In 1981, a group of Brown University students found a creative way of protesting a lecture by Central Intelligence Agency Director William Casey. Then, in keeping with the CIA’s campus fixation, the Agency kept tabs on the students as they defended their free speech rights.

In response to dwindling recruitment numbers in the ’60s, the Central Intelligence Agency adopted a more aggressive program to lure in the best and brightest from America’s college campuses. That increased visibility led to the Agency facing with heavy resistance from student protests, in the form of citizen’s arrests, paint-throwing, patriotic frat boys, and in one case, aggravated poetry.