University of Pennsylvania Rejects Offer of Grant from Arab Group

The University of Pennsylvania (UP) has rejected the offer of a grant from the Libyan-financed Arab Development Institute (ADI) because it failed to provide safeguards against discrimination, ideological advocacy and the free dissemination of research results. The offer, which included $180,000 in first year funding, was for the development of a curriculum for Middle Eastern history and culture for American high schools and the study of Libyan institutions.

The university was commended by the Philadelphia chapter of the American Jewish Committee for undertaking to develop guidelines to deal with propaganda oriented grants from oil-rich Arab states. The ADI offer was turned down on the basis of interim guidelines drafted last June and now under study by a special university committee for finalization. The issue sparked a sharp, frequently acrimonious debate in the weekly faculty section of the university-published “Almanac.”

According to the AJCommittee, the grant originally was to have been shared by UP and the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz. SUNY withdrew after the proposals became known. The UP Board of Trustees’ Committee on Corporate Responsibilities recommended that a new agreement be negotiated specifying that the university would have control of the project and called for safeguards. It was on the basis of the safeguards that a review committee concluded in August that the ADI proposal “did not satisfy the (interim) guidelines to an adequate degree.”

Specifically, according to the review committee’s chairman, economics professor Irving Kravis, the Libyan government refused to confirm ADI’s verbal assurances that Jewish personnel participating in the projects would be admitted to Libya. The Libyan Embassy in Washington subsequently informed the committee that official Libyan policy is not to issue visas to Jews.

ELEMENTS OF INTERIM GUIDELINES

The interim guidelines against which the proposals were measured called for specific assurances to protect the independence of UP faculty, to avoid any jeopardy to the university commitment to the principles of academic freedom and nondiscrimination, to protect research from parochial or ideological advocacy, to assure the bona fides of students as devoted primarily to academic purposes and meeting normal academic standards, and certification by the deans of the schools involved endorsing both the academic worthiness of the proposal and a judgement that school priorities justify any costs, direct or indirect.

Faculty members were divided over the review committee’s recommendation. English professor Peter Conn wrote in “Almanac” that “accepting the money makes the university willy-nilly and whether we like it or not, partner to the Col. (Muammar Qaddofi) and his effort (to buy international respectability). Given Qaddafi’s status as a self-proclaimed terrorist, overtures of alliance to him from the university raise serious questions.”

But Prof. Ann Mayer, of UP’s Wharton School of Business, wrote, “I myself have had to read thousands of pages of Qaddafi’s oratory in the course of a research project and have nowhere encountered any approbation of terrorism.”

DANGERS OF SUCH PROJECTS CITED

Physics professor Herbert Callen warned that such projects tend to produce a form of “self-imposed censorship to avoid offending the prejudices of the benefactor or the prospective benefactor.” He cited as an example the 1976 Annual Report of UP’s Middle East Center directed by Dr. Thomas Neff, co-author of the ADI proposal with Dr. Frederick Ley, chairman of UP’s Graduate Program in International Relations. Conn wrote: “I am unable to find within it any indication that such a country of Israel exists on the face of the earth….”

Commenting on the debate, Robert A. Fox, chairman of the AJCommittee’s Philadelphia chapter, said: “The university has made a thoughtful contribution to the difficult and sensitive task of dealing with appropriate and inappropriate gifts from oil-rich Arab countries to ensure both academic integrity and non-discrimination.”

Last spring, Swarthmore and Haverford Colleges abandoned a joint plan for Arab studies when it was disclosed that the $590,000 financing came from Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi arms broker implicated in a corporate bribery attempt.