In 2018, the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) entered into a partnership with the Central Intelligence Agency, becoming a CIA "Signature School". This agreement gives the CIA unprecedented access to the campus and students of UIC for recruitment purposes.

While the CIA has a long history of recruiting college students, the CIA Signature School Program only began in 2016. UIC was the fourth university to join the program in 2018, preceded by the University of New Mexico, Florida International University, and the City University of New York – Baruch College. 

The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the CIA and UIC, which was recently released after a member of the student news website Bonfire’s editorial board filed a FOIA request with the university, states that one of the core purposes of the program is to “[i]mplement a marketing plan to communicate [the CIA’s] diversity and inclusion brand.” Both the CIA and UIC have said the CIA is interested in UIC’s diverse student population. UIC has large Arabic and Spanish-speaking populations that the CIA is particularly interested in, as their recruiter made clear at a 2018 job fair. The CIA has a long, proven history (as evidenced by it's own declassified documents) of interfering in the affairs of soverign nations, undermining democracy, supporting coups, and acheiving its goals through assassination, murder, and torture. The victims of the vast majority of these crimes have been the peoples of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. The CIA wants to recruit UIC students of color to use for their fundamentally racist projects to continue to destabilize the Third World/Global South.

While the stated reasons for the CIA's international interference change from day to day, the motivation is always to exert more control over these countries, their economies, and their resources. This maintenance of the US’s political and economic dominance throughout the rest of the world is at the cost of millions of lives. Do we really want our university to play a role in this mass murder for profit?

While the CIA’s charter dictates that the agency only use counterintelligence measures on targets abroad, the CIA infamously tortured and experimented on unwitting U.S. citizens from 1953 to 1973 through Operation MKUltra. Additionally, Presidents Johnson and Nixon both used the agency for Operation CHAOS to infiltrate and disrupt domestic anti-war and black liberation movements, including at college campuses, in the 1960s and 1970s. 

The CIA has a history of using unethical and manipulative tactics to recruit international students and students who are not US citizens. Such tactics are detailed in the book Spy Schools by Daniel Golden. One example is bribing students who are not US citizens with citizenship. Another is the use of front organizations to employ students and faculty. Often, these recruits have no idea that they are working for the CIA, as agents are not required to disclose their employer to non-US citizens. A plethora of university research efforts around the country have unknowingly been directly funded by and provided intelligence to the agency. In this way, the CIA has played a covert influence on the direction of research in many university programs.

The agency has been scrutinized for its use of torture, particularly following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Its team of lawyers have played a key role in defending these practices in the courts. This may further explain the timing of the Agency’s partnership with UIC, which was unveiled only three months after the university announced that it was in talks to absorb John Marshall Law School (this merger has since been approved and began in Fall of 2019). This gives the CIA direct access to recruit new lawyers to provide legal cover for torture and other crimes from Chicago’s first public law school, a part of our university.

Ending this partnership will require a broad coalition of students and other university stakeholders exposing it for what it truly is. Join Students for a Democratic Society in demanding: CIA OFF CAMPUS! END THE PARTNERSHIP!