Did Harvard University Help to Create the Unabomber?

1. Did Harvard University Help to Create the Unabomber? And, if so, does this make him more like V in our eyes? All quotations in this slideshow come from Alston Chase’s June 2000 article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber.” It can be accessed online at http://www.newsmakingnews.com/unabomber%20article.htm

2. Students’ sympathy towards V • Each year, one of the reasons that students give for identifying V as a hero is that he was simply exacting revenge for injustices performed upon him, Valerie, and others at Larkhill Detention Centre.

3. Students’ repulsion toward the Unabomber • Alston Chase writes that “although most Americans are morally repulsed by the Unabomber’s terrorism, many accept his anti-technology views.” • Most students of mine have agreed with the majority of Kaczynski’s ideas in the abridged manifesto that they have read, but none of them consider him heroic in any way. One of their reasons is that unlike V, Kaczynski didn’t attack people who had previously done anything to him.

4. What if you found out information that indicated that one of the most prestigious universities in our nation’s history was at least partially responsible for creating what one criminologist has called “the most intellectual serial killer” ever? • To borrow Inspector Finch’s line from V for Vendetta …

5. “Would You Really Want to Know?” • Or, would it be easier to live as you have lived, assuming that Kaczynski is simply a paranoid schizophrenic whose mental illness exacerbated his radical ideas and led him to kill 3 people and injure 23 others, over an 18-year period? • What if, contrary to his mother’s and brother’s testimony (in support of an insanity plea) during his trial, Kaczynski was shown to have been quite stable during his childhood?

6. What if you found out that … • From 1959 until 1962, a group of Harvard University psychologists, led by Henry A. Murray, “conducted a disturbing and what would now be seen as ethically indefensible experiment on twenty-two undergraduates….”?

7. And that “One of these students … was Theodore John Kaczynski.” Henry A. Murray Ted Kaczynski

8. First things first … • Before we examine what occurred at Harvard, it is important to look closely at Kaczynski’s childhood. • In the fifth grade, Kaczynski scored 167 on an IQ test [anything over 150 is considered genius-level], and he was promoted to seventh grade the following year.

9. Investigating Kaczynski’s childhood • From then on, his parents “began to push him to study, lecturing him if his report card showed any grade below an A.” • When he was a sophomore, the high school administrators “recommended that he skip his junior year, placing him two years below his classmates.”

10. Kaczynski’s view of himself as a child • “Two years younger than his classmates, and still small for his age, Kaczynski became … an outcast in school. There was ‘a gradual increasing amount of hostility I had to face from the other kids,’ [Unabomber psychologist] Sally Johnson reports Kaczynski as admitting. ‘By the time I left high school, I was definitely regarded as a freak by a large segment of the student body.’”

11. Kaczynski’s childhood, cont. • Despite his acceleration and his own self-evaluation, “School reports regularly gave him high marks for neatness, ‘respect for others,’ ‘courtesy,’ ‘respect for law and order,’ and ‘self-discipline.’” • His guidance counselor wrote “Of all the youngsters I have worked with at the college level … I believe Ted has one of the greatest contributions to make to society. He is reflective, sensitive, and deeply conscious of his responsibilities to society.”

12. The first way that Harvard may have helped to create The Unabomber • “In September of 1958, when … Kaczynski [was] just sixteen …[his living quarters at] 8 Prescott Street was [an] … unusual place, a sort of incubator.” • “Earlier that year … Harvard's dean of freshmen, had decided to use the house as living accommodations for the brightest, youngest freshmen. [His] well-intentioned idea was to provide these boys with a nurturing, intimate environment, so that they wouldn't feel lost, as they might in the larger, less personal dorms.” • “In so doing he isolated the overly studious and less-mature boys from their classmates. He inadvertently created a ghetto for grinds, making social adjustment for themmore, rather than less, difficult.”

13. One college housemate’s perspective • “’I lived at Prescott Street that year too,’ Michael Stucki [said]. ‘And like Kaczynski, I was majoring in mathematics. Yet I swear I never ever even saw the guy.’ Stucki, who recently retired after a career in computers, lived alone on the top floor, far from Kaczynski's ground-floor room. In the unsocial society of 8 Prescott, that was a big distance. "It was not unusual to spend all one's time in one's room and then rush out the door to library or class…”

14. Are there any parallels in forced isolation? • “Whereas other freshmen lived in suites with one or two roommates, six of the sixteen students of Prescott Street, including Kaczynski, lived in single rooms. All but seven intended to major in a mathematical science. All but three came from high schools outside New England, and therefore knew few people in Massachusetts.”

15. Freshman Year Psychological Evaluation • The health-services doctor who interviewed Kaczynski as part of the medical examination Harvard required for all freshmen observed: Good impression created. Attractive, mature for age, relaxed.... Talks easily, fluently and pleasantly.... likes people and gets on well with them. May have many acquaintances but makes his friends carefully. Prefers to be by himself part of the time at least. May be slightly shy.... Essentially a practical and realistic planner and an efficient worker.... Exceedingly stable, well integrated and feels secure within himself. Usually very adaptable. May have many achievements and satisfactions. • The doctor further described Kaczynski thus: "Pleasant young man who is below usual college entrance age. Apparently a good mathematician but seems to be gifted in this direction only. Plans not crystallized yet but this is to be expected at his age. Is slightly shy and retiring but not to any abnormal extent.

16. Now, back to Dr. Murray and his experiment …

17. Dr. Murray’s background • Murray’s biographer wrote that during World War II, the psychologist “flourished as a leader in the global crusade of good against evil,” and that “He was also an advocate of world government.” He offered his services to the US government, for he was fascinated, for instance, “in the whole subject of brainwashing” Mustapha Mond? Chancellor Sutler? Brave New World? V for Vendetta? Does this remind you of →

18. Dr. Murray’s background, cont. • “During the war Murray served in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, helping to develop psychological screening tests for applicants and … monitoring military experiments on brainwashing.” • “Murray and his colleagues ‘put together an assessment system …[that] tested a recruit’s ability to stand up under pressure, to be a leader, to hold liquor, to lie skillfully, and to read a person’s character by the nature of his clothing… Murray’s system became a fixture in the OSS.”

19. Murray’s Interrogation Test One of the tests that Murray devised for the OSS was intended to determine how well applicants withstood interrogations. As Murray describes it: The candidate immediately went downstairs to the basement room. A voice from within commanded him to enter, and on complying he found himself facing a spotlight strong enough to blind him for a moment. The room was otherwise dark. Behind the spotlight sat a scarcely discernible board of inquisitors.... The interrogator gruffly ordered the candidate to sit down. When he did so, he discovered that the chair in which he sat was so arranged that the full strength of the beam was focused directly on his face.... At first the questions were asked in a quiet, sympathetic, conciliatory manner, to invite confidence.... After a few minutes, however, the examiner worked up to a crescendo in a dramatic fashion.... When an inconsistency appeared, he raised his voice and lashed out at the candidate, often with sharp sarcasm. He might even roar, "You're a liar."

20. Recruits’ reactions to the test • Even anticipation of this test was enough to cause some applicants to fall apart. The authors wrote that one person "insisted he could not go through with the test." They continued, "A little later the director ... found the candidate in his bedroom, sitting on the edge of his cot, sobbing."

21. The Harvard Experiment • Murray essentially repeated aspects of this interrogation test when he returned to Harvard. • “Murray’s [Harvard] experiment was intended to measure how people react under stress. He subjected them to “intensive interrogation– what Murray himself called ‘vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive’ attacks, assaulting his subjects’ egos and most-cherished ideas and beliefs.”

22. How it was presented to Kaczynski and others • Kaczynski told Mello that he was "pressured into participating" in the Murray experiment. His hesitation turned out to be sensible. Researchers gave the volunteers almost no information about the experiment in which they would participate. Each was simply asked to answer yes to the following question: "Would you be willing to contribute to the solution of certain psychological problems (parts of an on-going program of research in the development of personality), by serving as a subject in a series of experiments or taking a number of tests (average about 2 hours a week) through the academic year (at the current College rate per hour)?"

23. The details of the Harvard experiment • “First, you are told you have a month in which to write a brief exposition of your personal philosophy of life, an affirmation of the major guiding principles in accord with which you live or hope to live. Second, when you return to the Annex with your finished composition, you are informed that in a day or two you and a talented young lawyer will be asked to debate the respective merits of your two philosophies.”

24. The details of the Harvard experiment, continued • “When the subject arrived for the debate, he was escorted to a ‘brilliantly lighted room’ and seated in front of a one-way mirror. A motion-picture camera recorded his every move and facial expression through a hole in the wall. Electrodes leading to machines that recorded his heart and respiratory rates were attached to his body. Then the debate began. But the students were tricked. Contrary to what Murray claimed in his article, they had been led to believe that they would debate their philosophy of life with another student like themselves. Instead they confronted … a talented young lawyer indeed, but one who had been instructed to launch into an aggressive attack on the subject, for the purpose of upsetting him as much as possible.”

25. “The intent was to catch them by surprise, to deceive them, and to brutalize them.” • “As instructed, the unwitting subject attempted to represent and to defend his personal philosophy of life. Invariably, however, he was frustrated, and finally brought to expressions of real anger, by the withering assault of his older, more sophisticated opponent.... while fluctuations in the subject's pulse and respiration were measured on a cardiotachometer. Not surprisingly, most participants found this highly unpleasant, even traumatic, as the data set records.”

26. What was the real reason for doing this? • Alston Chase asks, “Could the experiment have had a purpose that Murray was reluctant to divulge? • Was the multiform-assessments project intended, at least in part, to help the CIA determine how to test, or break down, an individual's ability to withstand interrogation?”

27. Are there any parallels? Larkhill Detention Centre Divinity Avenue in Cambridge, MA

28. What is going on here? • Just like Inspector Finch’s dead-end search for information about Larkhill, when Alston Chase investigated Kaczynski’s file from Murray’s experiment he was similarly stonewalled. Chief Inspector Finch

29. Covering up the truth? • Kaczynski reported, in letters he sent to Alston Chase while he was imprisoned, that according to his defense lawyers, the higher-ups at the Henry A. Murray Research Center “had told participating psychologists not to talk with his defense team.” • Several of the research assistants that Chase himself interviewed “couldn’t, or wouldn’t, talk much about the study.” • When Chase went to the Murray Research Center, he says that even though the data referred to students’ code names only, he “was not permitted to view [Kaczynski’s] records.”

30. Did Murray’s torturous experiment cause Kaczynski to snap? • “Kaczynski's high school counselor, is among those who believe that the Murray experiment could have been a turning point in Kaczynski's life.” • “Ralph Meister, one of [Kaczynski's father’s] oldest friends and a retired psychologist who has known …Kaczynski since he was a small boy, also raises this possibility. So does one of Murray's own research associates.” • “The … [data] results certainly suggest that at the outset of the experiment Kaczynski was mentally healthy, but by the experiment's end, judging from Sally Johnson's comments, he was showing the first signs of emotional distress.”

31. Further support for this theory • “As Kaczynski's college life continued, outwardly he seemed to be adjusting to Harvard. But inwardly he increasingly seethed. According to Sally Johnson, he began worrying about his health. He began having terrible nightmares. He started having fantasies about taking revenge against a society that he increasingly viewed as an evil force obsessed with imposing conformism through psychological controls.”

32. Further support, continued • “These thoughts upset Kaczynski all the more because they exposed his ineffectuality. he would become horribly angry with Johnson reported that himself because he could not express this fury openly. ‘I never attempted to put any such fantasies into effect,’ she quoted from his writings, ‘because I was too strongly conditioned ... against any defiance of authority.... I could not have committed a crime of revenge even a relatively minor crime because ... my fear of being caught and punished was all out of proportion to the actual danger of being caught.’”

33. Further support, continued • “Kaczynski felt that justice demanded that he take revenge on society. But he lacked the personal resources at that time to do so. He was -- had always been -- a good boy. Instead he would seek escape. He began to dream about breaking away from society and living a primitive life.”

34. The Unabomber’s revenge • Although Ted Kaczynski never officially targeted Dr. Murray or any of his associates, he did send bombs to several professors at universities across the country. Many of them were experts in scientific fields. • In your view, is this form of retaliation similar enough to V’s vendetta to earn a bit more of your sympathy?

35. Reflecting on the parallels • According to V, “What they did to me was monstrous.” • Evey replies “And they created a monster.” • Yet later, after V tortures Evey, she is the one to pull the lever and blow up Parliament.

36. Did V’s government create a terrorist? Did V turn Evey into a terrorist?

37. Is that true for Kaczynski as well?Did Harvard, at least in part, create the Unabomber? You decide.