Putting the <scp>CIA</scp> on Trial: The Rise and Fall of Anti‐Recruiting Protests in the 1980s

ABSTRACT In the history of the Central America Solidarity movement, there is little more than passing reference to the role played by college students. This omission is in keeping with the dominant narrative around student protest in the Reagan era, which stresses rupture with past forms of activism. According to this account, in the Eighties apathy replaced activism as the dominant mood on campus. Excavating the history of such activism on the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts complicates this narrative, highlighting how CIA recruiting on campus provided students with an issue to rally around that targeted the secretive agency's role in Central American “dirty wars,” as well as the university's own complicity in the carnage. Besides situating anti‐CIA activism in the broader social and political context of the 1980s, this paper also explores how students borrowed from, expanded upon, and sometimes diverged from two key organizing strategies used by their activist forebears: anti‐recruiting protests and political trials.