Brad DeLong first quotes Benjamin Barber calling plagiarism charges against Saif Gaddafi “garbage.” Then he quotes a bunch of plagiarized passages.

One thing you gotta say for holy roller hypocrites like Gordon Gee and Jim Tressel: They inspire really good sports writing.

According to a new study:

… [Of] 29 reviews, or “meta-analyses,” of earlier drug trials — culled from top journals like JAMA and The Lancet — only two reported who had funded the original trials included in the review.

And none of the reviews mentioned whether the authors reporting on those trials had been paid by drugmakers.

… [M]ore than two-thirds of the original drug trials that ended up being included in the 29 reviews were funded by pharmaceutical companies.

Only 318 of the 509 trials reviewed gave the conflict-of-interest information in the first place.

… When the [research] team contacted the reviewers, the majority admitted they hadn’t even looked at the issue.

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.

… on a single football game?”

At least they’ve got a sweetie of a basketball coach.

UD followed, when the story first arose, the heavily indebted University of Central Arkansas president who forged the names of some UCA administrators on a letter to the school’s trustees. The letter told the trustees to give Lu Hardin a big ol’ deferred compensation package now, pronto. The remarkably incurious trustees (All pals of Hardin’s, maybe? Hardin’s a Mike Huckabee protege, by the way.) went ahead and did this. Then some damn newspaper began investigating.

University presidents aren’t supposed to steal from their schools, and Hardin now faces thirty years in prison for wire fraud and money laundering.

The University of Kentucky has so much to be proud of: Its sports program; its stewardship of the state’s arts and letters… And now there’s something else: It’s hired its first invisible professor, a man students and colleagues will almost never see.

Boasting that he represents a world “now digital and global,” this education professor guy (Why should I bother going back to the article to check on his name?) will sit on his ass in Iowa and send emails to UK.

He does worry that he’ll “miss out on some of [UK’s] culture.”

Nah!

What a boon to the UK campus! I trust we’ll all profit from UK’s groundbreaking initiative and let everybody but our football players stay home.

… in trying to get a grip on the London School of Economics/ Benjamin Barber/ Other Academic Friends of Libya controversy, scandal, whatever you want to call it. Start with a university story that has nothing to do with Libya.

Frank Rich recently wrote, in the New York Times:

[Lawrence] Summers [did] consulting work for [a] hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard.

That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution … would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. [Summers was] moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university.

And he was making millions and millions of dollars. At a one day a week job.

He was paid, what, $800,000 or so to be Harvard’s president.

Put aside whether, as Ben Stein suggests, such a beneficiary of Wall Street money could ever, in his government capacity, “crack the whip” against it (“Wall Street knows how to get its hooks into government. This is how the world works. Money talks.”) and ask rather, from the point of view of the university, whether his raking it in while president is seemly.

It’s not unseemly if you regard a university as an institution like any other in a capitalist economy, primarily geared toward generating profits (in its athletic program, in its entrepreneurial scientific work) and generating personal wealth (for consultants to money funds, like Summers, for consultants to wealthy dictatorships and other countries, like Barber, and for university presidents like Shirley Ann Jackson, who sit on corporate boards and earn millions to attend board meetings).

As Barber says, in his defense, “Everyone gets paid.” It’s exactly the same way university presidents defend giving four million dollars a year to football coaches: There’s a market for everything, and everyone gets paid the going rates.

Absolutely none of this is unseemly (I’m not talking, by the way, about the astounding salaries made by presidents of for-profit colleges. These guys are for profit, baby, and you better believe it.) if a university is a corporation with classrooms, run and staffed by people seriously distracted by big money elsewhere. But a lot of people have a nagging feeling that universities are something more. Indeed these people note that our government seems to feel they are something more, since they receive remarkable tax benefits. Some of them are even public institutions (Barber taught at two of these, Rutgers and the University of Maryland), direct recipients of taxpayer dollars. What happens to Americans’ support for non-profit universities when so much that goes on at those places is outrageously profit and personal wealth driven?

The Libya dust-up is only the latest lesson in a gradual education taking place among the American public as to what really goes on in higher ed.

… at the Arena Stage. Along with anything written by Frank Zappa, this play’s script has provided UD with sayings that have enriched her life over decades.

Albee’s stuff comes in handy mainly in domestic situations…

YOU CAN TAKE IT. YOU MARRIED ME FOR IT!

THAT IS A DESPERATELY SICK LIE.

These are for sure my favorites, but there are others.

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] …

… essay by Peter Brooks in the New York Review of Books. But there’s something in his vague, high-minded tone that marks him as floating above the problems he claims to be taking seriously.