Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Harvard Bashes Paula Broadwell (After Embracing Her)

The Boston Globe reports in on Harvard and the former lover of General Petraeus:
One of Broadwell’s former professors at Harvard described her as a self-promoter who would routinely show up at office hours.

“It was very much, ‘I’m here and you’re going to know I’m here,’ ” said the professor, who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of ongoing investigations. “She was not someone you would think of as a critical thinker. I don’t remember anything about her as a student. I remember her as a personality.”

The professor said when Petraeus chose Broadwell to write his biography, there was shock among the national security faculty at Harvard because “she just didn’t have the background — the academic background, the national security background, or the writing background.”

A second Harvard faculty member who knows Broadwell and Petraeus had similar misgivings.

At one point, Broadwell said she was leaving the doctorate track because she was over­extended and didn’t have time to complete the coursework, recounted the professor, who was not authorized to speak to the press.

Broadwell later complained that the writing project on Petraeus was not going well.

“She was a lot of talk but not a lot of follow-through,” said the second professor, who described Broadwell’s struggle to deliver on the biography as “deeply embarrassing” to the Kennedy School. “That is why she brought on a co-author,” Vernon Loeb, an editor at the Washington Post.
Of course, at the time Broadwell's book All In was on the NYT best seller list, they loved her. BG again:
Nonetheless, Harvard embraced Broadwell as a distinguished alumna after “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus” became a New York Times bestseller this year. On Sept. 10, the Kennedy School included Broadwell on an alumni panel of accomplished public servants and the next day hosted a forum at which she discussed her book.

5 comments:

  1. Academics are among the most lethal backstabbers on the planet. They learn this 'skill' when going for a PhD.

    “She was not someone you would think of as a critical thinker. I don’t remember anything about her as a student. I remember her as a personality.”

    He is amply decribing just about every politician and those that surround them on the planet today. Political (and one might suggest societal advancement) is no longer about brains, creativity, solving problems, honesty, integrity, no quite the opposite.

    The Dregs have taken over positions of power, political, corporate, and let us not leave out academic.



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  2. Thanks for posting and reminding me why I left the cesspool of Boston academia with an MA, never bothering to tell off my "advisor" or fellow "scholars" for being some of the worst people I'd ever met. Cambridge is a gross, incestious little island of pretention and delusion buffered by trust funds and connections. It's a joke really.

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  3. Bob, you are serious economist - why the hell do you bother with this low-life crap like this? It reminds me the BJ scandal around prez. Clinton: US sheeple was so busy discussing the details that bombing of a country in the Europe almost passed unnoticed.

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  4. Shame on both professors unwilling to be named but willing to slander in print.

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  5. Outrage that a student that obviously was accepted to Harvard's program should be bashed by her professor

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