I Was a Professor at the Horribly Corrupt American University of Iraq... Until the Neocons Fired Me

[kpete]

I Was a Professor at the Horribly Corrupt American University of Iraq... Until the Neocons Fired Me
Horror stories from the graft-ridden American University of Iraq campus in Kurdistan.
October 8, 2010 |


The hero of this story is the $100 bill -- or rather, the wad of $100 bills. My first meeting with those lovely $100 bills came at the end of my interview for a job teaching English at the American University of Iraq Sulaimaniya (AUIS). At the end of the interview, the Chancellor, Joshua Mitchell asked me what my travel expenses had been and pulled out a wad of $100 bills. He peeled off 11 of them -- the cost of my ticket -- and slapped them down on the table, snarling, “There, that’s how I do business!”

..................

Any scruples I might have had about joining the occupation vanished with the last of our cash. My wife Katherine and I had been truly poor in the preceding three years -- homeless, begging at food banks, the whole deal. I even published some helpful hints in AlterNet for those experiencing real poverty for the first time.

We went to Iraq to make money, not because we believed the neocon talk about training Iraq’s future leaders in the great ideals of the West.

And once we got to know our colleagues at AUIS, we found that nearly all the faculty was there for the same reason. Oh, they knew the talking points -- democracy, Great Books, transforming an authoritarian culture -- but they were in Iraq to make money. Well, to make money and to drink. In fact, when the talk got boozy, as it almost always did at faculty gatherings, the nonsense about bringing democracy disappeared and people started talking openly about SUVs and houses in the country.

MUCH more:
http://www.alternet.org/world/148443/i_was_a_professor_at_the_horribly_corrupt_american_university_of_iraq..._until_the_neocons_fired_me/

[rocktivity]

1. Well, don't just sit there

As they say in the academic world, publish or perish!

:headbang:
rocktivity

[Recursion]

2. Ugh. Agresto

His association with my alma mater pisses me off.

[mistertrickster]

3. So . . . why hasn't Obama's state dept. or whoever is running this thing, canned these a-holes? nt