Is it true that US professors were employed by the US government to spy on other nations (or other political purposes) during the Cold War? I was rereading my copy of Bitter Fruit by Stephen Kinzer and I knew that universities were often employed to do development projects under the Agency of International Development.
Were universities players in a larger political game to roll back Communism?
I don't know if this is what you are looking for, but Anthony Blunt was very famously both a Soviet spy in the UK during the Cold War and probably one of the most famous scholars of Renaissance and Baroque art in his lifetime-one of his books, Artistic Theory in Italy 1450-1600 is still routinely assigned in survey classes on Renaissance art.