What do Libyan Prime Minister Abdurrahim el-Keib, Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, and Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti have in common? A lot, it turns out. All three leaders are currently being hailed as sober, apolitical technocrats who can leverage their expertise and international experience to shepherd transitional governments through crises. And where, prey tell, did they learn these skills?
At U.S. universities. El-Keib, shown above, earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1976 and a doctorate in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University in 1984, penning a thesis on the "capacitive compensation planning and operation for primary distribution feeders." El-Keib went on to teach engineering off and on at the University of Alabama for 20 years, and will now replace the University of Pittsburgh-educated Mahmoud Jibril as Libya's interim prime minister.
Papademos, meanwhile, earned an undergraduate degree in physics, a master's in electrical engineering, and a doctorate in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s. The former Bank of Greece and European Central Bank official, who also taught at Columbia and Harvard, succeeds the Amherst-educated George Papandreou. Monti, for his part, studied economics at Yale.
Needless to say, these alma maters are welling up with pride. The Yale Alumni Magazine named Monti, a former European Commissioner, the "Yalie of the week," an honor that admittedly may have been eclipsed by his ascension to Italy's premiership. As for El-Keib, Yannis Yortsos, dean of USC's Viterbi School of Engineering, told the student newspaper, the Daily Trojan, "We are hopeful that the Trojan spirit and values will guide him in the difficult but exciting path of national rebuilding." Ben Redmond, a senior in electrical engineering at North Carolina State, told the school paper, the Technician, that El-Keib's appointment "just goes to show you that N.C. State is continuing to produce world class citizens and major players in global affairs."
That some world leaders attended U.S. colleges and now govern as technocrats may not be all that surprising. After all, the U.S. boasts many of the most prestigious universities in the world, and technocrats, as Kyoto University's Takashi Shiraishi puts it, typically belong to a transnational network "nestled in universities (especially economics departments), international multilateral lending agencies, and government ministries and agencies."
Still, what is surprising is just how many world leaders have attended U.S. universities, how far-flung those colleges are, and how this education has affected their views of the United States. Let's take a look at ten of the most interesting examples -- from Purdue to Penn State and Panama to Palau.
Abdullah Doma/AFP/Getty Images
SUBJECTS:
(18)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE