The Professors and Qaddafi's Extreme Makeover

Bloomberg Businessweek reports:

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."

You'll want to read the whole article. We assure you that Benjamin Barber and Joseph Nye wouldn't take money from the Koch brothers or associate with libertarianism but... Qaddafi is acceptable.