In Spying on Students, Gregg Michel chronicles the federal, state, and local repression of a small but dedicated southern White student movement. His captivating account renders visible the concerted efforts of federal, state, and local policing that attempted to protect the status quo through the surveillance and persecution of White activists, which was part of the broader suppression of a social movements during the 1960s. This important work takes us beyond individual “bad apples” such has the notorious Bull Connor, commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, and interrogates the extremes that organizations and institutions took to suppress student dissent.

Michel’s research uncovers a lot with very little. His accomplishment is a great feat despite the destruction of so many potential sources. Spying on Students requires careful attention to each endnote, as Michel pieces together puzzles from court cases, congressional investigations, and the thin remnants of surveillance and intelligence records that eluded the incinerators. That he could salvage so much evidence from perpetually guarded documents is an achievement difficult to overstate. Reassembled, the sources that remain tell a narrative of the criminalization of student dissent in the context of a jingoistic, anti-union, segregationist status quo. The book records countless examples of a disproportionate response that mistook White students’ participation in civil rights, labor organizing, or anti-war efforts in the South as an un-American “threat” unacceptable to local, state, and federal officials. As Michel convincingly shows, “there is a meaning in the mismatch between threat and response” (p. 15). Taken together, the sources serve as an urgent call to historians of education to pursue further investigations of the era of surreptitious surveillance of students everywhere.

Spying on Students is smartly arranged in the way it sifts downward from the federal level through state and local investigative units that surveilled and suppressed student activism in the South throughout the 1960s. In doing so, Michel helps expose layered and overlapping efforts to interrupt and silence White student protest. The book achieves a careful balance, covering both repression and resistance. It tirelessly documents the ways that authorities—often including university officials, intoxicated by power and paranoia—routinely overstepped the mandate of the law in their attempts to harass student activists. Alternately, the book stresses the dignity and courage of the small number of student activists that resisted. Despite unscrupulous harassment that at times left students exiled from campuses or communities, they remained persistent, succeeding in their quests for greater justice.

In his opening chapter, Michel dispels myths about the FBI as a neutral arbiter of justice in the South. In contrast to the portrayals disseminated in popular films like the 1988 drama Mississippi Burning, the book uncovers the many efforts by the FBI, along with the CIA, to preserve the status quo in the South. Dispelling common notions that these entities served only as garrisons to protect the United States from foreign threats, Michel reveals through undertakings like “Operation CHAOS” how they pursued their domestic suspicions with a vengeance. Other agencies played a similar role: the US Army’s Continental United States Intelligence, Intelligence Command, Military Intelligence Groups, and the Counter-Intelligence Analysis Branch all worked, often without oversight or accountability, to infiltrate and monitor domestic student activism, yielding little evidence of crimes while attempting to conceal any trace of their extensive efforts. Finally, chapter 1 shows the FBI and the New Left section of its COINTELPRO program taking great pains to disrupt White student activism across the South. These endeavors included close collaboration with school officials (pp. 29 and 38) and personal attacks aimed at humiliating student dissenters (p. 55). The power discrepancy between the FBI’s extensive monitoring efforts and, in the case of Oklahoma, only fifteen students across multiple campuses, was significant. Even still, the surveillance yielded no evidence of crimes. The absence of evidence, as Michel tirelessly shows, often only motivated investigators to be even more vigilant.

Chapter 2 surveys various forms of state-level surveillance. Michel highlights perhaps the best-known entity, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (MSSC), as a model of counterinsurgency propagated across the region as a fusion of anti-communism and White supremacy. Michel emphasizes that while efforts like those of the MSSC disproportionately targeted Black activists, they consistently targeted White students as well. The Oklahoma Office of Interagency Coordination (OIC), lesser known than the MSSC, made extensive though amateurish efforts to track thousands of Oklahoman and non-Oklahoman “trouble makers” alike (p. 72). Despite the destruction of records, it is partly through the investigation of OIC’s collaborations with other agencies that Michels is able to expose its covert operations. Similarly, the South Carolina State Enforcement Division (SLED) worked closely with federal and local police to monitor the activities of students like Brett Bursey, whose subsequent legal efforts helped bring SLED’s extralegal undertakings to light (pp. 86–87). Without such stubborn action from the victims of obsessive state scrutiny, it is unlikely that these wrongful investigations would ever have reached the public.

Finally, in chapters 3 and 4, Michel assesses the pains taken by local law enforcement in Memphis and Nashville to subdue any unsettling student activism. Indebted to prominent legal cases and the investigative work of the Kerner Commission, Spying on Students is able to uncover the overreach of local officials and police. In his accounts of the two cities, Michel sheds light on the confrontation between White student activism and the matrix of anxieties about civil rights, anti-war resistance, and labor organizing that unsettled the local order. The account of John Sorace serves as an example. Starting out as a volunteer, Sorace ascended to assistant police chief and then, through an obsession with technology and modernization, to commander of the city’s Intelligence and Security Division. There, he shepherded a spy network targeting Nashville students that received financial and material support from the Law Enforcement and Assistance Administration, established by the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (p. 182). With additional support from the FBI, Sorace was able to aid in the eradication of the Southern Student Organization Committee, using tactics ranging from photographing rallies to illicit harassment (pp. 60 and 185).

In Memphis, the Domestic Intelligence Unit (DIU) worked collaboratively with local university administrators and federal authorities to suppress White student activism, part of a wide-ranging attack that also targeted striking sanitation workers, Black activist groups such as the Invaders, and anti-war groups such as Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). The DIU commanded a host of operations that routinely utilized unlawful methods to amass sizable files on a wide range of dissent, much of it trivial. These expeditions benefited from collaboration from officials at universities like Memphis State University, where routine gatherings brought together campus officials, the DIU, local police, and the FBI to analyze student activism (pp. 144–45). Overzealous collaborators like the vice president of student affairs went as far as to offer to the DIU nearly unrestricted access to student files. The DIU became notorious for its excesses. After a Memphis State student and member of VVAW, Eric Carter, discovered a fellow student and VVAW member was an informant (p. 154), a judge issued a court order forcing the city to cease its political spying programs. Had this revelation and other forms of whistle-blowing not occurred, such unlawful practices might have continued.

The editors of HEQ have recently alluded to the threat of free speech infringement in higher education, highlighting the urgency of a book like Spying on Students.Footnote ¹ In light of the concerns raised over domestic surveillance in the decades since the events of September 11, 2001, Michel’s work is highly relevant. Those concerns have only been heightened by recent cases of excessive police repression and collaboration from higher ed institutions that have subjected administrators, faculty, and students alike to unwarranted suspicion.