Saif Gaddafi’s examiner, the renowned economist Lord Desai, says that he had earned the PhD, and that the LSE had been right to accept his donation.
His only regret, Lord Desai said on Thursday, was that Saif Gaddafi had failed to learn enough about democracy.
Busy, important people, like Germany’s defense minister and Muammar Gaddafi’s son, often have their dissertations written for them. We know this. Perfectly respectable universities, like the London School of Economics, sign off on these things because they hope to get money from the dissertation writer. Perfectly respectable professors, like David Held and Benjamin Barber, approve and promote the scholarship of people like Saif al-Islam Qaddafi because these professors like the image of themselves as kingmakers. It is hard to read Barber’s recent keening over the fact that “Oxford University Press, which contracted to publish the two extraordinary books Saif wrote on civil society and democratic reform in the developing world, will presumably now cancel publication” without laughing.
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From Mother Jones:
On his [dissertation’s] acknowledgments page, Saif noted that his thesis was made possible, in part, due to the assistance of a “number of experts…especially Professor Joseph Nye” of Harvard. One of the godfathers of the international relations theories of neoliberalism and soft power, Nye read portions of the paper and provided “advice and direction.” Probably not coincidentally, Nye twice visited Libya in 2007 and 2008 as a paid consultant for the Monitor Group, a Boston-based consulting firm then working for the Qaddafi government. He tells Mother Jones that he read one chapter of the dissertation and “found it intelligent.” After the 2007 trip, Nye wrote an essay for The New Republic, extolling Qaddafi’s efforts to clean up his image.
… In The New Republic piece, Nye noted that he had visited Libya “at the invitation of the Monitor Group.” He did not disclose that he had been there as a paid consultant for this firm — a relationship he acknowledged in an email to Mother Jones. That means The New Republic published an article sympathetic to Qaddafi written by a notable academic on the payroll of a company hired by Qaddafi to boost his standing in the United States.
… [The Monitor Group] helped [Saif] conduct research for his dissertation — raising the possibility that this thesis was another component of the Monitor Group’s makeover campaign for the Qaddafi regime. The consulting firm pocketed $3 million a year for its pro-Qaddafi endeavors.
Extraordinary.
… really calls it on Libya:
… Written off not long ago as an implacable despot, Gaddafi is a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat. Unlike almost any other Arab ruler, he has exhibited an extraordinary capacity to rethink his country’s role in a changed and changing world.
… Surprisingly flexible and pragmatic, Gaddafi was once an ardent socialist who now acknowledges private property and capital as sometimes appropriate elements in developing societies. Once an opponent of representative central government, he is wrestling with the need to delegate substantial authority to competent public officials if Libya is to join the global system.
Libya under Gaddafi has embarked on a journey that could make it the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without overt Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government and, in time, to an indigenous mixed constitution favoring direct democracy locally and efficient government centrally.
Benjamin Barber, Washington Post, August 2007.
Some commentary at the time. (The writer quotes Marc Lynch, a colleague of UD‘s at George Washington University.)
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In October 2008, Barber called Gaddafi “a poet of democracy.”
And teaching, even now, he said, is what keeps him going.
“Your illness and your aches and pains fall away,” he said. “There’s something happening in that space between you and students that’s magical, that’s mystical, that’s profound and it just sucks you in completely.”
A professor struggling through chemotherapy talks about teaching.
UD, who has been teaching for twenty-five years, will free associate a bit here, in response to these intriguing words:
something happening in that space between you and students that’s magical, that’s mystical, that’s profound and it just sucks you in completely
I’ve had classes in which the students so charmed me – their collective magical force so charmed me, day after day – that I worried I wouldn’t be able to grade them with any rigor at all. These groups were usually sophomores and juniors, whatever that means. Maybe there’s a sweet spot in the lives of university students — not too young, not too old… past the traumas of freshman year and not yet at the what-do-I-do-next traumas of senior year…
They were funny, ironic, and not yet hip. They were smart. They were emotional about things. Not vehement; sensitively responsive. I watched them take in my absurdities as well as my passions and become genially receptive to both.
So yes, I was sucked in. But am I willing to go as far as mystical?
Maybe. An interviewer asked Norman Maclean about his religion, and he said:
I suppose that in any conventional sense I’m a religious agnostic. There are things that make me feel a lot better. I find them in the woods, and in wonderful people. I suppose they’re my religion.
I feel I have company about me when I’m alone in the woods. I feel they’re beautiful. They’re a kind of religion to me. My dearest friends are also beautiful. My wife was an infinitely beautiful thing. I certainly feel there are men and women whom I have known and still know who are really above what one could think was humanly possible. They and the mountains are what for me ‘passeth human understanding.’
When does a very deep humanism become mystical? Maybe by definition it shouldn’t; it shouldn’t go there. But there’s no denying what this professor has noticed: something occasionally happens in the space between you and students. The space is sometimes charged – electrified – with a special sort of human exchange, even ‘above what one could think was humanly possible.’
For me it has to do not merely with those charm school sessions, in which I’m moved and gratified by the energy and inquiry and, hell, love of students (I’m thinking here of a moment just after I’d finished a class recently. I was ill with bronchitis – struggling through the session to keep my voice – and as I gathered my books and notes after class one student — I don’t know which one, because I had my head down, and a lot of students were passing behind me — one student simply put his or her hand on my arm and squeezed it gently.); it also has to do with rebellion. Or call it something milder – restiveness.
Youthful restiveness; the condition, among some of my students, of a somewhat belligerent, show-me, thing. They regard me with the narrowed eyes of outrageous skepticism as I prance around with my interpretations. Oh yeah? They lift their jean-clad legs onto their chairs, hug them closely, and glare at me. Says who?
They laugh with cynical disdain!
I do not like this laugh.
Or yes, I do like this laugh. I want them to be at odds, pissed off, picking away at things. I want them to have that congested personal / philosophical nihilistic thing going, because, yes, to take another of Professor Monte Bute’s words, there’s something profound about feeling as though you’ve been admitted into the thing they’ve got going. Something you’ve said about a poem or a story has coaxed a person’s inner life into a public space of discourse, and now you’re privileged to watch as – over time – that inner life clarifies and maybe begins to transform itself, as a result of its encounter with texts and people who’ve already experienced something similar and turned it into art and philosophy.
How John List decided to become a professor.
A Korean voice professor is accused of assaulting her students, demanding money from them, etc.
The case ignited when the school began an inside investigation last week upon requests from her former pupils. Her students also claimed that Kim, who has about 100 concerts and events a year, manipulated the register to cover up her absence at classes.
In the aftermath of a Brandeis student’s suicide, a professor speaks.
[T]hroughout the memorial, many expressed their exasperation at the senselessness of [Kat] Sommers’ death.
Professor Sabine von Mering … spoke about how Sommers had come to her office hours the previous week to help plan a trip for the class. Von Mering said she was about to read Sommers’ paper for her class when she received the news of her suicide.
“Is it us? Are we making people show us a face?” von Mering asked. “You have to know that the faculty does not expect you to show a face. If you do that, we cannot help you…”
… One of the most painful parts of his illness is its timing. [UCLA Professor of Japanese Michael] Marra is 54, and said he has just begun to give meaningful lectures – when he was in his 20s and 30s, he was still piecing together puzzles in his research.
… He will stay up until 2 or 3 a.m., answering e-mails from students who are studying in Japan. And last week, he started a new project: organizing a book for the 20th anniversary of the Center for Japanese Studies.
Though he hopes to finish out the quarter, Marra told his students at the first class meeting that this might not be possible. He said they were free to drop the course and left the classroom for several minutes. When he came back, everyone was still in their seats.
A Hamline University law professor was convicted this morning of failing to file state tax returns for the years 2004 through 2007.
… [Robin] Magee, of St. Paul, had claimed to investigators that she didn’t have her papers organized and that she didn’t understand tax law, according to the criminal complaint.
But Magee, 47, practiced tax law and criminal law before joining the faculty at Hamline…
She hasn’t taught for two years, but remains a tenured professor there… Drawing a paycheck and all…
Which is an even better gig than the never paying taxes thing, since you can eventually be run aground for failing to pay taxes, but at Hamline they seem to want to hold on to her.
Maybe they can’t find anyone else to teach her very specialized niche.
… West of the Moon.
From Leon Knopoff’s obituary in the LA Times:
He also gained a certain amount of fame from a 1983 report in the journal Nature with astronomer Steven Kilston that tentatively linked earthquakes to an alignment of the sun and moon on opposite sides of the Earth that tugged the opposite sides of faults in opposing directions. That article predicted a quake in November 1987 in California’s Imperial Valley and, in fact, two occurred.
Researchers still do not know what to make of that potential link.
[Princeton music professor Milton] Babbitt, whose father and brother were mathematicians, also taught in the mathematics department at Princeton during World War II. While his mathematical approach was a signature of his own compositions, as a teacher he embraced a wide range of subject matter, focusing on areas such as jazz and popular music, in addition to abstract modern compositions.
The composer Milton Babbitt has died, at 94. Princeton’s long review of his life describes a man of immense intellectual and artistic range.
… with Daniel Bell.
Bell has died, at 91. I’ll have more to say later.
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The Times obit quotes Bell on the distinction between scholar and intellectual:
The scholar has a bounded field of knowledge, a tradition, and seeks to find his place in it, adding to the accumulated, tested knowledge of the past as to a mosaic. The scholar, qua scholar, is less involved with his ‘self.’
The intellectual begins with his experience, his individual perceptions of the world, his privileges and deprivations, and judges the world by these sensibilities.
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Arguing the World is a film about Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, and Irving Kristol.
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From a 2004 interview:
[We’ve seen in the last two centuries] a triumph of the secular ideologies as against religion. [But this triumph] failed too. It failed with the end of communism, it failed with the collapse of Marxism, at least in its Russian and communist form. So that was really the end of ideology. … But I also said in 1960 that this was not the end of all ideology because you’ll always have credal warfare of new kinds, particularly with newly emerging states.
On the end of sociology as a discipline:
… I don’t think society is a system in which you have a single set of variables which control all the relationships of mankind. So if you can’t have a general theory and you can’t have sociology as a system, sociology has to go back to historical grounding. Now it can do very good empirical work and you can try to formalize it with mathematics, fair enough, if you think you can do it. In fact there’s a lot to be said for empirical sociology. But the notion that you can build out of this a general theory seems to me false, so [in that sense] that’s the end of sociology, not as an effort to look at different aspects of society, but to find a general theory.
Modernity, modernism, modernization.
I tried for my part to distinguish three things – modernity, modernism, and modernization. Modernity is an attitude to the world. You can find it in Diogenes, you can find it in the Elizabethan period. It’s an openness to the world, it’s a scepticism, rather than being fixed in certain positional modes. So modernity is not necessarily one element of time or a period but a more general element of human behaviour, or human aspiration… [M]odernism [is] a specific historical movement going back against romanticism … [and] traditionalism. Basically modernism is a certain kind of formalism. We think of the Bauhaus elements of modernism… Modernization is an effort to rationalize the administrative economic systems of the world.
And he was chair. Of Temple University’s opthalmology department.
An alleged alcoholic; and an alleged fraudster.
The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a 144-count indictment against Kubacki for
falsely claiming between 2002 and 2007 to have provided more than $1.5 million in services to patients at a clinic run by the ophthalmology department. The indictment says Kubacki… made notations in the charts of patients, seen by other doctors, indicating that he also had seen and evaluated those patients – when he hadn’t. In some cases, he wasn’t even in town when the patients were seen.
His false statements, the government said, allowed Temple to bill Medicare and other insurance companies for more than $1.5 million.
For Temple, there are questions of repayment as well as questions of responsibility. How long did it maintain a department chair apparently scorned by students because he was drunk? (Patients, of course, didn’t have the option of avoiding him.) Why did it take five years for Temple to notice the Medicare fraud? And why isn’t there a statement somewhere on Temple’s website about all of this? There should be.
Swarthmore’s George Moskos.