While teaching a course at NYU law school on corruption, New York’s Waterfront Commissioner, Ronald Goldstock, parked his car illegally.
An enterprising reporter waited by the car – it was there for six hours – until Goldstock returned to it, and asked him why he had done this.
It’s not illegal, he said, pointing to the THIS VEHICLE ON OFFICIAL POLICE BUSINESS placard he’d placed in his car’s front window.
UD likes the sound of this. She likes the idea of designating her teaching hours Official Police Business.
A professor at Utah Valley University cheated – just a little! jumped ahead of the line! – at the golf course, and when called on it by rule-abiding golfer Timothy Deason, got annoyed:
Deason told police Williams hit him on the back of the head with a golf club, breaking the club and knocking Deason to the ground. While he was down, Black [Williams’ golfing buddy] hit Deason in the back with a golf club and Williams stabbed him in the back of his left thigh with the shaft of the broken golf club, the affidavit states.
But hell. UVU put him on leave while he was in jail and all, but now that he’s paid a fine and gone on probation, it’s time to come home!
At the time of the incident Williams was working as a full-time associate professor of aviation at Utah Valley University. [Here’s his way-sketchy faculty page.] He … has since returned to work.
Cheating, and then beating a man bloody when he challenges your right to cheat! If there’s one place this man belongs, it’s back in a classroom.
Dan Drezner writes, on the subject of professors and Libya:
For a scholar, engagement with power should not be automatically rejected, particularly if it means altering policies in a fruitful manner. When the exercise morphs into intellectual kabuki theater, however, then disengagement seems like the best course of action.
Those scholars who stopped participating after it was obvious that Qaddafi wasn’t really interested in genuine change don’t deserve much opprobrium. By that count, [Benjamin] Barber really has a lot to answer for, while some of the others seem to have emerged relatively unscathed.
Yes – the calendar matters. When did people withdraw from involvement? And in the case of Libya, was it ever much more than theater?
But money also matters. Getting paid is fine; getting paid strikingly large sums should raise eyebrows, because it threatens to compromise the consultant’s intellectual integrity.
Finally, conflict of commitment matters. Barber writes:
[This] is about whether academics should stay in the ivory tower and do research and write books[.] Or engage in the world on behalf of the principles and theories their research produces? Do you simply shut your mouth and write? Or do you try to engage?
First, note the way he paints it – There’s the tremulous tight-lipped unengaged ivory tower dweller, and there’s the bold intrepid earth-changing Barber. This is a ridiculous either/or — plenty of academics engage politically in plenty of ways short of writing obsequious op/eds about authoritarians.
And second: How much teaching do professors like Barber do? (Barber no longer teaches, but taught recently at the University of Maryland and at Rutgers.) How often are they even on campus? A certain amount of traveling on behalf of democratic change is fine; but when professors become mainly consultants, when they appear maybe one day a week on campus, something’s terribly wrong.
… Roger Cohen.
There’s a video of Dr. Alia Brahimi of the London School of Economics greeting Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi as “Brother Leader” at the school three months ago, and presenting him with an L.S.E. cap — a tradition, she says, that started when the cap was handed to Nelson Mandela.
It may be possible to sink to greater depths but right now I can’t think how.
Calvo-Goller said yesterday that she had not yet studied the ruling and thus had not yet decided whether to appeal. But she said the complaint was aimed at forcing reviewers to be “more responsible” …
The court’s ruling is aimed at making people like Karin Calvo-Goller more responsible.
She has been ordered to pay compensation to her victim.
[T]he [modern] scholar, the writer, and the artist may not be parasites dependent on aristocratic patrons, but that does not mean they are truly free. The desire for applause tends to inspire servility in anyone subject to it — and it is a short step from flattering one’s public to flattering monsters who wield influence and power.
Paul Rahe weighs in on Benjamin Barber.
While dozens of New England families were remembering lost sons and daughters in the three years leading up to 20th anniversary of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, the Cambridge-based Monitor Group, founded by Harvard professors, was pocketing millions of dollars in consulting contracts from those responsible for the bombing: the Libyan government of Moammar Khadafy. The firm also helped arrange for big-name academics from Harvard and other universities to advise Khadafy in exchange for consulting fees.
… when first we kiss up to Saif.
A fellow contributor to The Nation asks Benjamin Barber about his Libya gig.
When I asked Barber about the Libyan funding for his article, he replied, “I didn’t take money from Qaddafi. The money to Monitor was coming from the Qaddafi Foundation, funded by Saif [Qaddafi’s son], who was providing the impetus for reform.”
But this turns out not to be true. Nothing in the Monitor documents that have been released mention the foundation. The Monitor documents David Corn obtained are all about PR for Qaddafi. And the Guardian obtained other documents showing that Monitor’s PR deal with Libya was submitted to the head of military intelligence for Qaddafi, Abd Allah al-Sanusi — he has been held responsible for atrocities in the present uprising.
Defending his acceptance of Libyan money, Barber also said, “Everyone gets paid. Consultants get paid, and I was paid by Monitor. I’ve been paid by lots of different people – the Department of Education, the state of New Jersey.”
But wait a minute – isn’t there a difference between working for the State of New Jersey and working for the state of Libya, to burnish its image in the eyes of Americans?
Barber went on to say, “The pay isn’t the issue. The issue is what I was doing there: working to build democratic capacity.”
In fact the issue is not what Barber told Libyans about democracy, but rather what he told Americans about Qaddafi.
Barber also pointed out that the US was courting Qaddafi at the time, seeking his help in fighting Al Qaeda and opening Libya to American oil companies. “Nobody criticized Condi Rice for shaking hands with Qaddafi,” Barber told me. “But when somebody goes in saying ‘maybe we can create some democratic capacity,’ they say we were duped in a P.R. scheme to burnish the image of a dictator. I just don’t get it.”
But it’s not that hard to understand: people expect intellectual integrity from Ben Barber, and Tony Giddens and Joe Nye. They expect something different from [a government official] …
He may have seen better days
When he was in his prime
He may have seen better days
Once upon a time.
Tho’ by the wayside he fell
He may yet mend his ways …
Benjamin Barber’s Tripolitan tumble continues.
From The Telegraph:
Col Gaddafi was feted by senior staff at the [London School of Economics] during a meeting conducted via video link just two months ago.
In a video, understood to show a closed doors meeting, the Libyan leader is seen being applauded by members of the LSE staff as he launches into a rambling speech in which he spouts offensive views about Lockerbie.
He also uses the speech to attack former world leaders including Baroness Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
The LSE student who leaked the video said she was disgusted at the way senior college figures had behaved towards Col Gaddafi and his son…
London School of Economics professor Lord Desai, on his reaction to one of Saif Gaddafi’s recent speeches:
“I was disappointed … because he was not behaving as if he had had an LSE education.”
Business Insider:
Former Rep. Bob Livingston (R-LA) severed his firm’s lobbying contract with the Qaddafi-controlled government of Libya in the fall of 2009, after Qaddafi’s son welcomed the individual convicted of bombing Pan Am Flight 103 back to his home country as a conquering hero.
“Saif Qaddafi gave him a really public greeting broadcast around the world to welcome him home as a hero of the state — that was just too much,” Livingston told TPM in a telephone interview.
February 22, 2011: Professor Benjamin Barber resigns from the board of Saif Qaddafi’s foundation.