… is the title of my just-published post at Inside Higher Education. It’s about intellectuals and the Gaddafis.

… a professor of history at Kansas State, looks into Saif Gaddafi’s London School of Economics PhD:

I spent an hour on google and found big chunks of plagiarized material, evidently not caught by the academics whom Saif thanks in his dissertation: Nancy Cartwright, David Held, Alex Voorhoeve, and Joseph Nye.

Go to his group website, The Russian Front, for details.

London School of Economics professor Lord Desai, on his reaction to one of Saif Gaddafi’s recent speeches:

“I was disappointed … because he was not behaving as if he had had an LSE education.”

Timothy Burke first talks about the London School of Economics, which awarded Gaddafi a PhD:

One of the basic roles of the London School of Economics and some of its most immediate peer institutions in the contemporary global economy is to grant technocratic credentials to the well-connected children of authoritarian functionaries…

What LSE faculty should have seen in Gaddafi’s dissertation is another mode of mimicry, a kind of neoliberal pantomime. It should have reminded them of how little in the end any of the white papers and policy summits and good-governance roadshows do to actually change the regimes which are the most odious examples of bad governance, and how easy it is to tailor a certain kind of earnest social science into some new clothes for the emperor.

He then turns to Saif Gaddafi’s Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, Benjamin Barber:

I can find some sympathy in the case of Saif Gaddafi’s teachers for David Held, but it’s hard to feel the same for Benjamin Barber. Rather than begging for a more reflective, contemplative understanding of the human heart, Barber is doubling down… Saif Gaddafi’s choices have uncloaked some of Barber’s choices, that he’s been acting as an auxiliary member of the regime, a lobbyist, a geopolitical launderer. So he talks of tragedies to come in Libya in order to not have to have an accounting of the mountain of tragedy beneath his own feet.

We’ll see more and more of these professor-confessionals.

For 33 years, I taught classes at the University of Missouri’s main campus in Columbia. Every year, I felt my indignation kick in as students, fellow faculty, administrators, staff, alumni and townspeople with no direct connection to MU seemed to show more concern about the football and basketball teams than about teaching and research.

Tell it!

[B]ig-time athletics damage morale of faculty and staff, who see stratospheric football and basketball coaches’ salaries as everybody else swallows reductions. Athletic programs sometimes increase budget deficits rather than earn money for the campuses.

Yes!

So, I will continue my tiny protest by boycotting MU football and basketball games and occasionally speaking out. Many of my colleagues and friends will make fun of me, as they always have, and I will probably die without seeing even a bit of meaningful reform.

In an editorial, the Sacramento Bee states the obvious truth about tax-siphoning, student-exploiting for-profit schools. The editors agree with the California Student Aid Commission that “the state [should] not give Cal Grants to students at for-profit colleges unless those colleges use some of their profits to provide student aid.”

The commission also called for denying grants to students at schools that fail to graduate sufficient numbers of students and whose students have an unacceptably high rate of default on student loans.

… rank UD‘s town, Garrett Park, third on their list of ten favorite historic districts:

Garrett Park Historic District
Garrett Park, Maryland

As a railroad community, Garrett Park developed over time. Many of its houses—sprawling Victorians—date to the 1890s, while the neighborhood also boasts an array of modest 1920s-era “Chevy Houses,” which came complete with a car in the garage at purchase. We love the eclectic mix of this community, which is also reflected in its neighborhood spirit, evidenced by a sign on prominent display along the main road since the 1980s, boasting “Nuclear Free Zone.” (The train still runs, too—you can hear the whistle echo through the streets.)

On the University of Cincinnati board of trustees sits Stanley Chesley. His term isn’t up until 2018.

Chesley negotiated a settlement of $200 million for 431 people in Boone County, Ky., that were sickened by the diet drug.

Yet almost half of that $200 million settlement went to Chesley and his co-counsels with the lawsuit — William Gallion, Shirley Cunningham, Jr. and Melbourne Mills, Jr. — for lawyer fees. The lawyer fees were approved by former Boone County Circuit Court Judge Joseph Bamberger in a “clandestine meeting” with the attorneys in February 2002 — a meeting that excluded the lawyer’s clients.

From the report recommending Chesley’s disbarment: “The greed evidenced by the plaintiff’s attorneys in this case is astounding.”

But, you know, just a bunch o’ Kentucky hicks; they’ll never figure it out…

The university can’t get rid of Chesley; only the governor can.

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.

From The Daily Telegraph:

… The Gadhafis … ingratiated themselves into the upper echelons of British society, handily aided by Saif’s charm and the sage-like status apparently conferred by his [London School of Economics] doctorate.

… So successful was his adoption of British ways that he was lauded at the LSE by Professor David Held in a speech. It described his former student as: “Someone who looks to democracy, civil society and deep liberal values for the core of his inspiration.”

Now keen to prove that it is not as amorally venal as many suspect, the LSE has announced it will not take more of the $2.3 million pledged by Saif than the $472,800 it has already spent on its weighty purposes.

… [Perhaps] London’s …academic circles might be more fastidious … about consorting with such a grotesque as this ghastly murderous man.

This is a new one on me. Apparently an online Chinese scam operation has copied a number of pages from Reed College’s website, changed each use of the word “Reed” to “Redwood,” and presented itself as the University of Redwood.

Officials at Reed suspect the site is part of a scheme to collect application fees from prospective students in Hong Kong and Asia. After collecting a fee, “a shrewd scammer could wait several weeks, then issue a rejection letter, and the student would never know,” said Martin Ringle, chief technology officer at Reed.

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.

Irish elections today. Votes are now being counted.

Extremely funny article about an extremely sad situation here.

… 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.”