Ex-NAU president sent suggestive e-mails to university **Hired to rehabilitate Iraq’s universities

[seemslikeadream]

http://wc.arizona.edu/papers/95/62/01_5.html

Thursday November 15, 2001
PHOENIX - A male employee at Northern Arizona University complained that the school's former president made unwanted sexual advances toward him and sent him sexually suggestive e-mails, a newspaper reported yesterday.

Owen Cargol, 50, was president for just four months before resigning Saturday when confronted with the allegations.

The Arizona Board of Regents officially accepted Cargol's resignation Monday and appointed Provost John Haeger as acting president.

The employee's complaint was supported by one or more e-mails containing "vivid" sexual overtures that Cargol sent the man, The Arizona Republic reported, citing sources familiar with the investigation.

Cargol, a married father of two, told the newspaper Tuesday that he had "interactions" with the unnamed employee, but Cargol said they were "misconstrued."


http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/11/iraq
June 11

Not Our Best and Brightest?
The missteps in Iraq are well documented by now.


Library shelves could be lined with books that criticize the poorly constructed endgame, the insufficient troop levels and the disbanding of the Iraqi military. There have, however, been glimmers of promise that have gotten a share of ink as well. Among those success stories is the American University of Iraq, a Western-style institution in the war-torn country’s northern region that promises to “lead the transformation of Iraq into a liberal and democratic society.”

The university’s lofty aspirations, as espoused on its Web site, make the selection of its first chancellor all the more puzzling. Owen Cargol, who took the helm at AU-Iraq in 2007 and resigned in late April of this year, had a checkered past that could have been revealed to university organizers with a simple Google search. The sexual harassment scandal that brought down Cargol at Northern Arizona University in 2001 was well publicized, in all of its explicit detail, but apparently never came to the attention of the U.S. officials who trusted Cargol to help reshape the Middle East.

John Agresto, who was hired by the Coalition Provisional Authority to rehabilitate Iraq’s universities from 2003 to 2004, is now AU-Iraq’s interim chancellor. Asked about the Cargol hire in an e-mail, Agresto distanced the university from its former chief.

....

Young, who says he had a morbid curiosity about where Cargol had ended up, learned of Cargol’s new position after conducting a simple Internet search.

“I was like, I wonder where Owen Cargol has gone to? And I (said) ‘oh my God, he’s in The New York Times,’ “ recalled Young, who stumbled across several glowing stories about American University of Iraq that didn’t mention Cargol’s past.

“This guy resigned in disgrace and almost brought down the university with him, and here he is with a bunch of people I have a lot of respect for,” Young added.

AU-Iraq, housed in the Kurdish-populated city of Sulaimani, is indeed the brainchild of a star-studded cast of scholars and politicians. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is chairman of the Board of Regents; and Barham Salih, Iraq’s deputy prime minister, is president of the Board of Trustees. Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and a counselor to former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, sits on the board. So too does Fouad Ajami, head of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Agresto, the new interim chancellor, brings his own bona fides. As detailed in Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Agresto has close connections to Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne Cheney, with whom Agresto served during a stint at the National Endowment for the Humanities. A self-described neoconservative who was “mugged by reality” in Iraq, Agresto “knew next to nothing about Iraq’s educational system” when he arrived with orders to rebuild it, The Washington Post reported.

How Agresto and his colleagues came to select Cargol to head AU-Iraq is unclear, but Cargol’s decision to reinvent himself as an administrator in the Middle East preceded his work in Iraq. Before he took the chancellor’s post, Cargol was provost of Abu Dhabi University, a private institution in the United Arab Emirates.

Efforts to reach Abu Dhabi officials were unsuccessful.