This Professor Refuses to Disclose Her Work for Autocratic Regimes.
Here's What Happened When I Confronted Her.
By Casey Michel
January 22, 2015
The woman across the table demanded to know my cholesterol count. This was in front of 30 others, during an on-the-record discussion at Columbia University, where the womanan academic named Brenda Shaffer, a political science professor at the University of Haifareplied to my question about her non-disclosures with questions of her own.
If I asked you, Casey, OK, whats your wifes name, what school do you go to, who funds your scholarship right now, where do you work, how do you pay your meals, how dowhats your cholesterol counttheres nothing to be ashamed of in any of those answers, Shaffer said.
My cholesterol. My wifes name. Who paid my tuition, thus allowing me to sit in on the panel discussing Azerbaijans plans for a Southern Gas Corridor to reroute Caspian gas toward European markets. The panel featured Shaffer and Vitaliy Baylarbayov, the deputy vice president from SOCAR, Azerbaijans state-run hydrocarbon company. Shaffer established her assertiveness early. Halfway through the discussion, when the moderator, Jesse McCormick of the Center on Global Energy Policy, referred to Shaffer as a panelist," she stopped him. Moderator, she corrected. The discussion continued, through some confused looks.
Once the floor opened, I raised my hand, interested in the role Tony Blair was playing in lobbying for Azerbaijan's pipeline interests. I was also interested in Shaffers role that dayand why she decided not to disclose her relationship with the Azerbaijani government, time and again, on that panel and in print. A few weeks earlier, Shaffer penned an op-ed in The New York Times claiming that Azerbaijan was the Wests important security partner and that, bizarrely, Russias next land grab would take place in the South Caucasusrather than, say, Moldova or northern Kazakhstan. (This claim presumably would prime the West to offer greater diplomatic support for Azerbaijan in Moscow.) While most analysts scratched their heads at Shaffers reasoning, others focused on why she wrote the article in the first place. As first reported by RFE/RL, her impetus may have come from her role as an adviser for strategic affairs for the president of SOCAR. According to The Harvard Crimson, Shaffer has continued in that position, presenting a distinct, laughable barrier to her claims of objectivity when assessing Eurasian fuel.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120830/brenda-shaffer-refuses-disclose-conflicts-interest-columns