By PAUL A. RAHE [Chronicle of Higher Education] – What would it take to elicit servility from an intellectual? Money would help, of course. Just ask the Harvard professors who founded the Monitor Group—which for a time shilled for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in return for a quarter of a million dollars a month. And query the administration at the London School of Economics, recipient of a £1.5-million pledge from a foundation run by Seif, the tyrant’s notably generous, charming, and debonair son and presumed heir, who earned a Ph.D. at the school with a dissertation alleged by some to have been at least partly plagiarized (LSE is investigating those allegations).

But money is certainly not the only coin in which the modern intellectual likes to be paid. There is, after all, nothing quite like celebrity, and proximity to power can easily become for an intellectual in search of renown what a candle is for a moth. If, as they say, power corrupts, then lack of power corrupts absolutely….

Of course, there is nothing intrinsically dishonorable in the offering of advice upon invitation. One can always hope—though one should not expect—that one might thereby do some good. Public flattery is, however, another matter.

If, in The Washington Post, one were to describe the elder Qaddafi as “a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat,” if one were to call him “flexible and pragmatic,” if one were to go on to suggest that “Libya under Qaddafi has embarked on a journey that could make it the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without overt Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government and, in time, to an indigenous mixed constitution favoring direct democracy locally and efficient government centrally,” one would be apt—and with good reason—to be compared with Leni Riefenstahl, as Benjamin Barber was by Ken Silverstein at Harper’s Magazine.

Continued at The Chronicle of Higher Education | More Chronicle & Notices.