specialized scientific or technological expertise, they're wooing higher-level academics--not just as analysts, but also for clandestine operations.
Golden uncovers unbelievable campus activity--from the CIA placing agents undercover in Harvard Kennedy School classes and staging academic conferences to persuade Iranian nuclear scientists to defect, to a Chinese graduate student at Duke University stealing research for an invisibility cloak, and a tiny liberal arts college in Marietta, Ohio, exchanging faculty with China's most notorious spy school. He shows how relentlessly and ruthlessly this practice has permeated our culture, not just inside the US, but internationally as well.
Brief description: Daniel Golden won a Pulitzer for his Wall Street Journal series on admissions preferences at elite colleges, which became the basis for his bestselling book, The Price of Admission. His expose of Countrywide's special loans to lawmakers during the subprime mortgage crisis resulted in Senate ethics hearings at which his story was read in its entirety into the Congressional record. In 2011, he was named a finalist for the Pulitzer in Public Service for his Bloomberg News series about for-profit colleges exploiting veterans and low-income students, collapsing the multi-billion-dollar industry.
Review Quotes:
"Whether you are a teacher, student or parent, Daniel Golden's closely researched account of the assault on our academic freedoms by home-grown intelligence services is timely and shocking."
--John le Carré