H/T to reader Ron.
The mud-slinging and back stabbing at the University of Utah’s Middle East Center is less than edifying and continues unabated. Charges and counter-charges include plagiarism, cronyism, sexual harassment, insubordination and even contributing to a student’s suicide. It begins to seem like a B-grade movie with bad actors and a melodramatic script. An Arab- Iranian feud – with under-currents of Shia-Sunni rivalry – being played out in Utah!! And the roots of the feuding go back some 1500 years to the very rapid Arab conquest of Persia in 644 AD. Ever since there has been a feeling of Persian “shame” at not resisting the takeover very strongly and is the root cause of the Persian disdain for Arab culture and influence which continues today. Just to complicate the picture there is much back-biting and intrigue within the Arabists themselves.
The Salt Lake Tribune now reports that officials at University of California, Los Angeles said on Thursday that
..they can find no record of awarding a degree beyond a master’s to Ibrahim Karawan, who led the Middle East Center until 2008, when he was succeeded by Bahman Bakhtiari.
That would seem to support allegations by Bakhtiari, recently terminated for plagiarism, that Karawan does not hold a doctorate and never was qualified to be a professor, sign off graduate students’ work and seek federal grants. In a lawsuit filed Sept. 2, Bakhtiari alleges a colleague concealed Karawan’s “academic fraud” for at least two decades and orchestrated Bakhtiari’s firing by inciting graduate students to drum up evidence of plagiarism and then publicize what they found.
Bakhtiari is now using the confusion over Karawan’s academic status in his legal fight with former colleagues whom he blames for his expulsion from his tenured faculty appointment. Bakhtiari, whose name also appears in print as “Baktiari,” claims he is guilty of little more than sloppiness with attribution, while alleging Karawan perpetrated a fraud on the university, its students and the federal government, which awarded grants to the MEC on the basis of Karawan’s doctorate.
“The University’s failure to take any action against a proclaimed professor who did not hold the mandatory credentials and, for nearly 25 years, signed his name to graduate degrees and solicitations for public monies through the United States Department of Education as one holding those credentials in violation not only of university policy but also federal law, while conversely seeking the academic death penalty for me based on minimal allegations, is discriminatory at best,” Bakhtiari wrote in an Aug. 17 e-mail to the Tribune.
Bakhtiari’s suit targets history professor Peter Sluglett, who was the center’s director from 1994 until 2000, when Karawan took the reins, as well as several “John Does.” Sluglett, who left this week for a year in Singapore, had a leadership position on the center’s executive committee and worked closely with Karawan over the years. Administrators’ abrupt dismissal of Sluglett and another scholar from the center is what precipitated Karawan’s resignation as director in 2008, setting the stage for Bakhtiari’s hiring from the University of Maine. Sluglett later was reinstated at the center and resumed a central role in its management.
The principal cast of villains consist of Bakhtiari (of Iranian origin – fired as Director), Karawan (an Arab, a former Director and currently acting Director) and Sluglett ( an Arabist, former Director and now in Singapore for a year).
Cast of villains at the Mid-East Center: Bakhtiari-Kerawan-Sluglett
There is a large supporting cast of actors of students and faculty consisting among others of university interim President, Lorris Betz, and humanities dean Robert Newman.
But this appears to be a movie where the entire cast are bad-guys and there is no hero in sight!
The k2p blog 