Welcome back to the podcast, Bribes, Swindler, Steel. I'm Alexandra Rogge. Today we're talking about the use of

universities to launder reputations. My guest is John Heather Shaw. He's a co-author of the

Working Paper, Reputation Laundering in the University Sector of Open Societies.

It's a project of the National Endowment for Democracy's International Forum for Democratic Studies.

John is a professor of politics at the University of Exeter, where his research addresses conflict,

security, and development in global politics. John, thank you for joining me. Thank you,

Alexandra. It's a pleasure to be with you. Can you maybe just start by discussing your report?

And, you know, it outlines three ways that foreign money in academic settings can contribute to,

or I guess, bolster reputation laundering. Can you walk us through those three mechanisms?

We're also interested in domestic actors who do this, and that's an important issue. I think we've

chosen to focus on foreign money and foreign reputation laundering, partly because we're scholars

of international relations, and that's just real interest and importance to us.

And it's less studied.

I think there's less transparency around it for issues around how difficult it can be to

assess sources of funding from overseas.

And it's often taking place where individuals from places where there is little or no academic

freedom are funding universities in places where there is. And no academic freedom are funding universities in places

where there is, and that causes certain kinds of problems. So we pick out three areas,

three types of mechanism really where reputations are laundered. I think two of them are strictly

reputational laundering areas, and the third one is a little bit more transactional. So the first

is that of endowments and gifts, often for particular programs or for chairs. For example,

in Middle East studies, there's an awful lot of funding both in the UK and the US, and it's the

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