Dr. George Rupp, President of Columbia
University -- Fascism, Money Laundering (and the CIA, too)
By Alex Constantine Copyright, 2000
The 1988 issue of Louis Rukeyser's Business Almanac
reports, "the largest fines for money laundering came in 1986," the occasion of
this record-breaking event being the federal audit of Texas Commerce Bank of
Houston, "hit with $1.9 million in civil fines for not reporting cash
transactions." Dr. George Rupp, a director of the bank, also then president of
Rice University, sat on the board of the Panhandle Eastern Corporation in
Houston, a holding company for the state's natural gas industry. Robert
Mosbacher, former President Bush's Commerce Secretary, served with Rupp on the
board of Texas Commerce Bank -- an institution controlled throughout the1900s by
the family of James Baker III, President Bush, Sr.'s secretary of state and a
partner in Baker & Botts, a law firm that largely serves Morgan-Rockefeller
interests.
Linda Minor, a Houston-area attorney and student of the
city's commercial history, informs us that the Bakers "formed one of the
component banks that later merged into Texas Commerce -- for a client of his,
Hugh Hamilton, who appeared to be a front from Scottish distilling interests.
The Baker law firm always acted on behalf of clients and used other people's
money to gain power for themselves. Their major clients were the Union Pacific,
Southern Pacific and even the Missouri Pacific Railroads. They also
were very into representation of power companies. Baker & Botts was actually
the attorneys for the 'Octopus' from its first days." The 1994 Columbia
Electronic Encyclopedia offers this capsule bio of Dr. George Erik Rupp: "1942,
American educator and theologian, b. Summit, N.J. He studied in Germany before
graduating from Princeton Univ. He earned a B.D. degree from Yale Univ. and a
doctorate from Harvard. A Presbyterian minister, he has spent most of his career
in the field of higher education. After serving as vice chancellor of the Univ.
of Redlands, Redlands, Calif.,
he taught at the Harvard Divinity School, was Dean of Academic Affairs at the
Univ. of Wisconsin at Green Bay, and became president of Rice Univ. in 1985
[Note: Rice was founded by the grandfather of James Baker III, Captain James A.
Baker -- originally intended as a world center for the study of the
fascist-style eugenics, all the rage at the turn of the century]. He was named
president of Columbia Univ. in 1993. He is the author of Commitment and
Community (1989)."
The "Enemy Alien" Chair at Rice University.
Everybody knows the war is over,
Everybody knows the good guys lost...
-- Leonard Cohen
Dr. Rupp could be counted on to "keep the secrets" at
Rice U. There were others. There was, for instance, Franz Brotzen, the
mysterious presence at Rice -- an "enemy alien," according to the draft board --
who got along famously with the "prickly" career college president, as reported
in the Rice University Weekly (April 27, 1995), a story that chronicles the rise
of a well-respected spy from Nazi Germany:
Spy Questions To Classroom Lessons Mark
Brotzen's Life
By Meg Langner, Rice News Correspondent
In early 1945, Franz Brotzen, now a Rice University professor
emeritus, was a U.S. military officer charged with helping to organize the
once-powerful Nazi spy network in the Soviet Union into a resource for the
United States.
The German high command knew the war would soon end. They
expected no mercy from the Soviets but hoped to be punished less severely when
they surrendered to the Americans, said Brotzen, the Stanley Moore Professor
Emeritus of Materials Science.
The United States knew very little about the Soviet Union at that time, he said,
and when the Allies won the war, the Nazis decided to turn over to the United
States their intelligence on the Soviets.
During the war, Germany controlled large spy networks within
the U.S.S.R., but as the Nazis retreated before the Soviet forces, the system
fell into disarray, Brotzen said.
Brotzen, along with three other American intelligence
officers, was sent into Germany following the surrender of the Nazis, where he
lived for six months interviewing former-Nazi officers who had served on the
Eastern front. He fulfilled the American government's request for information on
the Soviet Union by
figuring out how facts could best be obtained.
"That was quite an exciting time, sort of a little bit
out of spy novels," he said.
Brontzen left Germany for Brazil and eventually settled
in at Rice University to conduct research in materials science.
Brotzen, born in Berlin,
graduated from the gymnasium during the depression and landed a job with I.G.
Farben, the chemical monopoly that manufactured poison gas for the "Solution,"
made extensive use of slave labor, etc. Farben maintained symbiotic bonds with a
host of German and American corporations and the Nazi genocidists throughout the
war. German spies under Farben corporate cover were dispatched throughout South
America before the war, and the young drug salesman did fit the profile. Brotzen
joined Farben's pharmaceutical division at the age of 18, and was quickly
transferred to Brazil. In Teofilo Otoni, he worked temporarily in the sales
department and contracted his share of diseases, he says, while wandering
through the jungle, but survived to see WW II erupt. He left Farben, by his own
account, and took a job in Rio de Janeiro importing steel mill construction
equipment. Franz began to read about metallurgy and his interest in materials
science was kindled. Brotzen headed for the U.S. to pursue a degree and arrived
on December 1, 1941 -- a week before Pearl Harbor. His draft status: "enemy
alien," but Brotzen quickly landed a job in
Cleveland, Ohio anyways. He took evening classes at the Case School of Applied
Science. A year after his entry into the States, he was drafted by the Army and
packed off to a military intelligence training school in Maryland. The German
expatriate spy rose to officer rank and taught at the military intelligence
center until the final phase of the war, when he was sent back to Germany to
liaison with the Nazi intelligence high command along the Eastern front. A year
later, he returned to the U.S., earned his
doctorate at Case. and went on to become a full professor at Rice University in
1954:
His research has spanned almost every field within materials
science, from work on materials' mechanical, electronic and magnetic behavior to
studies of their physical chemistry, and Brotzen has long been internationally
recognized as an
outstanding researcher.
He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 and received the U.S.
Senior Scientist Award from Germany's Humboldt Foundation in 1973. He is a
fellow of ASM International and is the 1995 recipient of the Case Institute of
Technology Distinguished Engineering Alumnus Award.
Brotzen has also been involved in student life at Rice. That
he enjoys and excels in teaching is proven by the number of awards he has won:
four George R. Brown Awards for Superior Teaching, the Gold Medal from the
Alumni Association, the Minnie Stevens Piper Award and the Student Association's
Mentor Award.
He is also a strong supporter of the college system. He and
his wife, Frances, have been masters of both Jones and Brown, and they remain
active Brown associates, welcoming and counseling advisee groups each year.
The couple also gives an annual scholarship in Brown and
Jones and a substantial summer travel award open to all undergraduates from all
colleges.
Brotzen has been active in university administration as well.
In the early 1960s he was responsible for Rice's federal funding, which he
helped increase from $1 million to $13.5 million.
And as the dean of engineering from 1962 until 1966, he
expanded Rice's research and graduate programs in engineering.
He has also served on "practically every committee that
ever existed on campus," according to Ronald Sass, Rice professor of
ecology and evolutionary biology. Brotzen has spent a total of approximately 20
years on each of the Faculty Council and the University Council and its
predecessors.
"He's someone who has ... a deep and abiding love for
this institution," said Ronald Stebbings, professor of space physics and
astronomy. "When I was a senior member of the administration, I often found
that I'd learn important details about the running of the place from my weekly
lunches with Franz.
"I can't think of anybody, frankly, who really has a
clearer picture, on a day-to-day basis, of the wide range of things that are
going on this campus."
Although he has made an enormous contribution to Rice over
the years, Brotzen has kept up interests outside engineering and away from Rice.
He loves to travel and has seen much of the world. He is an art buff. He follows
sports and stays active in the Democratic Party.
He has taught as a visiting professor at schools including
the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Germany, and the Federal Polytechnic
Institute in Zurich, Switzerland....
Brotzen has been an integral part of the Rice community.
He retired in 1986, but President George Rupp immediately
asked him to become the Stanley C. Moore Professor Emeritus of Materials Science
and Brotzen has continued his research and taught every semester since, except
one. There's no telling when he will actually retire.
"I'm having a ball, I'm having a very good time, so why
change?" Brotzen said.
Some faculty members at Rice University will back the
occasional Aryan Obermensch. This is the same institution of "higher learning"
that once had a particularly vile KKK chapter on campus, and withstood 17 years
of federal pressure to admit Blacks before the courts forced the school to give
up its discriminatory policies (Rice Thresher, March 29, 1996). At the David
Irving Web site, the disgraced Holocaust revisionist credits a Rice scholar with
furthering his writing career: "April 22, 1996 Professor Francis Loewenheim, at
Rice University in Houston, tells the author he has read and discussed [Irving's]
Goebbels book with Professor Gordon Craig, the noted historian at Stanford;
after seeing what Loewenheim has written for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Craig
agrees the book should be published. John Walsh at The
Independent phones Mr. Irving, and mentions that the review by Professor Donald
Watt (London School of Economics), which they're publishing next week, is highly
favorable...."
David Irving is a role model to the ultra-right fringe
of Rice University's student body.
On December 12, 1997, the Austin American-Statesman
reported: "A Holocaust museum has rejected the donation of an advertising fee
from Rice University's student newspaper after it printed an ad from a group
that doubts the Holocaust occurred. 'This money is tainted and its purpose is to
deny the murder of millions of human beings, Jews and non-Jews alike, and aims
to deny Holocaust survivors the opportunity to bear witness for those who cannot
speak for themselves,' said Abraham J. Peck, executive director of Holocaust
Museum Houston."
Dr. Rupp's prominent pal James Baker III joined the
Rice University Board of Governors in 1993. The Rice/Baker relationship is
symbiotic. Grandpa Baker was instrumental in the founding of the university and
served as its first chairman from 1891 through 1941. James Baker III inherited
the ultraconservative obsessions of his grandfather, served in three right-wing
administrations (Secretary of Commerce under President Ford, Reagan's
chief-of-staff and treasury secretary in the Bush, Sr. regime. In August 1988,
Baker was the chairman of then Vice President Bush's presidential
campaign). When Clinton defeated Bush four years later, Baker moved on to Rice
to direct the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, a think tank that
serves the corporate sector.
In July1993, Dr. Rupp, the former Harvard Divinity
School lecturer and world-class money launderer, was christened head of Columbia
University. Four years later, the Chronicle of Higher Education (December 5,
1997) reported that the students and faculty at Columbia had "mixed feelings"
about their president. "Though he was popular for his fund-raising success and
several well-handled situations, his 'prickly' personality and plans for the
undergraduate college have raised concerns."
Concerns that extended beyond Harlem. A paid
advertisement about Rupp's cooperation with the German government appeared in
the Washington Post in September1994, placed by the Church of Scientology. The
CoS has struggled with the German government for years. Scientology's cavil in
the Post accused Columbia and the German government of collaborating to
whitewash history: "Nazis stormed through the streets of German cities,
terrorizing and killing Jews and members of religious minorities. Although news
of these events reached the outside world, nothing was done. Today, we would be
wise not to ignore the early warning signs from a country which has twice this
century brought the world to war, and whose government is today
attempting to rewrite history with an exhibition at Columbia University puffing
up so-called German resistance to the Nazis - a spectacle that, according to the
Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, is intended solely to polish
Germany's international prestige."
Dr. Rupp also rolls out the silk carpet for the
intelligence establishment, though he is only the latest administrator to do so.
In 1968, the North American Congress in Latin America (NACLA) published a report
that accused, "most of the evidence points to indirect relationships, but
because the CIA is closed and secret and because the Columbia Administration
refuses to discuss its CIA relations, it is quite possible that CIA-CU ties are
far more direct and pervasive than the public data now indicates. In fact, our
own information indicates that these ties are so direct as to involve a highly
influential group of men in dual positions of leadership -- inside Columbia and
in the CIA itself." The Agency funded its fronts on campus via a maze of private
trusts. One of the most generous was the Farfield Foundation, a major
contributor to a number of CIA dummy fronts, represented at Columbia by Gardner
Cowles, a Teachers' College trustee, and William A.M. Burden. Both sat on the
board of the Farfield Foundation. Burden, a Farfield founder, was also a
director of Lockheed Aircraft. The foundation made a number of contributions in
1962 and 1964 to Columbia for "travel and study"
fellowships. Another funding source was Sigurd Larmon, president of the
advertising firm Young and Rubicam. Larmon was one of the academics selected in
1953 by President Eisenhower, according to the NACLA report, "to perfect the
country's psychological warfare program." Eisenhower's psyop committee suggested
"organization and techniques of the Central Intelligence Agency, the
Psychological Strategy Board, the Voice of America, the Information Services of
the State and other departments, and the psychological operations of the Army in
Korea." In the late O60s, investigation of the CIA on campus was directed
by Dr. Serge Lang of the Math Department -- he was denied access to the School's
books. NACLA reported:
When Lang asked if Columbia held any contract the
existence of which was classified, Warren Goodell, Associate Director of
Projects and Grants, said he was not at liberty to comment. Ralph S. Halford,
then Dean of Graduate Faculties, stated the
administration's official policy on CIA funding: 'University policy would not
preclude the acceptance ... of project support from the CIA.' He went on to say
that if a project was in line with regular academic duty, endorsed by the
chairman or dean of the division
in which it would be conducted, and approved by the Office of Projects and
Grants as being appropriate to a University, 'the University would not hesitate
to accept ... an offer by the CIA to furnish funds in support of the project.'
... As important as direct CIA involvement in SIA research projects, is
Columbia's association with two organizations, the Asia Foundation and the
Council on Foreign Relations. The Asia Foundation has received much if not all
of its financial support from the CIA. It has a budget of about $7
million a year to provide 'private American assistance to those Asian groups and
individuals working for continued social and economic improvement.' ...
In 1962, when Robert Blum, president of the Foundation,
resigned, Kirk was appointed Chairman of the Nominating Committee of the
Trustees, whose purpose was to select a new president. In his search for
suitable candidates for this position, Kirk sought the advice and suggestions of
Dean Rusk and Averell Harriman, a move
which indicates the importance of the Foundation. He also encouraged
recommendations from George S. Moore, President of the First National City Bank
of New York, and A.L. Nickerson, Chairman of the Board of Socony Mobil Oil
Company, Inc., concerning members of the bank and of Socony Mobil, which had
experience in Asian affairs. One man who was proposed as a possible choice was
Robert Amory, but Kirk himself is reported to have feared that he might bring
embarrassment to the
Asia Foundation. From 1952-1962, Amory was Deputy Director of the CIA.
George Tenet, "acting" director of the CIA for the past
four years, received his master's degree from Columbia's School of International
Affairs (SIA), a limb of the CIA's Ivy League learning tree, in 1978. The Agency
connection is long-standing. NACLA found an indirect tie between the CIA and
SRI, "demonstrated by the presence of Eugene C. Bewkes and Alger B. Chapman,
advisory council members of SIA, and David S. Smith, Associate Dean of SIA,
Director of the International Fellows Program and a member of the Administrative
Board of the Research Institute on Communist Affairs. All three men are
directors of the Edward John Noble Foundation, which besides passing money for
the CIA, has also given over $2 million [in federal
proceeds] to SIA." Smith's connection to Langley extended to a past position as
Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, and his involvement in the U-2 spy plane over flights.
Under Rupp's reign, spooks still haunt the campus. He
keeps the secrets. He daren't mention, for instance, that the university trains
CIA and Mossad agents, an arrangement subsidized by the black budget. Many
students studying foreign languages at Columbia's Department of Middle East
Languages and Culture are either training for the Israeli Mossad or the Central
Intelligence Agency. Columbia students with poor grades who still want a CIA job
receive scholarships to Cairo's American University, or Robert College in
Turkey. Some Muslims in the foreign language schools at Columbia train for
employment in D.C. One Jordanian-American student confessed that he is took
Arabic in preparation for a State Department exam. Language study toward
intelligence work is disguised as `cultural' programs, legitimizing them and
assuring continued federal funding.
(Muslimedia International, http://www.malaysia.net/mulimedia/,
July 17, 1996)
The Best of "Wrong Intentions"
Detractors kvetch, but George Rupp's much-touted
fund-raising abilities have endeared him to the board of governors. Dr. Rupp is
credited with raising an impressive $2.74 billion for the university over the
past decade -- better than twice the administration's original goal.
But the books are not Kosher. An Op-Ed column in a
Columbia student newspaper examined "George Rupp's Dirty Little Secret": "Before
George Rupp was president of Columbia University (and after he graduated from
Princeton, Yale Divinity School, and Harvard Graduate School with high honors
from each, and was dean of the Harvard Divinity School), he was president of
Rice University in Texas. During his time there, he was able to more than double
their endowment from $500 million to $1.25 billion." Nevertheless, Rice, like
Columbia, had dropped in academic ranking. "It seems, perhaps, that that fair
university in Houston shares some interesting secrets with us. The reason for
this is simple.... Rice was able to make its money not only through alumni
donations, but also by raising tuition and slowly decreasing the actual number
of tenured faculty. Sound familiar? In fact, Rice used to be free, before Rupp
served as president. As students here at Columbia, we've been witness to the
continual growth of the undergraduate student body, while the number of tenured
faculty in each department has either stayed the same or decreased. But we're
all supposed to grin and bear it in overcrowded classrooms, meager course
offerings each semester.... We cannot stand idly by as President Rupp runs this
University with the wrong intentions." Rupp overlooks the fact that the school
is "supposed to be a not-for-profit educational institution. It would seem that
from living in New York, President Rupp has been lured by the flashy draw of
life on Wall Street and thinks of himself as more of a CEO than anything else.
Despite his distinguished academic career, it would appear that he values, above
all else, the almighty dollar" (Columbia Daily Spectator, December 4, 2000).
Rupp's superhuman talent for scaring up funds is
evident in his extraction of federal tax subsidies from Congress to support
scientific research that benefits the same multinationals he has served all
along, academic-corporate welfare. Some might call it a scam. He is at the
forefront of college presidents and scientists lobbying to sustain Cold War
expenditures in state-supported research laboratories. "The federal
government," he told a group of congressmen at a 1998 breakfast meeting, "has
maintained a strong commitment to scientific discovery and innovation that has
been crucial to maintaining and increasing America's economic strength, global
competitiveness, national security and overall standard of living,. It is
critically important that we continue and expand upon the partnership forged
between Congress and the university community." Dr. Rupp based his appeal
on a report by the Committee for Economic Development that determined returns on
tax-subsidized "investments" in university-based science research had returned a
20-30 percent profit -- almost twice that of the average stock purchase
(Columbia University Record, vol. 2, no. 5, October 2, 1998). The
publicly-supported research culminates in patents that reap appreciable revenue
for universities and corporations.
What else is a school for?
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Alex Constantine Political Conspiracy Research Bin: http://alexconstantine.50megs.com/