About this item
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Daniel Golden exposes how academia has become the center of foreign and domestic espionage -- and why that is troubling news for our nation's security.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. Golden, acclaimed author of The Price of Admission, blows the lid off this secret culture of espionage and its consequences at home and abroad.
About the Author
I'm a longtime investigative reporter and editor, specializing for the past two decades in higher education coverage. In academic circles, I've been called a muckraker, a gadfly, and much worse names. Unlike most education journalists, who approach universities with a certain amount of deference, I treat them as businesses motivated by money and power. My work - including my Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal articles on college admissions, and subsequent book, The Price of Admission, and my award-winning Bloomberg News series on for-profit colleges - has exposed how institutional greed taints educational decisions that ought to be driven by merit.
In a similar vein, my new book, Spy Schools, suggests that universities ignore foreign efforts to steal their research because they're intent on attracting full-paying international students and opening branches overseas. At the same time, Spy Schools represents a new direction for me because it's also about foreign and domestic spy agencies and national security. During my research, I tussled in court with the FBI, which was trying to deny me access to emails it had sent to state universities. Eventually the bureau handed over most of the records.
I was born in Ohio, and grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts. My parents were professors at the University of Massachusetts, and their conversations and cocktail parties proved to be excellent training for covering higher education. After attending public high school and Harvard, I worked for a succession of publications that subsequently either busted or were sold. In order: the Springfield, Mass., Daily News (defunct along with pretty much every other afternoon newspaper) ; The Boston Globe (sold to the New York Times and then John Henry) ; The Wall Street Journal (sold to Rupert Murdoch) ; and Conde Nast Portfolio (folded) . You could say that my career has traced the decline of print media. I finally wised up and switched to electronic media, first Bloomberg News and now ProPublica, where I'm a senior editor.
Journalism has taken me all over the U.S. and the world. For my work, I have visited 48 states (only Alaska and North Dakota remain on my bucket list) , Western Europe, West and East Africa, China, and Central and South America. The dignitaries I've interviewed range from Hank Aaron and Bill Gates to President George H.W. Bush and the late Ted Kennedy.
Besides the Pulitzer Prize that I won for my college admissions reporting in 2004, I edited a series on tax inversions that in 2015 earned Bloomberg's first-ever Pulitzer. Among other honors, I have won three George Polk awards, three National Headliner awards, the Sigma Delta Chi award, the Gerald Loeb award, the Overseas Press Club award, the New York Press Club Gold Keyboard award, and two Education Writers Association grand prizes. I was also a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for public service
