The Struggle Over Project Troy’s Successor: Economists and Other Social Scientists in the Making of MIT’s Center for International Studies

This paper provides a detailed account of the struggle over the Center for International Studies (CIS) and its mission. The center, a research institute established at MIT in the early 1950s, was an outgrowth of Project Troy, a 1950 top secret initiative devoted to the problem of “getting the truth behind the Iron Curtain.“ The paper attends to a single, curious fact about the CIS: The center’s intellectual agenda had very little to do with the propaganda questions that preoccupied the Troy participants. The focus, instead, was on the study of economic development, under the leadership of founding director Max Millikan, an economist and Troy participant. Millikan retained the previous initiative’s close Cold War ties to government. But he maneuvered to abandon Troy’s propaganda remit in favor of his own interests in international development. As the paper recounts, Millikan’s initial success in reorienting the center met resistance when he turned to the Ford Foundation to fund his economic development program. Millikan reluctantly agreed to house a Ford-funded Research Program in International Communication (RPIC) within the CIS. With that concession, and with the help of fellow economist Richard Bissell—then an influential advisor at Ford—the foundation agreed to underwrite the economic development program. Once the RPIC got underway in fall 1953, the Center for International Studies operated as two distinct and autonomous programs, one staffed by economists, and the second by other social scientists—until the late 1950s, when the communication program was phased out.