The Professors and Qaddafi

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?

Photo Illustration by Maayan Pearl; Foto24/Gallo Images/Getty Images

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.

At one point, the firm proposed a mass-circulation book—for an additional price of $2.45 million—that according to a Monitor memo would "allow the reader to hear Qaddafi elaborate, in his own words and in conversation with renowned international experts, his core ideas on individual freedom, direct democracy vs. representative democracy, [and] the role of state and religion."

The book never materialized, but Monitor succeeded in generating plenty of positive press for Libya. In an interview with Businessweek in February 2007, Porter said Saif Qaddafi had helped arrange Monitor's engagement with Libya. "I have gotten to know Saif quite well," Porter said. "He was a doctoral candidate at the London School of Economics, where he studied with some of the best professors. He's very much oriented toward making Libya a member of the modern world community."

Monitor brought Benjamin R. Barber, then a professor at the University of Maryland, to Libya for three visits. On Aug. 15, 2007, Barber published an opinion article in The Washington Post entitled "Qaddafi's Libya: An Ally for America?" Although "written off not long ago as an implacable despot," Qaddafi "is a complex and adaptive thinker," Barber asserted, "as well as an efficient, if laid-back autocrat." Joseph Nye, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, also met Qaddafi. In December 2007 he published an essay in The New Republic in which he described the ruler of Libya since 1969 as "an autocrat" and a past "sponsor of terrorism," but also a man of ideas, "actively seeking a new strategy" and interested in "direct democracy."

Now that Qaddafi has vowed to hunt down and kill every last dissident in Libya, Monitor's image-buffing campaign has received probing coverage in The Boston Globe and Mother Jones, and the firm has issued an online apologia. "Given the terrible spectacle of Colonel Qaddafi using force on his own people, it may be difficult to imagine that just a few years ago many saw a period of promise in Libya," the firm said on Mar. 24. "Colonel Qaddafi had renounced terror, forfeited nuclear and chemical weapons and programs, and declared himself ready to rejoin the community of nations."

An idea in the abstract may thrill its creator, but an idea that has been tested by reality—and survives intact—can change the world. That's why academics who descend from the ivory tower and subject their theories to the complications of modern life deserve applause. Provided, of course, that their motivations remain pure. Recent history suggests that's a tricky line to walk.

A generation of Ivy League economists was enjoying both professional esteem and financial industry paychecks until the Wall Street crisis of 2008 made them look pretty dumb, if not venal. The Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job offered a bipartisan parade of these men—for example, at Harvard, Larry Summers, a Democrat who opposed more oversight of derivatives, also collected generous speaking fees from investment banks, while Frederic Mishkin, a George W. Bush appointee to the Federal Reserve who teaches at Columbia, was paid to co-author a 2006 report praising the Icelandic financial system, which subsequently collapsed.

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