Reply #13: What was lost when some of America's finest scholars got paid to buff the Libyan dictator's image?

[pinboy3niner]

Opening Remarks April 6, 2011, 11:01PM EST


The Professors and Qaddafi's Extreme Makeover


What was lost when some of America's finest scholars got paid to buff the Libyan dictator's image?


By Paul M. Barrett


In 2006 and 2007, a dozen Western intellectuals traveled to the North African desert for intimate conversations with the man who likes to call himself the Brother Leader. Muammar Qaddafi received his visitors in a carpeted Bedouin-style tent, where they sat on plastic chairs and sipped tea while discussing the dictator's thoughts on economics and politics.

The meetings were arranged by the Monitor Group, a Cambridge (Mass.) consulting firm co-founded in 1983 by Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School management expert. As Politico first reported on Feb. 21, the Qaddafi regime paid Monitor a fee of $3 million a year, plus expenses, to run what the firm called "a sustained, long-term program to enhance international understanding and appreciation of Libya." Monitor, which has 1,500 employees worldwide, organized roundtables and produced thick studies on stimulating business in the isolated oil state. It provided research for a PhD thesis Qaddafi's son Saif al-Islam submitted to the London School of Economics.


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None of that excuses the use of august academic reputations and affiliations to promote the Qaddafis. Monitor partner Eamonn Kelly said in an e-mail to Bloomberg Businessweek that the firm regrets "our research in support" of Saif Qaddafi's doctoral thesis. "We also regret the proposal submitted to write a book under Colonel Qaddafi's name. Although this work was not completed, the very idea was a mistake." Kelly said he is leading an internal investigation that includes whether Monitor engaged in lobbying without having registered to represent Libya.

What Monitor did is no different from what K Street "public affairs" shops do every day of the week for dubious foreign governments. Still, the Libya episode leaves a distinctive odor, one that emanates from the corruption of academic reputation. Harry Lewis, a computer science professor at Harvard, doesn't like the smell. During a faculty meeting on Apr. 5, he asked the university's president, Drew Faust, "Shouldn't Harvard acknowledge embarrassment, and might you remind us that when we parlay our status as Harvard professors for personal profit, we can hurt both the university and all of its members?" Faust responded that she supports such expressions of concern but also endorses "the wide discretion of all of you in this room … to pursue the directions of academic inquiry you choose, and the outside activities and engagements you choose."


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Barrett is an assistant managing editor at Bloomberg Businessweek.


http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_16/b4224004951872.htm