EDITORIAL: Georgetown Disclosure Policy Leaves Adjunct Bias Unchecked
The views expressed herein represent the views of a majority of the members of the Caravel’s Editorial Board and are not reflective of the position of any individual member, the newsroom staff, or Georgetown University.
May 2, 2020: This piece won the 3rd place Bunn Award for Journalistic Excellence in the Commentary category.
An oil field in Azerbaijan. (Martin Lopatka/Flickr)
This is the second installment in a two-part series on foreign influence.
Last week, the Editorial Board wrote about how foreign autocrats pull the strings of the U.S. government by lavishing money on morally bankrupt lobbying and PR agencies. But, there is an equally insidious system of influence at work on U.S. college campuses. Aided by scattered and selectively applied disclosure policies, even professors at Georgetown are able to hide their distasteful ties.
Georgetown University’s Dr. Brenda Shaffer has in the past been involved with improving Azerbaijan’s public image in the U.S. Shaffer, an adjunct professor in the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies (CEREES) and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center, is referenced in the 2013 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filing of DCI Group, at that time a registered agent of Azerbaijan. The filing discloses that the PR agency’s staff “introduced” her to the media in December 2012 and met with her in February 2013 “to discuss possible future writings on Azerbaijan issues.” It is unclear whether Shaffer’s public writings on Azerbaijan were directly influenced by this meeting.
In September 2014, the New York Times published an Editor’s Note at the end of an op-ed by Shaffer on Azerbaijan, writing that she “did not disclose [her role as] an adviser to Azerbaijan’s state-run oil company. Like other Op-Ed contributors, the writer... signed a contract obliging her to disclose conflicts of interest, actual or potential. Had editors been aware of her ties to the company, they would have insisted on disclosure.” The article advocates increased U.S. involvement in the South Caucasus and positions Azerbaijan as a natural partner in efforts to counter Russian influence.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a U.S. government-funded news agency, reports that the New York Times published its Editor’s Note after being shown a photo of Shaffer’s business card, which identified her as “Advisor to the President of SOCAR [the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan] for Strategic Affairs.” At that time, a SOCAR spokesman denied to RFE/RL that Shaffer had ever worked there.
While Shaffer’s Georgetown University bio page does mention past work “as an advisor to the Government of Israel’s Zemach Committee for natural gas policy and Israel’s Ministry of Energy and Water,” it does not reference any connection to Azerbaijan or SOCAR. Azerbaijan’s government is a notorious human rights violator.
In a January 2015 New Republic opinion piece, Casey Michel described an interaction with Shaffer at a public event at Columbia University. He asked if Congress was aware of Shaffer’s relationship with SOCAR when she testified before a commission hearing in which “she spoke glowingly of [Azerbaijan’s] role as an American partner.” Shaffer responded with, “If I asked you, Casey, OK, what’s your wife’s name, what school do you go to, who funds your scholarship right now, where do you work, how do you pay your meals, how do—what’s your cholesterol count—there’s nothing to be ashamed of in any of those answers.”
Shaffer declined through a spokesperson to comment on the record for this piece.
Shaffer is not the only Georgetown professor with suspect ties to foreign countries. The Hoya reported in January that Molly McKew, a newly hired adjunct professor in the SFS, has a history of foreign lobbying. Another Georgetown professor critical of McKew said, “the claims she makes are outlandish, escalationist, and rooted in a history of working for foreign governments with an interest in influencing public debate in the United States.”
Georgetown’s published Financial Conflicts of Interest Policy requires that “All faculty… complete and submit a disclosure form upon their employment by the University.” It also requires faculty to submit an updated form “at any point at which their most recent disclosure becomes incomplete or inaccurate.”
A Georgetown University spokesperson told the Caravel, “Georgetown’s financial conflicts of interest policy applies to all full-time Georgetown employees—faculty, administration and staff. Adjunct faculty members, who are normally part-time and selected to teach because of their outside employment or talents, interests and experiences, have a more limited engagement with the University and are generally not subject to the policy’s disclosure requirements. The policy covers all financial conflicts including those created by a University employee’s foreign interests.”
“6. The term “FACULTY” as used in the Policy includes all full-time faculty members, part-time faculty members, and visiting faculty members.”
This explanation does not match the policy published on Georgetown’s website. In the appendix to the policy, “faculty” is clearly defined as “all full-time faculty members, part-time faculty members, and visiting faculty members.” Shaffer’s biographical information page identifies her as “a visiting researcher” and “adjunct professor.”
In addition, Georgetown’s insistence that adjunct faculty are “selected to teach because of their outside employment or talents” ignores that such “outside employment” is usually publicly disclosed—and framed as a selling point of the class. Students take classes with adjunct faculty with the aim of learning from their experience; for example, they pick a class with a former business executive knowing that the professor’s views will be informed by his or her past work.
Students piece together their own worldviews based, in part, on the information they learn in their classes. Students who take classes with an adjunct professor whose ties to industry or a foreign government are clearly known can make their own determinations about how far to trust their professor’s views. Students who take classes unaware that their professor has ties to industry or a foreign government do not know to be skeptical of the views to which they are being exposed.
Even if Georgetown was following its own disclosure policy to the letter, the policy does not mandate public disclosure of conflicts of interest as a matter of course. A Georgetown spokesperson said, “Disclosures made under the conflict of interest policy are confidential.” (Public disclosure is listed in the policy as one option on a menu of “appropriate restrictions and limitations” to be imposed if a conflict is discovered.)
Georgetown should improve its conflict of interest disclosure policy and apply it equally to all faculty. Students should know when their professors have conflicts that could bias their teaching. Failing to require public disclosure for adjuncts fails students.
The conflicts of interest policy’s final clause says, “The Policy shall be interpreted and applied in a manner that best advances its goals and purposes and best serves the interests of the University.” It is convenient for Georgetown that it has decided its best interest is to keep its students ignorant.
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