whole story, told in great detail– including thumbnail history of Porter and Monitor–worth a look. Warsh is polymath and muckracker and has a PhD in economics, plus deep knowledge of Harvard scandals.
David Warsh: Harvard star prof’s sleazy deals with Gadhafi
01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, March 31, 2011
http://is.gd/67UNBd
We now know that Gadhafi’s son bribed his way into his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics; that Monitor Group had been paid to help him write his dissertation there (much of which apparently turns out to have been plagiarized, anyway); that the Libyan government was paying Monitor $250,000 a month for its services; that, according to The New York Times, Libya’s sovereign-wealth fund today owns a portion of Pearson PLC, the conglomerate that publishes the Financial Times and The Economist; that the whole deal quietly fell apart two years later.
, , , ,In a statement last week, Monitor wrote that “just a few years ago many saw a period of promise in Libya.” That was certainly true in Cambridge. What dissenting Libyans in Tripoli witnessed was a parade of well-paid visitors flattering their half-mad dictator, and a squad of Harvard-connected consultants bent on creating a “National Security Organization” for the government, designed to augment the existing security apparatus with a new corps of MBA-trained personnel officers.
I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for Porter to give some evidence of contrition about his mission to Tripoli. Sir Howard Davies may have resigned as director of the LSE (“The short point is that I am responsible for the school’s reputation and that has suffered”), but being a Harvard professor apparently means never having to say you’re sorry.
David Warsh, a former writer for The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and The Boston Globe, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com
Read the full article: Warsh’s J’accuse against HBS Prof Porter