Andrew Hess, who teaches a course on Afghanistan at Tufts University, is one of the nation's top specialists on a suddenly crucial part of the world. Since the United States started its Afghan campaign - and began getting criticism for its lack of expertise in Central Asia - Hess has waited for the government to tap his knowledge. 

He's still waiting.

This fall Hess has taken calls from newspaper reporters and television stations - but hasn't received one call from US intelligence. He says he's baffled.

''I'm the only person with a program at the graduate level in the United States that deals with southwest Asia,'' he said.

Since Sept. 11, the CIA has made clear that it is eager for recruits familiar with the Middle East and Central Asia, especially those who can speak Arabic, Dari, or Pashto. And applications have shot through the stratosphere, many from recent college graduates.

But the deeper knowledge of the area and language lies not with students but with professors like Hess. And when it comes to academics, many intelligence watchers say that contact with the CIA largely remains limited to those scholars who have well-established credentials as insiders.

''If there is an increased liaison with the academic world, I haven't seen evidence of it,'' said Arthur Hulnick, a Boston University international relations professor who worked as an analyst at the CIA for 28 years before joining the academy.

It wasn't always so. In its early days, what is sometimes called the ''cloak and gown'' relationship was often a tight one. Indeed, in the 1950s, the Center for International Studies at MIT was secretly funded by the CIA - one of many university research institutions underwritten by intelligence and the US military.

But then came the 1960s, where America's growing involvement in Vietnam - both covert and overt - began to drive a wedge between university communities and government policy makers. In the years that followed, an increasingly liberal professoriat found the CIA's Cold War practices increasingly tough to swallow.

''Academe started to turn against the CIA when it got involved in assassination plots and the overthrow of governments,'' said Loch Johnson, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia who has written several books on intelligence.

At Harvard in the mid-1980s, international relations professors Richard Betts and Samuel Huntington and Middle East specialist Nadav Safran were caught up in a national scandal after a series of Harvard Crimson articles revealed that the CIA had provided them with funding for various academic endeavors. The incidents eventually resulted in a speech at Harvard by Robert Gates, then deputy director of the agency. Gates said the CIA would continue to seek academic aid, but would encourage scholarly disclosure of such ties.

With the end of the Cold War, it looked as though at least some of this baggage might be forgotten. And now that Sept. 11 has put patriotism back on the map, the political climate seems particularly conducive to better spy-scholar relations.

''I think that the obvious common interest serves to bridge or erode some, although not all of the differences,'' said Robert Jervis, a professor of political science at Columbia University who has consulted with the CIA on numerous occasions.

Already there are indications that professors may be newly inclined to offer help to the CIA. Harvard's Joseph Nye, dean of the Kennedy School of Government and former chair of the CIA's National Intelligence Council, met recently with a faculty member who said he ''definitely wanted to try'' to help out the intelligence community after the Sept. 11 attacks. (Nye declined to name this professor.)

Yet serious obstacles to cloak and gown collaboration remain on both sides. BU's Hulnick cites inadequate outreach to professors on the part of the intelligence community. Until the mid-1990s, he said, ''the agency used to have a full-time academic coordinator that spent a lot of time in touch with the academic community, and that job vanished in the process of downsizing.''

According to CIA spokesman Tom Crispell, the responsibility for academic outreach now resides with ''individual agency components,'' such as the Near East or South Asia offices within the CIA's directorate of intelligence.

But Columbia's Jervis, for one, argues that individual intelligence analysts have been given little incentive to reach out to university-based scholars. ''They're shy - they're afraid they're going to get rebuffed. They're not rewarded for it, and so they don't do it,'' he said.

Steven Aftergood, an intelligence specialist with the Federation of American Scientists, also places much of the burden on the agency for making and sustaining academic relations. The simple fact, says Aftergood, is that the CIA remains ''culturally averse to uncleared outsiders.''

Meanwhile, on the academic side, Sept. 11 hasn't quite changed everything. Some old prejudices can die hard. Jefferson Adams, a professor of history at Sarah Lawrence College, heads the intelligence studies section of the International Studies Association, a scholarly umbrella group that serves as one key setting for interchanges with the CIA. He says that on his own campus - a ''reasonably typical liberal arts institution'' - he still detects ''enormous suspicion about the agency.''

In a kind of ironic repetition of the generational rift created by Vietnam, Adams observes that students may be coming around, but ''very few faculty are willing to rethink some of these issues.''

Certainly Houchang Chehabi, an international relations professor at BU, would never work with the CIA. ''It would reflect very badly on me if I cooperated with an agency that has a very bad reputation in the Third World,'' he said. Chehabi, an Iranian citizen, said that were he to help the CIA, he would ''never be able to do research in Iran any more.''

Still, there have been some notable recent collaborations between scholars and intelligence. The CIA's National Intelligence Council, which is responsible for national intelligence estimates, prepares many of its publications in collaboration with academics and think tanks.

The Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha has longstanding ties with Washington policymakers and collaborates regularly with intelligence. ''We're at war,'' said center director Thomas Gouttierre. ''I'm an American, and the American government is leading this war. If we have some knowledge or analysis that could be of advantage, we should be forthcoming.''

Harvard, too, has seen some modest signs of increased collaboration since Sept. 11. According to Thomas Mullins, associate director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, his organization's expertise on Islamic finance has been sought by the US intelligence community - ''as in, like, the CIA.''

However, Mullins cites this example of outreach as the exception, rather than the rule.

''I can't say it's a red-hot interest'' on the CIA's part, he said.

And when it comes to professors at the Middle Eastern studies center, he said, ''I know there are some people here who have worked closely with the intelligence people over a long period of time - and others who wouldn't give them the time of day.''