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] …
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…
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.
BBC:
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.
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.