As part of back-to-school week, we combed through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) archives to find connections between colleges and the Agency, starting with our home turf: Boston.

Boston College

• Awarded former Director Allen Dulles an honorary degree in 1961

Boston University

• Recruited campus spies as apart of “Operation Chaos”

Emerson College

• Sponsored a forum in which former Director William Colby defended additional restrictions on the Freedom of Information Act

Harvard University

• You can find full issues of the Harvard Crimson (complete with crossword puzzles!) scanned into CREST

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Agency sponsored an analyst’s independent research in nuclear proliferation

Northeastern University

• Agency was ordered to pay $1,000 in damages for opening a college placement coordinator’s mail

Simmons College

• Hosted a forum in which Colby said almost exactly the opposite of what he had said in the Emerson forum

Suffolk University

• Nominated former Director Stansfield Turner to be college president, who turned it down

Tufts University

• Former economics professor Franklyn Holzman pointed out CIA reports on Soviet defense spending were “largely a myth”

University of Massachusetts - Boston

• Former Political Science professor Arnold Beichman collaborated with the Agency on a course on terrorism

This is only a small sampling, so we encourage you to dive in yourself. If you find anything interesting, or you have suggestions on where the CIA college tour should go next, let us know on Twitter or at info@muckrock.com

Image via CIA