A Boolean argument was expected.

Here is a surprising and little-known fact: from 1955 to 1962, Michigan State University was contracted by the U.S. government to provide “technical assistance” in Vietnam, teaching aspects of civil service and police administration to the government agencies of South Vietnam.

The story begins in 1954, after French colonialism met its demise at Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Accords divided the country into North and South. The U.S. decided that the best hope to staunch the spread of communism in South Vietnam lay in its new prime minister, a former exile named Ngo Dinh Diem. The International Cooperation Administration (ICA), a U.S. government agency, hoped to provide Diem with the means of “nation building.”

During his self-imposed exile in the early 1950s, Diem had met and befriended Wesley R. Fishel, an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State with a Ph.D in international relations from the University of Chicago. When Diem came to power in 1954, Fishel became something of a confidant and informal advisor to the prime minister. Diem sought the means to improve the new government’s strength and make it more responsive to issues that included a communist insurgency, a massive refugee influx from North Vietnam, and a calcified bureaucracy whose Vietnamese workers had never been adequately trained by the recently departed French colonialists (who coveted both the knowledge and all the top positions). Fishel convinced Diem that MSU had the know-how to provide the needed training in police and public administration, and when the request for assistance reached the U.S. government, MSU led a very short list of candidate schools.

A cadre of professors, from the departments of economics and political science as well as the school of police administration and public safety, soon deployed to Saigon as the Michigan State University Group (MSUG). From May 1955 to June 1962, the MSUG participated in several major programs, with varying success.

One of these was COMIGAL, a refugee resettlement program that provided placement and infrastructure-building for some 900,000 people fleeing the communist North. Most of the refugees were Catholic, as Diem (himself a Catholic) had widely promulgated the idea that they might be persecuted under communist rule. Among the MSUG’s positive influences was the idea of decentralized bureaucracy, of scattering COMIGAL offices throughout the villages to improve both the responsiveness of those offices and the self-responsibility of the refugees themselves. Yet the MSUG was unable to convince Diem of the validity of the land claims made by the Montagnards, Vietnam’s “mountain people” of the central highlands, and thousands of refugees—with government approval—became permanent squatters on land “already cleared by highlanders for planting.” Both the Montagnards and the majority Buddhists resented being governed by a Catholic regime, a minority religious group that they saw as unabashed colonialists. This opposition and Diem’s ruthless suppression pushed these groups toward further insurgency and, ultimately, communist rule.

In another program, the MSUG designed, financed, and implemented an expansion of the National Institute of Administration (NIA), a civil servant training school in Saigon. The NIA library in particular saw a tremendous improvement in both the size of its holdings and its organization. But students, used to the French style of juridical education, did not benefit well from American-style lectures. The library fell into disuse as most of its documents were in English, yet English-language studies were not emphasized. Finally, this notable quote, from an MSUG veteran in support of the project, expresses instead its mixed results: “You could tell that they [NIA graduates] were quite successful and in positions of authority because a number of them were assassinated after they went out to their posts in the countryside.” (emphasis added)

In the “participant program,” some 179 Vietnamese civil servants travelled to the United States, the Phillippines, Japan, and elsewhere, to be educated. Participants studied at major universities (not just Michigan State, but also Vanderbilt, Harvard, and many others) in pursuit of masters degrees and doctorates in civil service-related fields such as economics or political science. This program petered out during the seven years of the MSUG project—partly due to language and cultural difficulties—and never had the full support of Saigon. For one, it was feared that students who had become familiar with American language and culture would be reluctant to return to Vietnam. (Contrarily, although many did stay in the States, homesickness was a more common issue.) For another, not only were returning participants not given promotions commensurate with their new abilities, they were not always guaranteed to get their old jobs back.

Then there was the police administration project.

The MSUG helped the Sûreté—which they renamed the Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation, in an attempt to lessen the negative public image of that special police agency—to establish a national identification card. It was intended to streamline government services. Diem used the i.d. card registry to crack down on dissenters.

The MSUG tried to reform the civil guard into something resembling a U.S. state police outfit, an organization familiar to the professors, while Saigon (and the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group) preferred that the civil guard be a more heavily armed paramilitary force that could exercise national police duties and support the national army. The indecision and infighting between the advisory groups left the civil guard unprepared when major communist insurgency action began in 1959.

Much of the police administration training involved rudimentary tasks, such as the use of fingerprint kits, and even some seemingly obvious fundamentals, such as teaching city cops to treat the public they serve with politeness. And as far as the recorded history shows, it would appear that the MSUG’s primary roles were dispensing handcuffs and training Vietnamese police in small firearms.

Perhaps the biggest issue at stake was the fact that Michigan State lacked the manpower to sustain both its home campus and the MSUG. Particularly in police administration, a field in which MSU was widely respected in the 1950s, it became necessary to hire extensively outside the university in order to staff the project and still leave a sufficient contingent in East Lansing to teach classes. At one point, of the thirty-three police advisors stationed in Vietnam, only four were Michigan State employees prior to the MSUG. The “hired guns” often received academic status as lecturers or assistant professors at State. Moreover, several were also employees of the CIA.

It makes some sense that CIA-trained personnel were hired, since much of the police training was in counter-insurgency tactics. Whether these hirelings were merely teachers with former (or current) CIA associations, or active CIA agents performing covert operations on the side, remains a matter of conjecture. The official CIA record will be classified for many years to come. Ultimately, regardless of whether or not the CIA connection was appropriate, it opened the door for valid criticism of the MSUG.

Some MSUG professors may have ignored the signs of trouble and succumbed to the glamour of overseas service in a land where a professor earning “hardship assignment” pay incentives could hire five full-time servants and find them well within budget. Others, home from their tours of duty, wrote articles critical of the Diem regime and U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Two appeared in The New Republic magazine in 1961 and 1962. One in particular, a scathing indictment by professors Adrian Jaffe and Milton Taylor titled “A Crumbling Bastion: Flattery and Lies Won’t Save Vietnam,” enraged Diem. In spite of the university’s attempts to appease him, Diem called for termination of the MSUG project. The group left Vietnam in June 1962.

Within eighteen months, Diem was dead from a coup by a group of Vietnamese general officers, and the U.S. had begun to send the first of its military “advisors” that soon led to twelve years of conflict and over fifty-eight thousand Americans—and two million Vietnamese—dead.

Four years after MSUG’s expulsion an exposé appeared in Ramparts, which Ernst routinely describes as a “liberal West Coast Catholic magazine.” The article, titled “The University on the Make,” was sensationalistic in tone, and some of its statements were later admitted to be untrue. But it offered powerful fodder for the nascent antiwar movement, and it raised some interesting questions about a university’s role in the world community. CIA involvement was a main focus of the article, with the implication that the MSUG provided cover for “cloak-and-dagger” work. The article made Professor Fishel the scapegoat for the project, and he was soon demonized on campus, both in East Lansing and later at Southern Illinois University. He died at the age of 57 in the mid-1970s, and one could certainly argue that his notoriety contributed to his early demise.

Anyway, that’s roughly the story. John Ernst’s telling is a solidly researched, seemingly objective, overview of the Michigan State University Group. The book suffers some from repetition, engendered in part because each major player (MSUG, ICA, MAAG, etc.) is redefined and reintroduced in each chapter, seemingly as if that chapter might be republished as an individual essay elsewhere. There are a few teasers, the most major of which is the assertion that “the Kennedy administration encouraged the plot” by the Vietnamese military to assassinate Diem in 1963; this aside is never expounded or substantiated. But overall it’s an excellent and scholarly work, of an interesting and intentionally forgotten period in American international relations.

In my review of Walter Adams’ book The Test (which provided my first hint of this story’s existence), I stated my opinion that John Hannah was one of Michigan State’s greatest presidents. For his tireless work in growing the school from a humble agricultural college into a major university, I continue to feel that Hannah merits this distinction. But Hannah had traits—among them a propensity for high-level political wheeling and dealing, and a staunch anti-communist bent—that became serious flaws in the case of the MSUG. Hannah firmly believed that “the world is our campus” and defended the MSUG as a positive example of this sort of world service, long after the project had ended with mixed results and had become a political liability.

Adams in particular, who prodded Taylor and Jaffe to write their New Republic articles, would argue that the university’s role is not to act as the instrument of the nation’s foreign policy, and I must agree. The U.S. wanted to stop the spread of the “red menace,” but in backing Diem—an entrenched bureaucrat with despotic tendencies—it may have provided the direct catalyst for South Vietnam’s ultimate fall to communism. The MSUG’s intentions were, for the most part, noble, and the group had some successes (however short-lived) in improving Vietnamese public welfare and safety. But MSU was rightfully burned by the public-opinion fallout of the Vietnam project. The MSUG was solely there for “technical assistance,” and had no position to voice or act upon its opposition to Diem’s policies. The university saw no academic gains from its involvement. What ground the MSUG gained in Vietnam was surely surpassed in effect by Diem’s autocratic, nepotistic, draconian rule.

One too can wonder what benefit, if any, the project could have had even if it had been wholly successful. Scholarly research was nearly impossible given the sheer volume of practical work involved. As the Ramparts article noted just four years after the project’s end with some glee (and validity), “MSU has not a single course, not even a study program, to show for its six [sic] years in Vietnam.” About the only campus remnant of this history that survives to the present is the International Center, built in 1964 and partially financed using the proceeds from the MSUG’s $25 million government stipend (most of which went toward matériel, salaries, field expenses, and administrative costs).

Meanwhile the university continued to accept overseas technical-assistance contracts, but never again on the scale of the MSUG. Even today MSU is engaged in dozens of overseas projects—including one in the Mekong Delta, where MSU is teaching environmental resource management under contract to the U.S. Department of State.

And of course, the U.S. government continues its attempts at overseas nation-building, with mixed results at best.

A memoir of his nine-month tenure as president of Michigan State University in 1969, this book by Professor Walter Adams lies at a perfect crossroads of several of my interests. I’m a graduate of that pioneer land grant institution, with a deep-seated interest in MSU history. I have studied the antiestablishment movement of that era. Plus as a former member of the Spartan Marching Band, I have a great deal of respect for Dr. Adams. He was, after all, the Number One Band Fan.

Sadly, the closest I ever got to taking a class from him was hearing his commencement address at my graduation ceremony. This book is certainly no Econ. 444, but it is a terrific glimpse into Adams’ general disposition: it is, like him, witty and self-effacing, yet deeply insightful. It leads me to believe that, despite his being “encumbered neither by administrative expertise nor experience,” his deep and broad understanding of the university’s role in society, and his genuine love for MSU, its students and faculty, made him a more-than-able administrator. I might even go so far as to argue a point to which Adams himself would have undoubtedly taken offense: that the three greatest presidents of the university were Abbot, Hannah, and Adams.

Theophilus Capen Abbot (1826–1892) presided for twenty-two years during the very early era when the State Agricultural College was still taking its first, tentative steps. He worked hard to make sure the school maintained its focus on scientific agriculture—even when that science was more theory than praxis. He successfully defended the school against forces in the legislature and the general public that wanted the Agricultural College dissolved and reestablished as a department of the University of Michigan.

John Alfred Hannah (1902–1991) was a former chicken farmer and poultry specialist who, almost single-handedly, transformed the school from a little cow college (MSC) to a world-class megaversity (MSU). During his twenty-eight-year reign—and this is the proper term for his office, as he held virtually all the power—enrollment increased from 6,000 to nearly 40,000; the Basic College, among other forward-thinking programs, was established; a massive campus building program was undertaken; and a branch campus was formed, which later gained its independence as Oakland University.

Upon Hannah’s departure, the university faced a difficult juncture. The Board of Trustees, composed of elected officials from across the state, had been pushed to the periphery by the Hannah administration, and the board wanted to reestablish its power base where it belonged, at the top of the pyramid. They were reluctant to maintain the status quo by selecting one of Hannah’s hand-picked successors. In addition, the days of the king-makers, of the trustees choosing a new president in a cloistered setting beyond outside influence—which arguably was how Hannah, the son-in-law of the previous president, had gained the throne—had gone the way of the small-time cow college. After twenty-eight years, not only was the selection process obsolete, but no one had a clear idea of what it had been, or what it should be.

And of course, it was 1969, a time of nationwide unrest, and student protest and uprising. This was a factor that the trustees, and their choice of president, could not safely ignore.

To buy time, the trustees asked Distinguished Economics Professor Walter Adams to serve as interim president. Dr. Adams had been a member of the faculty for twenty-two years. His senior-level undergraduate economics class was widely regarded as one of the most difficult—and most rewarding—courses available at MSU. His stance on the inadvisability of “bigness” in corporations and government, combined with a consummate teacher’s ability to convey complex ideas in accessible terms, made him a frequent expert witness at Congressional budget hearings. But as an administrator, he had effectively zero experience.

Nevertheless, Adams accepted the job, with the understanding that his term would be truly interim and would not extend beyond the end of the year, by which time the selection process would be complete. A self-professed pragmatist and optimist, Adams took up the presidential mantle using, as he put it, a combination of intuition and insight. (One must add “intelligence” to this list.) His watchwords became “openness, honesty, and accessibility.”

Adams’ opening chapters of The Test describe some of the broad subgroups with which he had to deal. They were “the white radicals,” “the black militants,” “the moderate majority,” and “the outside agitators.” The first three are some of the typical factions found on nearly every university campus in the late-’60s. But Adams’ method, of directly engaging these groups in dialogue, paying attention to understand their grievances (and often finding that all they really wanted was a listening ear), was far from typical. He treated them all, even the most antagonistic agitators, as friends and colleagues.

Perhaps ironically, it was his experience as a soldier in World War II, serving with distinction to earn the Bronze Star and a battlefield commission as lieutenant, that informed Adams’ tactics in resolving confrontations peacefully. One of his colleagues, also a veteran, chastized him for walking straight into the fray of a protest against police recruiters at the Placement Bureau, saying “it’s O.K. to sacrifice a second lieutenant in a fire fight, but you never take a chance on the general falling into enemy hands.” The thing is, as a professor Adams saw himself as one of the rank-and-file faculty, in effect a second lieutenant—and that attitude allowed him to think on his feet, with flexibility, in the midst of tense and fluid situations.

The results—open dialogue and a sense that the university was receptive to change, rather than (self) destructive student protest and the inevitable hardline establishment response—make me wish that this book had been available to the governors of Ohio and Mississippi in the year that followed Adams’ tenure.

A chapter titled “The Outside Agitators” could easily lead one to think of radical infiltrators, such as SDS members from other campuses, coming to MSU to cause trouble (like those rumored to have burned down the ROTC building at Kent State in May 1970). Not so. To Adams, the outside agitators were other members of the establishment: the press, the state legislature, the Nixon administration. Even alumni, whom one would have thought had the best interests of the school at heart, were a “potential source of divisiveness and polarization.” One by one, he shut down their negative rhetoric.

He invited press representatives to the president’s box at an MSU football game, after which they attended a cocktail mixer at the president’s manse where the other guests were members of the student government and leaders of “white radical” and “black militant” student organizations. The social setting (and free-flowing spirits) led to frank, friendly discussions that opened the lines of communication, after which “no newspaper represented at the gathering printed a student-baiting editorial” during his tenure, nor for some time afterward. Coverage of student protests and disruptions continued as before, but now the press understood the issues with greater depth and were able to editorialize without resorting to a simplistic viewpoint and divisive tone.

When a state senator, in the wake of a racial incident at one of the school’s cafeterias, introduced a bill that mainly served to fuel the polemics (and improve his own political visibility), the MSU student government wrote a rebuttal for proclamation on the senate floor. The open letter espoused both improvements in racial equality on campus and the fact that the incident had been swiftly dealt with by the students themselves in a way that satisfied all parties (in part due to Adams having prompted, once again, an open discussion between the factions). A large group of student leaders announced their intention to attend the senate session where the rebuttal would be introduced, and the Senate President-pro-tem, fearing a riot, asked Adams to attend the session. This he did, although he believed his presence was not much of a factor in the students’ behavior. Justifying his trust in them, the students acted as model citizens as they filled the senate gallery and listened attentively to the entire session. (After it was over, the battalion of state police that had been standing by in the basement of the Capitol—in full riot gear and armed to the teeth—was quietly dismissed without incident.)

In October 1969, campus activists organized a Vietnam Moratorium Day that wound up being a peaceful, focussed protest—thanks in large part to Adams’ involvement. Despite being expressly forbidden to do so by President Nixon, Michigan Governor William G. Milliken (a Republican) attended the on-campus activities, stating clearly—without ever taking the microphone to speak—his opposition to the violent, polemical rhetoric of Vice-President Spiro Agnew and others in the Nixon government. The gathering attracted the full gamut of students (the radicals and the moderate majority), faculty, and even an octogenarian East Lansing resident who, just by being there and showing that she cared, became something of a heroine to the students during the march to the Capitol. President Adams, of course, led the way.

Taking the opportunity of a bully pulpit provided by this memoir, Adams goes on to discuss his attitude toward what a university’s goals and place should be in modern society. With the indisputable dialectic of a master economist he rails against the dilution of a university’s intellectual capital by acceptance of government grants for outside work; among other arguments he shares a particularly interesting tale of MSU contracting to conduct police training in post-colonial, pre-war Vietnam—and its involvement, not unwittingly, with the CIA. He wrote, some thirty-five years ago, that the land grant philosophy pioneered by MSU, holding at its core a mandate to provide higher education to the “industrial classes,” i.e. education for the people and not solely for the elite, was as relevant and important in 1969 as it was in 1869. And it remains a vital goal of the American land-grant university to this day.

A tangent about another legacy of Walter Adams. Beyond his prowess as economics professor, and his tenure as university president, Adams was widely known for his unwavering support of MSU sports teams. Many have told the tales of his vitriolic attacks on Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight (and their subsequent friendship). Fellow econ prof “Lash” Larrowe mentions in his introduction to The Test that Adams once so antagonized a visiting baseball coach that the coach had to be restrained by campus police so that he couldn’t charge into the stands, red-faced and fists clenched, to silence Adams.

It wasn’t so much that he was vocal, although he was, but that he knew a team’s (and a coach’s) weaknesses and would play off of them. For example, he would find the slowest, or shortest, player on a basketball team and loudly suggest to the coach to put that player in on offense. In The Test, in his typical way of being both understated and perfectly accurate, Adams uses this adjective to describe his fandom: “assiduous”—as in “marked by careful unremitting attention or persistent application.” Indeed.

His wife Pauline, professor emerita of American thought and language, recently gave a speech in which she contended that one of the most momentous changes in MSU history was when home basketball games moved from Jenison Fieldhouse to the Breslin Center, because Walt’s season tickets were moved from seats directly behind the visitors’ bench to about the tenth row. This distance, of course, made his needling much less audible and effective.

In fact, nowadays the NCAA has a rule that schools must “reserve or protect the seating or spectator areas immediately behind the visiting team bench for fans of the visiting team, whenever possible.” Rumor has it that Adams might have been a direct cause of this rule. I like to think of this as the “Walter Adams Buffer Zone.”

In conclusion, I found The Test by Walter Adams to be a very fun, interesting read. His shrewd views of the roles of the American university, and its president, are universal and still timely today, and his humor is infectious. He could be an irascible curmudgeon when teaching undergrads—or taunting opponents—but it was his genuine love for his students that drove Adams to teach, and made him such a great president. As professor, he had maybe a few hundred students each term that he considered his “children.” As president, that family numbered 40,000—and he treated each one he met, even in the briefest moment, with love, care, and individual kindness.