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] …
… is featured in this PBS report about big-time university sports. (Click on the video.)
Thanks, Dirk, for the link.
Oh yeah? What’s so special about ‘academia’? What’s the word refer to at all?
Millions of people scattered over America, in front of their computers, clicking on to a distance-ed course?
That’s what academia is – or is quickly becoming – in the United States. How is that activity taintable?
Or do you have in mind the opposite of this, the high-end of academia? UD‘s friend Janine Wedel calls this group of people the shadow elite. (Laura Rozen elaborates on the idea: “[T]here are people who are transparent [about] working for paid interest and [then] there are people who have reputations as being scholars at universities. It’s not clear that they are being funded perhaps by a consulting firm that is getting paid by [for instance] the Libyan government.”)
Academia is professors like Andrei Shleifer and Benjamin Barber and oodles of others, who span the globe to enrich themselves. What’s taintable about that?
Or maybe you mean our sports programs.
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(UD thanks Dirk for the sports link.)
After this season’s big snows, after the big winds, the Scottish lanes of Garrett Park, Maryland (all of its streets have names taken from locations in Sir Walter Scott novels) were strewn with leaves and limbs. Up and down my street, Rokeby Avenue, thick branches from the town’s lowering oaks and maples lay in piles fashioned by walkers who kicked things aside as they walked.
The whole town of Garrett Park is an arboretum. We’re known for enormously high old trees that mass so closely it’s sometimes hard to see the sky at all. If you want to catch a meteor shower or a lunar eclipse or a rare northern lights show, you’ve got to sidle out of the town’s embrace.
During the evening of the thundersnow, I stood at my front door and heard the woody chorus of the town trees creaking, cracking, and then letting fall their old arms. I heard the stalwart firs and beeches begin to fail, piece by piece, under the weight of snow. Some of the branches fell into my front yard, breaking off from their trunks with a shower of loosened snow, then drifting to the ground in a cloud.
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By the time the weather cleared, my small house, surrounded by about an acre of land, looked like a lumberyard. Some logs from the last tree we had removed (trees are always encroaching on our house, or on the above-ground wires in front of it) still lay scattered in the woods, waiting to burn in our fireplace. They’ve been there long enough to spawn giant puffballs.
There was the routine limbfall as well, the almost-daily drop of twigs and branches onto our back deck and down the stretch of backyard and woods. And now another layer of – call it ground canopy – established itself: bits of hollies, sharp and palm-like; long, just-budding dogwood offshoots; beautiful soft viburnum outgrowth with glossy green-gray leaves; dull thin hollow honeysuckle sticks.
There were immovably heavy black limbs mottled with olive starbusts. They showed, where they’d broken off, the wood’s pale yellow heart. Some had hollows for owls and squirrels, and sub branches that looked like deer antlers. On foggy days and nights, this elaborate fallenness everywhere lent an air of lassitude, a sort of cosmic letting go, to the small world of my town.
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But now there was the business of breaking up the wood and dragging it into the little forest next to our property. This wasn’t my daily routine of walking the dog about the place and bending every now and then to pick up a twig. For this I’d need the hatchet I’d inherited from my mother, a serious gardener and thirty-year resident of the town (I grew up in Garrett Park). I’d need the green tight-fitting garden gloves I’d bought to protect my hands from the prickly bushes edging our house. I’d need a bit of upper body strength.
The deer who live at the top of our hill watched as I hurled hatcheted pieces of timber into the woods. When I stopped to stretch, I marveled at the sky: wild traceries of limbs, all of them still shivering in the wind.
I made note of the most fragile among them, the dead ones ready to topple in the next storm. When I tired of hauling trees into the woods, I simply made piles of the branches. They got higher and higher, until they looked like platforms for a saint’s immolation.
The piles are still out there; very slowly, I’m digging out from the woodstorm.
“Don’t toss them all away!” said my friend Karyna to me the other night. She said she’s always wanted to try wood sculpting. “I’m coming over to see your beautiful wood.”
… which has the lowest graduation rate – 5% – of any university in the country, new settles in for some more good news: In cahoots with an Information Technology specialist on campus, one of its mechanical engineering professors stole $150,000 from the place.
Truly a bad week for German academia, with Baron zu Googleberg biting the dust, and now Professor Joachim Boldt, current holder of the world retraction record.
Why did he make up all of those studies? Why did he forge the names of his supposed co-authors?
He had financial interests in the plasma expander at issue.
… has, in the wake of the Libya scandal, resigned. I’ll get some links in a moment.
Here you go. It’s actually got a tiny bit of good news in it. The LSE has – had – at least one faculty member in this game with integrity.
The Financial Times [has] obtained fresh details about opposition from one of the university’s experts on the Middle East to the LSE’s acceptance of £300,000 in donations from a charity run by Seif al-Islam Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator’s son and an alumnus of the university.
Fred Halliday, an emeritus professor of international relations who died last year, wrote to the LSE council in late 2009 to say that Libya had made “no significant progress in protecting the rights of citizens, or migrant workers and refugees, and remains a country run by a secretive, erratic and corrupt elite”.
Pretty much knew it would happen, but still… How wonderful. The grotesque Karin Calvo-Goller has lost her libel case over a negative book review.
I’m about to send a congratulatory email to Joseph Weiler.
The whole case was sickening. France needs to revisit its libel laws.
Background here. (Note that I was wrong. She didn’t drop the case. She kept at it and will now, one hopes, both pay Weiler’s legal expenses and suffer the derision she deserves.)
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Update: Indeed. In response to my congratulatory email, Professor Weiler sent me an account of the proceedings. The French court speaks:
[Complainant] has abused her right to bring legal proceedings, on the one hand by initiating an action for defamation in relation to words that do not go beyond the limits of academic criticism, an essential element of academic freedom and freedom of expression and, on the other hand, by artificially bringing proceedings through the French criminal justice system.”
Considering the resulting harm suffered by the accused, he will be justly compensated by judgment against the Complainant requiring her to pay to him the sum of €8,000.” [about US$ 11,000]
UD thanks Professor Weiler.
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Sing it.