Over at Antiochians.org, a poster says that at reunion “an alumna told me the C.I.A. had engineered the 1973 strike.” The poster doubts this, but many other people have no doubt about it at all.
One thing that keeps this idea out there is the Church Commission report. (A complete copy of it is available here; a searchable text of parts of it is here. )
So far as I can tell, there are only two references to Antioch in the entire text, both of them exactly the same. (In my book that actually makes one reference, but I’m being generous.) They appear in the opening section of Part D of Book II and in Part I.B.2 of Book III in a sentence that reads in part:
New Left targets ranged from the SDS to the InterUniversity Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy, from Antioch College (‘vanguard of the New Left’) to the New Mexico Free University and other ‘alternate’ schools.
So Antioch was just a small part of what interested them. What’s important is what COINTELPRO did at Antioch. Here’s an example of the kind of take-no-prisoners directions the FBI gave its agents:
Consider the use of cartoons, photographs, and anonymous letters which will have the effect of ridiculing the New Left.
(The memorandum that describes the recommended disruption techniques begins here and goes on for the next five pages.)
The Church Committee also notes that COINTELPRO was “officially terminated ‘for security reasons’ on April 27, 1971″; the report then explains that the Committee’s investigation had found only three instances of COINTELPRO activity continuing beyond that date.
So all the report can be said to claim in relation to Antioch is that COINTELPRO, in the late 1960s, applied some disruptive techniques among groups considered to be in the extremely ill-defined category of the New Left and that these techniques were aimed at suppressing First Amendment rights. A damning enough claim, certainly, but not one that in any way suggests that COINTELPRO was behind the strike–which in any case happened about two years after COINTELPRO closed up shop.
Until I see more concrete information to the contrary, I’m considering this bit about the FBI and the ‘73 strike nothing more than a rumor.
