Gaddafi’s money talks especially to academics

WHEN the old moralists assembled their galleries of vices and virtues - personified, so that the flatterer simpers, the jealous man squints and the man of ambition speaks too loudly and too well - they often depicted vanity and avarice as walking hand in hand. What, after all, stands as a better testament to our true value in this world of deceptive appearances than the solid practical favours others shower upon us in their devotion?

And how better to buttress our vaulting yet too-fragile sense of self-worth than with the tender consolations of the purse? In 2007 the London School of Economics confirmed a doctorate of philosophy upon one Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi, for a worthy and high-minded thesis on The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance Institutions.

The author's name may sound familiar. This is indeed the same ingratiating young man - still clad in the upper-crust English undergraduate's garb of candy-striped shirt and soft cashmere sweater - who greeted us on our television screens last week, speaking of his family's iron determination to retain power down to the last litre of Libyan blood.

Gaddafi himself seems to enjoy the paradoxes of his situation. Called upon to give an honoured lecture at the LSE - to which he donated £150,000 around the time his thesis was submitted, in addition to the £2.5 million gifted by his family for various worthy purposes - he noted mischievously that Libya was the most democratic country on earth.

"In theory!" he added, "in theory!" - to the good-natured amusement of his audience. The thesis penned under Gaddafi's name makes for a wearisome read. Mostly it is a craven homage to the doctrines of its supervisor and adviser, professors David Held of the LSE and Joseph Nye of Harvard respectively, recited in the sing-song manner of a vicar in a BBC murder-mystery.

Even the thesis's actual author - whoever that may be, since so far we know only of individuals who refused the commission to write it - seems to have tired of their own wordsmithery, since no fewer than 18 passages are allegedly copied from elsewhere.  Along the way, the thesis acknowledges the assistance of the Massachusetts-based Monitor Group, which conducted a survey on "the role of NGOs [non-government organisations] in global governance", based on the author's own research design.

Thanks to the exiled Libyan opposition group National Conference of the Libyan Opposition - a group which to the best of my knowledge receives no research funding of any kind - we know something about the Monitor Group's connections with the Gaddafi family. "Libya," as a leaked document from the firm observes, "has suffered from a deficit of positive public relations and adequate contact with a wide range of opinion-leaders and contemporary thinkers. This program aims to redress the balance in Libya's favour."

To that end the Monitor Group facilitated the payment of generous consultancy fees, and the provisioning of study trips, for many of the West's most celebrated intellectual figures, sourced from all points of the political compass including, as it happens, Held and Nye.  The one thread linking the recipients was that most held personal chairs at one or other of the Monitor Group's preferred academic institutions, Harvard and the LSE.

On his return from one of these Libyan vacations, the LSE's Anthony Giddens penned an article for the British weekly the New Statesman, describing in poetical terms his meeting with Muammar Gaddafi in his famous Tripolitan tent, lying like a prophet's cave on the mysterious fringe of the Libyan desert.

Gaddafi was conversant with Giddens's theory of the third way, and described his own political philosophy as moving in the same direction. "You usually get half an hour when meeting a political leader. My conversation with Gaddafi lasts for more than three. Gaddafi is relaxed and enjoys intellectual conversation. We sit close together and occasionally sip mint tea."

A year later it was Nye's turn. In the US weekly The New Republic he wrote of his own three-hour conversation with Libya's President on the desert's edge, where they drank tea while the horses, camels and goats grazed around.

"We sat in plastic chairs by a table on which five of my books were spread."

The colonel had clearly read Nye's celebrated pop-philosophy treatise on soft power closely, for he described how his own thinking was moving in the same direction.

There can scarcely be another profession where theory and practice are so distantly connected, or where the temptations towards petty corruption are so pervasive, as the modern academy.

Everybody knows the vocation of the scholar is to seek truth; yet successful scholarly books are concocted with an eye to the fickle book market, where endless self-reinvention is the most urgent necessity.

Every scholar has, in their mind's eye, an image of themselves as a stern partisan of authenticity and originality; yet each one, in practice, acts the faithful mendicant to some dead French philosopher, whose time-withered ideas they treat with the instinctual reverence of a medieval monk.

Academic conferences are conceived of as veritable assemblies of the republic of letters; and yet the most successful ones are hosted in exotic, sun-drenched locations. Grant monies are obtained to pursue pure knowledge down to its iciest depths, and yet everybody worth their salt has already established what the grant is supposed to be proving, while nobody in their right mind would countenance the possibility that a well-devised hypothesis could ever be disproven by its results.

Who knows: perhaps this extraordinary disparity between self-image and reality, between lofty world philosophies and habits of daily life that bear no conceivable relation to them, might have something to do with the incapacity of our academy to provide honourable examples to the intellectuals of developing countries, for whom the vocation of truth and the pursuit of intellectual honesty are sometimes matters of life and death.

And so from Tripoli to Cairo to Beijing, we have left it for journalists, philologists, literary critics and taxi-drivers to take on the mantle of intellectual for themselves, and to deliver in reality the kinds of brave thoughts that we deliver only in our dreams.