John R. Everett

John Rutherford Everett (1918-1992) was an American philosopher and college administrator. He presided over Hollins College in Virginia from 1950 to 1960, served as the first chancellor of the Municipal College System of the City of New York from 1960 to 1962, and was president of the New School for Social Research from 1964 to 1982. The New School Archives hold his presidential records, including a file of 1977 and 1978 correspondence with the CIA about two subprojects, 134 and 137, funded through MKULTRA in 1961 for work at the school that the file dates to 1962.

Early Life and Education

Everett was born on December 27, 1918, in Portland, Oregon, to Margaret Myrtle Johnson Everett and Monroe Green Everett, a Presbyterian minister who later served as president of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.¹ He received an AB from Park College in Parkville, Missouri in 1942, an MA in economics from Columbia University in 1943, a Bachelor of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1944, and a PhD in philosophy from Columbia in 1945.¹ He married Eunice Elizabeth Sloan, a fellow Park College student, on June 13, 1942, in Connecticut. They had one daughter. They divorced in June 1963, and on January 21, 1964 he married Elsie Leivesley Howard, who had a son from a previous marriage.¹

Philosophy Career, 1943 to 1950

Everett taught philosophy at Columbia from 1943 to 1945 while also serving as an assistant in the philosophy of religion at Union Theological Seminary during the 1944 to 1945 academic year.¹ He joined the faculty of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut in 1945 as an assistant professor of philosophy and remained three years.¹ He returned to Columbia in 1948 as chair of the philosophy department.¹ His books were Religion in Economics: A Study of John Bates Clark, Richard T. Ely [and] Simon N. Patten (1946) and Religion in Human Experience: An Introduction (1950).¹

Hollins College, 1950 to 1960

In April 1950 the board of trustees of Hollins College elected Everett its president. He took up the post in July, at age thirty-one, and was the youngest college president in the United States at the time.¹ The United States Junior Chamber of Commerce named him one of its ten outstanding young men of 1950 the following year.¹ During the decade the college built four major buildings, among them a new library, adopted a new curriculum and opened a study-abroad program. Enrollment almost doubled, the faculty rose from thirty-nine to sixty-three, most of them holding doctorates, and Everett worked to lift the endowment above $3 million by 1960.¹² The graduate programs were coeducational and covered psychology, writing, French and Spanish, and Everett created a travel and research fund for faculty.¹ The Hollins archives list the Paris study-abroad program, a literary festival and the first Parents' Day among the changes, and the buildings as Faculty Row, Turner Hall, Randolph Hall, the Fishburn Library, the Hill Building and the duPont Chapel; from 1957 to 1960 he sat on the Advisory Council for the Virginia Economy.²

Everett helped establish the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges in 1952 and represented the United States on the committee of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization that met in Paris to study the article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on participation in cultural and educational life.¹ In 1956 he chaired the educational advisory committee of the Council for Financial Aid to Education. Roanoke College awarded him an honorary doctorate of laws in 1960.¹ His papers from the Hollins years include memos about founding a college in Aspen, Colorado, his "President's Column" for the Hollins Bulletin, a 1951 typescript titled "Why Educate Women," and reflections on the 1952 UNESCO meeting.³

On race, the New School's finding aid records that in a 1958 memo, written while he was president of Hollins, Everett called the desegregation movement "propaganda."⁴ Anna Robinson-Sweet, an associate archivist at the New School, wrote in Public Seminar that South Carolina governor James Byrnes commended the same stance.⁵ A 1968 article in The Atlantic opposed the decentralization of New York City public schools and described forced desegregation as "unfair competition" for African-American students who had been disadvantaged in their education.⁴

Chancellor of the Municipal College System, 1960 to 1962

In January 1960 Everett submitted his resignation from Hollins, effective on the appointment of a successor, to become an educational consultant to Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, Inc. The company had contracted with Hollins to develop teaching-machine programs in mathematics and foreign languages for public schools.¹ In June 1960 he became the first chancellor of the Municipal College System of the City of New York, over which he presided for 80,000 students at four senior colleges and three community colleges. The system was renamed the City University of New York in 1961.¹

His papers at the New School hold correspondence with Gustave G. Rosenberg, chairman of the Board of Higher Education, and Mayor Robert Wagner on administrative, budgeting and development matters, along with two statements about a "communist speaker ban."³ The series also holds correspondence with Harold W. Stokes, president of Queens College, about a court trial arising from accusations of religious discrimination at CUNY.³ Series 1 of the presidential records carries a file for the University and a consultancy to the United States Department of State, and the Mayor's Task Force on City Personnel.⁶ Encyclopedia Virginia states that he resigned after two years "for personal reasons."¹

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1962 to 1964

Everett left the chancellorship in 1962 and joined Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., in Chicago. Encyclopedia Virginia gives the post as senior vice president,¹ and the New School's finding aid for his papers gives it as vice president, with the Britannica period dated 1962 to 1964.³ The Britannica series of the papers holds correspondence with Maurice B. Mitchell, president of the company, a memo on the role of television in education titled "Teaching Machines," and a memo to Sidney Tickton, vice president of the Academy for Educational Development, and Herman B Wells about cooperation between private and public universities.³

President of the New School, 1964 to 1982

Everett became president of the New School in October 1964.⁴ The school's presidential records list Hans Simons (1950 to 1961), Henry David (1961 to 1963) and Robert MacIver (1963 to 1964) as his predecessors.⁴ Public Seminar describes his tenure as one of the longest in the school's history, second only to that of the founder Alvin Johnson.⁵ Enrollment grew from 8,000 to 30,000 during his presidency.¹

In the summer and fall of 1965 Everett urged the board of trustees to fund an expansion that would make the school the premier institution of adult education in New York City.⁵ In a 1965 memo to the board he wrote that "the original purpose [offering refuge to European scholars fleeing fascism] of the Graduate Faculty has disappeared," and that without the Graduate Faculty the school "would cease to be a university for adults because it would cease to be a university."⁵

Expansion, Parsons and the Graduate Faculty

The Center for New York City Affairs was founded in 1965 and was developed into a full-scale graduate school of management and urban professions, now known as the Milano School of Policy, Management and the Environment.⁴⁵ An undergraduate program started in 1966 and later became Eugene Lang College.⁴⁵ In 1970 the school merged with Parsons School of Design, which Encyclopedia Virginia describes as a new division brought in during his presidency.¹⁵ The campus also grew through the acquisition of the buildings now known as the Sheila Johnson Design Center and the space where the University Center stands.⁵

In May 1970 students, with the administration's permission, occupied the Graduate Faculty building at 65 Fifth Avenue to organize anti-war study groups and discussions. High school students later joined the occupation. A negotiation of about two weeks followed, and a court injunction process led to resistance from the strikers. New York City police emptied the building on May 25, 1970, and the finding aid records that no violence occurred during the voluntary arrest of several students.³

In 1979 Everett recommended eliminating the Graduate Faculty's doctoral programs and, if necessary, its master's programs in sociology and political science.³ The finding aid states that after intense negotiations and several years of restructuring, every doctoral program was reapproved by the New York State Board of Regents.³ Public Seminar describes the end of his tenure as finding the school "in a precarious academic and financial position," marked by a de-accreditation crisis, faculty departures and a financial crisis.⁵

Writings on Higher Education

Everett wrote articles and speeches on higher education during the 1960s and 1970s. In a 1965 article titled "Revolution in Higher Education," he warned that universities were becoming "trade schools for those who wish to learn the techniques of the knowledge business."⁵ His 1969 article for The Atlantic, "Sex and Politics in the Underground Press," concluded that "Sex will sell very well by itself while pretentious factless political theorizing will not."⁵ Public Seminar reports that in October 1968 Everett wrote that the Columbia strike of the previous spring had been caused by the president's decision to call in the police, and that it was not really about the war or the university's expansion into Morningside Heights.⁵

The 1977 Disclosures and the New School

The file in the Everett records titled "Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 1977-1978" is at Box 7, Folder 29.⁷ Its digitized description states that the correspondence "concerns the discovery of documents by the Church Committee," a Senate committee formed in 1975, and that the documents detailed that the Central Intelligence Agency "had funded professors at The New School in the early 1960s as part of MK-Ultra." The attached documents "detail two faculty research projects funded at the university."⁸

A document in the file, signed by Director Stansfield Turner and addressed to Senator Daniel K. Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is dated August 2, 1977. It describes the agency's recovered material. The agency's notice to Everett describes a statement the Director presented at a joint public hearing on August 2; the printed record of that hearing is dated August 3. Turner wrote that "We are now in possession of the names of 185 non-government researchers and assistants" in the recovered material, and that the names of 80 institutions "are also mentioned." He listed the institutions as 44 colleges or universities, 15 research foundations or pharmaceutical and chemical companies and the like, 12 hospitals or clinics, and 3 penal institutions. He wrote that "I am providing your Committee with all of the names on a classified basis," and that he had "a legal obligation under the Privacy Act not to publicly disclose the names of the individual researchers without their consent."⁹

The printed record of the joint hearing, held before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, contains the exchange that followed. Senator Edward M. Kennedy said he hoped Turner would "notify the universities and then also indicate to the public." Turner replied that he was "only interested in doing it in a way that when identifying a university it will not lead to the public disclosure of the individuals," and that "Many of them were witting, and therefore they can take all those precautionary steps on their own." He said he would "phone several university presidents today who are my friends and who are not involved in this, and ask them what they think the equities would be."¹⁰ Earlier in the same exchange Turner said: "I have already notified one institution because the involvement was so extensive that I thought they really needed to protect themselves."¹⁰

A letter from General Counsel Anthony A. Lapham, which Everett's reply dates to August 12, 1977, told him that the agency had "located several thousand hitherto undiscovered documents relating to activities funded by the CIA as a part of Project MKULTRA." It stated that "Your institution is included among the institutions at which some portion of this CIA-sponsored research appears to have been performed or with which one or more individuals performing some aspect of this research were affiliated." Lapham wrote that the agency was consulting the United States Department of Justice and that "Our present understanding is that we are not at liberty to disclose this information" about the individuals involved.¹¹ The letter cites the Church Committee report, Book I, pages 385 to 422.¹¹

Everett replied on August 16, 1977: "Your letter of August 12th came as quite a shock to me." He wrote that "I have talked with the relevant people here who should have known about any such activity in this institution and they know nothing about the matter." He added: "Of course, over the years there have been different people in these positions and some have left and others have died."¹² On August 23 the agency's Office of General Counsel acknowledged a letter of August 18 and said the materials were being processed for release.¹³

The agency's copies of the subproject files reached the school on September 7, 1977, with a letter signed by A. R. Cinquegrana of the Office of General Counsel. It enclosed "copies of all available documents which relate to Subprojects 134 and 137 of Project MKULTRA and involve the School in these activities," and stated that "the name of the School has been reinserted wherever it appears in the original documents." The names of all other institutions, all individuals and CIA employees remained deleted.¹⁴

The school's own statement on the matter survives in the folder as an undated typed draft with typewriter strikeovers; it opens by saying the school was notified of being one of "more than 80 American universities" with CIA-sponsored research. It states that the school "was notified ... by the Central Intelligence Agency in August, 1977," that it "chose not to notify either its own members or the public of its involvement pending its receipt of additional information from the CIA," and that it "demands that the CIA immediately release to the public all information in its files on these covert projects."¹⁵ The draft says that the documents received on September 7 describe two subprojects at the school "in the year 1962," one completing "a lexicon of terms dealing with handwriting psychology and psychopathology of handwriting" and the other "the possible relationship between an individual's physique (or body type) and personality," and that "an effort was made by the CIA to hide its sponsorship from this university, and in at least one case, from a researcher working on one of the projects."¹⁵ It adds that the school was "now in the process of searching our records in an effort to uncover such facts."¹⁵

On November 7, 1977, Lapham wrote again. He noted that "many institutions chose to take advantage of" the offer of documents and "chose further to make public" them, and asked whether the school had disclosed the correspondence and whether it believed its identity should continue to be protected. He wrote that "Where an institution has itself made public these relationships, there would seem to be little point in our continued refusal to confirm these facts."¹⁶ On March 17, 1978, Assistant General Counsel A. R. Cinquegrana wrote, referring to the General Counsel's November 7 letter, that "to date we have received no response from your institution," and that if the school had not responded by April 15, 1978, "we shall presume that you do not wish the identity of your institution to be disclosed and will continue to protect it insofar as possible."¹⁷ The letter is stamped received by the Office of the President on March 22, 1978.¹⁷

The New York Times reported on October 9, 1977, that the Senate Health Subcommittee had invited the presidents of 20 institutions to testify on September 20 and 21. Only one accepted, and that president was not scheduled to testify because the others had declined.¹⁸ The same article reports that "each of those institutions has been notified separately by the C.I.A.," and that the list of the 80 institutions given to Senate investigators remained classified.¹⁸

Subprojects 134 and 137

The CIA release of the two subproject files names no investigator. The copy the agency sent to the school carries a red insertion of the school's name on two memoranda. On the draft memorandum dated May 29, 1961, for Subproject 134 (page image 134-12), the red insertion "New School for Social Research" stands in the first paragraph, which names the researcher only as "Mr." with the name blacked out.¹⁹ The memorandum states that the purpose is "to support the research studies of Mr." and that the study's relevance lies "in its potential contribution to clandestine indirect assessment, i.e., without the subject's awareness." It records that earlier work by a redacted doctor "and his associates" had "developed some promising but inexact relationships between body type and temperament," that a second redacted doctor "has agreed to consult with Mr." on "design and statistical analysis," that a by-product of the research "will provide Dr." [redacted] "additional data which will be useful in advancing his own research program (MKULTRA, Subproject 77)," and that the estimated cost is $22,000 for one year. Paragraph 5 reads "Mr." [redacted] "is neither cleared nor witting of true Sponsor." The status page for the subproject lists the contractor, a redacted name, "as a grantee of the" redacted body.¹⁹²⁰

The June 9, 1961 recommendation for funding Subproject 134 at $22,000 states that funding "is recommended, despite the superficiality of the proposal and the questionable products which have issued from previous research," and that three redacted doctors "can strengthen the research accomplished through monitorship and close guidance." It adds: "We would like to get someone of better stature working in the area, but this appears to be the best we can accomplish at the moment," and that the work "fits into our indirect assessment requirement and will contribute to the Wechsler-Bellevue work in which Dr." [redacted] "is engaging."²¹

The proposal letter in the same release, covering September 1, 1961 to August 31, 1962, describes a study in "constitutional psychology" relating anthropometric dimensions to temperament, perception and intelligence. Its pilot project used fifty adult male Protestant theological students and ministers who had been photographed and somatotyped by William H. Sheldon or his assistants. The author writes that he looks forward to devoting his full attention to the project "as soon as my present contract expires at the end of June" and that a redacted doctor has agreed to act as his consultant; the letter proposes to use factor analyses of the Wechsler scales by David R. Saunders, and the reviewer's comments on the pilot report recommend that a redacted person with "considerable work in somatotypy" be consulted.²⁰

On the memorandum for the record of August 24, 1961, for Subproject 137 (page image 137-10), the red insertions "New School for Social Research" and "New York City" stand in the blacked-out line that gives the institution of the investigator, a woman described as "Dr." [redacted] "in completing a psycholexicon on handwriting." The memorandum states that she "has an international reputation for her work in graphology and speech," that "She is advanced in years and her health is failing," that her manuscript was "now eighty percent complete," and that she was "neither cleared nor witting of Agency sponsorship." The cost is put at not more than $2,000.²²

The release's accounting pages for Subproject 137 record a February 1963 memorandum stating that the investigator "died in 1962 and did not send in an accounting," that the file held "a letter from her brother stating that the manuscript is almost finished," and that "The Fund will receive its usual acknowledgement in the publication of the manuscript." A certification form, unsigned and undated in the release, states that the recipient "died in 1962 without rendering an accounting" and that "a manuscript has been published and value received." The accounting by individual for the $2,000 advance of September 11, 1961 carries the approving signature "Sidney Gottlieb, DC/TSD" and the date March 10, 1964.²³

The Subproject 137 investigator is Klara G. Roman. The New School insertion, the graphology lexicon, the death in 1962 and the failing health in 1961 correspond to her record, as do the entries in the curriculum vitae attached to the proposal: a 1928 diploma, the 1930 construction of the "Graphodyne," an instrument "to measure writing speed and pressure," and a 1948 research appointment to an Institute for Psychosomatic and Psychiatric Research and Training "in conjunction with" an Institute for Psychoanalysis, which corresponds to the Chicago work that her 1954 preface credits to Michael Reese Hospital and Franz Alexander. The Human Ecology Fund's 1963 report, as tabulated by David H. Price, lists $2,000 to "Roman, Klara G." for "Book: The Psychology of Writing." The release redacts her name.²⁴²⁵

The same table lists a grant titled "Physique and psychological functioning," investigator Frank Haronian, psychology, $39,000; it is the only entry whose title concerns physique.²⁵ The Subproject 134 proposal concerns physique and psychological functioning, and its funds passed to a grantee of a redacted body. Haronian later published "Body type and sophistication of body concept" with A. Arthur Sugerman in the Journal of Personality (September 1964), and articles in Pastoral Psychology and the Journal of Religion and Health, the same field as the clergy subjects of the pilot study.²⁶ That paper states that the study "was partly supported by a grant to Frank Haronian from the Human Ecology Fund."³¹ The Subproject 134 investigator is Haronian. The release redacts his name, and the $39,000 of the Fund's table differs from the $22,000 of the subproject. The consultant whom the 134 memorandum ties to Subproject 77 is the investigator of that subproject, a study of the factor structure of the Wechsler scales.²⁷

The Everett Records

The John R. Everett records at the New School cover 17.3 cubic feet in 15 boxes, dated 1918 to 1979, with most of the material from 1941 to 1979.⁶ Series 1 contains files on activities outside the school, including board service at Park College, the New Lincoln School, National Training Laboratories Institute, and Union Theological Seminary (1968 to 1978), as well as a consultancy to the United States Department of State on administrative matters and a National Aeronautics and Space Administration panel.⁶ Series 2 holds the records of the school's centers and schools, including the Center for New York City Affairs (1965 to 1979), the Graduate Faculty (1941 to 1979), the New School Art Center, New School College and Parsons School of Design (1967 to 1980).⁶ Series 3, the subject files, contains folders on the Board of Trustees, fund raising, the faculty, the Rockefeller Foundation, several accounting firms, and the CIA folder.⁶

The finding aid notes that some files are restricted and that the collection includes records of the presidents before Everett, Hans Simons, Henry David and Robert MacIver.⁴ A second collection of Everett's papers, documenting his work at Hollins, City University, Britannica and the New School, was donated to Columbia University in 2002 by his second wife, Elsie Leivesley Howard, and transferred to the New School in 2018.³

Death

In May 1982 the trustees, under chairman Dorothy H. Hirshon, elected Jonathan F. Fanton, vice president for planning at the University of Chicago, to succeed Everett, who was retiring; Fanton was to take office on September 1, 1982.³⁰

Everett died of pancreatic cancer at Cabrini Medical Center in Manhattan on January 21, 1992, at age 73. He lived in Manhattan and Pawling, New York.¹²²⁹ His obituary records that the City University chancellorship had been created three years before it was offered to him, at a salary of $25,000 a year, that he resigned it in 1962 for what he called "overwhelmingly personal and financial" reasons, and that during his New School presidency enrollment grew from 8,000 to 30,000 students.²⁹ After his retirement a scholarship was established in his name at Hollins, which the university continued to offer in the twenty-first century.¹ The New School holds a file titled "John R. Everett Memorial," dated April 6, 1992, in the Office of the President's Laserfiche files.²⁸