Recent events in Libya have James S. Henry, in Forbes, returning to the question of high-profile, Gaddafi-enriched American professors acting as flacks – not only before the rebellion broke out but, for some of them, during it – for that regime. Henry charges that in exchange for large amounts of money from respectability-seeking Gaddafi, a group of amoral technocrats from some of our best universities used their respectable university affiliations to confer legitimacy upon a brutal dictator.

At the very least, some of these people muddied the distinction between consulting for the regime on things like best economic practices, and burnishing – air-brushing, in Henry’s word – its image. The Monitor Group, for instance, failed to register as what they were — lobbyists. They did so retroactively, under pressure from an outraged American public.

Using the symbolic power of the university to enrich yourself financially by conferring some of that symbolic power on others is an old game, and UD talks on this blog about the game’s many forms. UCLA makes a Milkin brother’s past all better by naming a business law institute after him in exchange for tens of millions of his ill-gotten goods. Yeshiva might have had its suspicions about the strange, remarkably lucrative relationship between Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, but it took their money and conferred not only intellectual but religious respectability upon both of them by making them trustees. Vastly wealthy, vastly shady insider traders are being air-brushed as we speak. Several of them sit on university boards of trustees. They are hoping against hope that the Justice Department doesn’t do to them what it’s been doing to so many others. So are the universities harboring them because of their money.

The symbolic power of the university also confers goodness and seriousness upon corrupt athletes, coaches, and administrators. Amateurism, student athletes, a healthy body as well as a healthy mind, teamwork — pick your cliché. The extent to which large numbers of people continue to buy into these conceits – given the endemic filth of big-time university sports – is a measure of how powerful the symbolic power of the university continues to be.

The more impressive and famous the university – think Harvard – the more highly sought-after by wealthy miscreants trying to smell like a rose. But obviously what’s starting to happen is that the miscreants are transferring their stink to the university itself.

The university has always existed in a dirty seductive world. The reason people still refer to universities as ivory towers is that they are — or they’re supposed to be. They can’t be centers of serious legitimate thought – thought unbiased by powerful outside interests – if they’re always scurrying down the tower steps and closing this deal and then that deal to write what people on the outside with money and power want them to write.

The symbolic power of the university derives from its refusal to do this, its devotion to the pursuit of reasonably unvarnished, uncorrupted truth.

This is why conflict of interest and ghostwriting and all of that are such crucial subjects of this blog. When a colleague of UD‘s fails to disclose that a commercial interest – a business wanting to promote certain points of view about, say, the real estate market – has paid him for what he has written, we are rightly scandalized. When university professors let corporations ghostwrite their articles — to which these professors attach their names — we are rightly scandalized. The big dirty world is always knocking at the ivory tower doors offering money in exchange for legitimacy. It gets in a lot, too.

Politicians like Rick Perry help things along by ridiculing – as so many ordinary Americans routinely do – the whole “ivory tower” concept. Come down from your arrogant holier than thou bullshit and join the rest of us! What makes you special?

What makes the university special? If it continues selling off its definitive, much-sought-after asset, nothing at all.