Should Academics Take Bribes?
Occasionally journalists do something right: The faculty of the Columbia journalism school voted overwhelmingly not to let a professor accept a trip to Saudi Arabia largely paid for by the kingdom's state-owned oil company, according to the New York Sun.
The vote over whether to take the trip was a slam-dunk—unanimous, as it should have been.
But not everyone at Columbia was so ethical.
The dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, Lisa Anderson, did go on the trip. Anderson subsequently sat on Columbia's five-member committee abjudicating the matter of alleged anti-Israeli professors in Columbia's Middle Eastern studies department. As the Sun puts it, "The five member committee for the most part cleared the professors, and its report was criticized by some as a whitewash."
I don't know whether Anderson's trip had any influence on her committee work, but it certainly doesn't look good, and she shouldn't have taken it.
I'm pretty tough on a lot of journalists on this blog, and sometimes I forget to mention that one of the things I like about journalism is that we journalists at least think about such matters, even if we sometimes drop the ball. (Don't get me started about travel writers, entertainment writers, and so on.)
In so many facets of American professional life, a trip like this wouldn't even prompt a raised eyebrow.
I'd be very curious to learn more about junkets in the academic world. Did anyone from Harvard go on this trip, for example? And did it have any connection to the $20 million that Harvard just received from a Saudi prince to pursue Middle Eastern studies?
As we journalists know, there's a fine line between a donation and a bribe....
