‘American University in Iraq’: another Bushist fiasco

The American University of Iraq, which boasts Zal Khalilzad as a Regent and Fouad Ajami as a Trustee, has run into a serious difficulty. Dr Owen Cargol, who was hired as the university chancellor in April 2007 left his post in a hurry (or was terminated?) in late April of this year, after revelations that in 2001 he had to leave the presidency of Northern Arizona University in the wake of a serious sexual harrassment scandal.
The Inside Higher Ed website reported on the AU-Iraq affair yesterday. The report noted that AU-Iraq, which is located in the Kurdish city of Suleimani and boasts many pro-US Iraqi politicians including President Jalal Talabani and vice president Barham Saleh on its board, had received much attention from the NYT and other western MSM outlets as being one of the (very few) admirable and effective parts of the US intervention in Iraq.

IHE noted that risks involved in selecting Cargol as AU-Iraq’s first chancellor,

could have been revealed to university organizers with a simple Google search. The sexual harassment scandal that brought down Cargol at Northern Arizona University in 2001 was well publicized, in all of its explicit detail, but apparently never came to the attention of the U.S. officials who trusted Cargol to help reshape the Middle East.

The IHE report tells us that,

John Agresto, who was hired by the Coalition Provisional Authority to rehabilitate Iraq’s universities from 2003 to 2004, is now AU-Iraq’s interim chancellor…
Agresto… brings his own bona fides. As detailed in [Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book] Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Agresto has close connections to Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne Cheney, with whom Agresto served during a stint at the National Endowment for the Humanities. A self-described neoconservative who was “mugged by reality” in Iraq, Agresto “knew next to nothing about Iraq’s educational system” when he arrived with orders to rebuild it, The Washington Post reported.
How Agresto and his colleagues came to select Cargol to head AU-Iraq is unclear, but Cargol’s decision to reinvent himself as an administrator in the Middle East preceded his work in Iraq. Before he took the chancellor’s post, Cargol was provost of Abu Dhabi University, a private institution in the United Arab Emirates.
Efforts to reach Abu Dhabi officials were unsuccessful.

Attentive JWN readers are doubtless aware that I am on the board of something called the Global Partnership for an International University in Iraq. Our GP-IUI project has been running in low gear for four-plus years, in light of the insecurity situation in Iraq. But it was recently established as a legal entity in Canada, where it is based; and we are pursuing plans for professional development efforts with Iraqi academics who will, we hope, go on to form the core of t IUI’s professional cadre.
Our board is led by a distinguished group of Iraqi, Canadian, US, and European intellectuals, including some recently retired individuals with proven track records in university leadership. We decided to incorporate in Canada for a number of reasons, including to dissociate ourselves clearly and unequivocally from the coercive machinations that the Bush administration has pursued in Iraq. The leaders of the AU-Iraq project evidently decided to take an almost directly different tack. (And see where it got them.)
The problems their project has suffered are disturbing. The entire structure of Iraqi higher education– once the pride of the whole region– is currently in very dire straits indeed; and it will take the focused efforts of scores of thousands of Iraqis (and some supportive outsiders) to restore it to a structure that can truly serve the needs of the country’s 30 million talented and still generally well educated people. US taxpayers have poured at least $10.5 million– perhaps considerably more?– into the AU-Iraq project, which ended up being so poorly served by its board.
The IHE site tells us that Cargol’s resignation from Northern Arizona University,

stemmed from allegations made by a Northern Arizona employee who alleged that Cargol, while naked in a locker room, grabbed the employee’s genitals, the Arizona Republic reported. In a subsequent e-mail to the employee, Cargol described himself as “a rub-your-belly, grab-your-balls, give-you-a-hug, slap-your-back, pull-your-dick, squeeze-your-hand, cheek-your-face, and pat-your-thigh kind of guy.”
Cargol, who at the time was a married father of two children, went on to say that he was a “sensual kind of guy” who hoped the employee could “feel comfortable enough with me (and others) to reciprocate the same level of playfulness and affection,” the newspaper reported.
Cargol’s pressured resignation from Northern Arizona came just four months after he was appointed.

All that information was publicly available when the board hired Cargol in 2007.