Figure in Petraeus Scandal Seen Losing Her Post as Honorary Consul

HONG KONG - Jill Kelley, the Florida hostess who unwittingly touched off the scandal that led to the resignation of the C.I.A. director David H. Petraeus, is about to be sacked as an honorary consul for South Korea, according to news reports from Seoul.

The Yonhap news agency cited a senior South Korean official as saying that Ms. Kelley, 37, would lose her largely ceremonial title over the scandal. The agency also reported that Kim Kyou-hyun, the deputy foreign minister for political affairs, said that Ms. Kelley had used her position for personal gain.

The South Korean government had not announced a formal revocation of her title by Tuesday afternoon.

Honorary consuls are little more than courtesy appointments, and Seoul reportedly has 15 such positions in the United States. They are paid a token amount, about $2,500 in the case of South Korea.

“Their mission is to help promote Korea-U.S. relations and protect the rights of Korean Americans,” Yonhap wrote, adding that they have “no specific privileges or protections under the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.”

When Ms. Kelley called the Tampa police on Nov. 11 to complain about a trespasser at her home, she mentioned her title and apparently tried to claim the preferential treatment given to official envoys abroad - diplomatic immunity.

“You know, I don't know if by any chance, because I'm an honorary consul general, so I have inviolability, so they should not be able to cross my property,” Ms. Kelley said in her call, as reported by Bloomberg News. “I don't know if you want to get diplomatic protection involved as well.”

A recording of Ms. Kelley's call, which begins at 1:24 of the tape, is here.

A diplomatic official quoted by Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy magazine said Ms. Kelley had helped to rally support for the free trade agreement between Seoul and Washington, and she arranged meetings between American busi ness executives and the South Korean ambassador to the United States.

Ms. Kelley, her husband and her twin sister, Natalie Khawam, held social gatherings and befriended senior military officers at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, the home of U.S. Central Command and the Special Operations Command.

Ms. Kelley has since lost her clearance to visit MacDill without an escort, ABC News reported.

It was not clear whether Ms. Kelley would need new license plates for her silver Mercedes-Benz S500. Her current Florida plates, embossed with “1JK,” identify her as an honorary consul.

The Petraeus scandal came to light after Ms. Kelley contacted the F.B.I. to complain about anonymous e-mails she was receiving, messages that accused her of “inappropriately flirtatious behavior toward Mr. Petraeus,” as The Times has reported.

“The subsequent cyberstalking investigation uncovered an extramarital affair between Mr. Petraeus and Paula Broadwell, his b iographer, who agents determined had sent the anonymous e-mails,” the Times story said.

“It also ensnared Gen. John R. Allen, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, after F.B.I. agents discovered what a law enforcement official said on Wednesday were sexually explicit e-mail exchanges between him and Ms. Kelley.”

Mr. Petraeus, a former four-star general, acknowledged the affair with Ms. Broadwell and resigned as C.I.A. director on Nov. 9.

My colleague Scott Shane reported last week that Ms. Kelley has hired Abbe D. Lowell, the Washington defense lawyer who successfully defended John Edwards against the alleged misuse of campaign funds.

“Mr. Lowell, an acquaintance of Ms. Kelley's from the Washington social scene, immediately brought in Judy Smith, an old hand at scandals in the capital, who promotes herself as ‘America's No. 1 Crisis Management Expert,' ” Scott said.

Ms. Khawam is being represented by the celebrity lawyer Glori a Allred, while Ms. Broadwell has hired Dee Dee Myers, the former Clinton White House press secretary.

Ms. Myers told Scott that her firm, the Glover Park Group, was enlisted by Ms. Broadwell's lawyers to “help Paula and her legal team navigate a crowded media environment, manage incoming requests and ensure that her story is accurately told.”

Mr. Petraeus has hired the noted Washington lawyer Robert B. Barnett. “Though he is perhaps best known for negotiating book megadeals for the Washington elite,” Scott said, “his focus this time is said to be steering Mr. Petraeus's future career, not his literary life.”

Universities Ponder Accounting 101: How to Balance the Books

It's considered an impolite topic in some scholarly circles, where academics would rather talk about resources or funding than say the “m” word. But the reality is that academia needs money to survive. Whatever a school's goals are-giving a chance to poor students, encouraging better teaching, driving great research-someone has to pay.

And on the money front, things aren't looking great in Europe. Cynics might say that last week was typical: European Union budget talks fell apart, and more students protested in London over rising tuition fees.

Christopher F. Schuetze reports on how the financial crisis has hit universities in various European nations - which, despite grand-sounding schemes like the Bologna Process, vary greatly in the way they fund and manage their education systems.

It's no surprise that hard-hit economies like Ireland, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain had significant education cuts. Ireland, in particular, is facing a challenge: A '90s baby boom means there will be more kids heading to university than ever before, and less money to pay for them.

And the situation sounds dire in Italy. “We are running the risk of the collapse of the system,” Marco Mancini, president of the Conference of Italian University Rectors, said about education cuts.

But the cuts are not universal. Surprisingly, nine E.U. nations - including, notably France, Germany and Switzerland - have increased higher education funding these past few years.

Funding may be uneven, but tuition rates for European students are not, which has led to in-fighting over who pays when young people cross borders. As Nina Siegal reports, some Belgians have bristled over Dutch students enrolling in their schools, where annual tuition is a scant "578 - but costs local taxpayers about "10,000 per year per student.

Part of the problem - if you can call it that - is that most Continental Europeans consider affordable higher edu cation a universal right, to be largely funded by the state and shared by all. Their relatively low domestic tuition fees are the envy of foreign students, who are paying many times those rates.

The notable exception is Britain, which raised its tuition cap for local students to £9,000 a year, making it the third-priciest university system in the world, after the United States and South Korea.

That drastic rise may have a chilling effect on the Continent. “If this is what can be done in the U.K., a democracy with one of the top education systems in the world, what will stop governments from doing it elsewhere?” Howard Hotson of the Council for the Defense of British Universities said to me in a phone conversation.

But, as any accounting student will tell you, you have to balance the books. If public coffers are running low, universities have to find other ways to make up the cash. Raising tuition is one way. Canvassing philanthropists and former graduates is another. D.D. Guttenplan writes about the University College London's rather macabre new appeal for alumni donations.

Yet another is to admit more wealthy foreign students, whose tuition is not funded by the state. But if a school admits too many, it may change the broader feel of a campus, dilute quality, and anger local taxpayers who feel that their children's places are being given away.

I once asked a president of an elite U.S. university whether it used foreign students this way. He said that his own institution's admissions were “needs blind,” meaning they were based only on the quality of the candidates, and not on nationality or economic status. That, ideally, is how it should be done everywhere.

But then he leaned over and - off the record, of course - said “I'm not more moral than anyone else; I just have more money. If the school didn't have its huge endowment, I might be standing on the sidewalk waving in foreign students, to o.”

Do you think universities should be government-funded basic services, like roads and hospitals? Or should they be market-driven? If so, will only big-name, elite schools draw moneyed donors and rich students?

Berlin Needs a Security Strategy

BERLIN - Over the past few weeks, German government officials have been trying to come up with a strategy for Russia. I have written recently about Berlin's strained relations with Moscow and refer again to the issue in my latest Letter From Europe.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right coalition has found it difficult to deal with Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin. She dislikes him, which she has made plain during news conferences and a recent podium discussion in Moscow earlier this month.

At one point during the discussion hosted by the Petersburg Dialogue, Ms. Merkel spoke her mind. She clearly had had enough of Mr. Putin's clampdown on the media and intimidation of editors that dare criticize his increasingly autocratic leadership style.

‘‘If I were offended every time I was criticized, I wouldn't last three days as chancellor,'' Ms. Merkel said. That did not elicit any response.

Criticizing Mr. Putin's Russia is one thing. Doing s omething about it is another. And that is Germany's, and Europe's problem.

Because Germany is Russia's biggest trading partner and because Germany is the most important country in the E.U. by virtue of its size and economy, Berlin needs a security strategy. It would explain, among other things, Germany's national interests, the role of its armed forces and the connection between interests and values. Yet Germany has no security strategy or doctrine.

This is very unsettling for Germany's E.U. partners and NATO allies. Neither organization knows where they stand with Germany over basic questions such as strategy, say diplomats. A security strategy would also make clear to Russia where Germany would draw the line.

Thomas de Maizière, Germany's defense minister, who was Ms. Merkel's chief of staff from 2005 to 2009, may now try to fill this vacuum.

In a lengthy guest column last week in the daily Frankfurter Rundschau, Mr. de Maizière said it was high time that Germany had a debate about international security and about the role of the Bundeswehr, Germany's armed forces, in international missions.

‘‘As defense minister I ask myself why we don't discuss German defense and security policy in schools, universities, churches or any other public forums.''

It is not certain he will take this further in the coming months as the countdown to the German federal elections begin in earnest. It means that Europe - and Russia - will have to wait until after September 2013 for Berlin to come up a security doctrine, if indeed it will even do that.

Eighth Sister? In Asia, Campuses for Women

In May, the Asian University for Women is expected to graduate its first class of 138 students, almost all of whom come from deprived backgrounds and rely on scholarships to pay for the $15,000 that room, board and school fees would cost.

In an IHT Female Factor Special Report, Bettina Wassener visited its campus in Chittagong, Bangladesh, a modest complex that has drawn young women from states as diverse as Afghanistan, China, the Palestinian territories and Indonesia. Most would not have had a chance at an English-language university-level education on a multicultural campus. Now, some of these young women are on exchanges as far-flung as Stanford University in the United States and the Institut d'Études Politiques in France.

The A.U.W.'s founder, Kamal Ahmad, is a native of Bangladesh who was educated in the United States; the grant to use the land is from Bangladesh itself. But the majority of the support comes from the West: Cherie Blair, the Bill & Mel inda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the IKEA Foundation and the U.S. State Department. The search for funds is still on as the A.U.W. slowly works toward building a larger campus.

The A.U.W. has inspired a somewhat different project in Malaysia. Kelly Wetherille talks to Barbara Hou, formerly of the Bangladeshi school, who now wants to build an Asian Women's Leadership University. The A.W.L.U., expected to open in 2015, aims to be an Asian version of the Seven Sisters, the grouping of elite U.S. liberal arts colleges for women. Her vision is for a school in a relatively affluent area with the majority of students paying full tuition, and about a quarter on scholarship.

While young women may be achieving equality in the classroom, there is another fight going in the upper echelons of academia, where women compete with men for research positions, professorships and executive posts.

As Liz Gooch reports, more than one-third of the higher educ ation institutions in the Philippines are headed by women. Thailand is also a surprising bright spot in this regard. But they are exceptions. In Asia, only 18 percent of university researchers are women, compared to 29 percent worldwide.

Fanny M. Cheung of the Chinese University of Hong Kong was blunt in her assessment of the social realities that might hold women back. She called the child-bearing years the “golden age” for academics. She also said that, in China in particular, women may hesitate before pursuing a Ph.D. because it might frighten off potential husbands.

“It takes a very confident man to be able to accept a wife who is in a so-called superior position because, by virtue of a higher degree, you will be considered more superior,” she said. “In Asia that is still a fairly strong barrier.”

Didi Kirsten Tatlow attended a training session in Bangkok that turned the issue of women's rights on its head.

Instead of educating women, the session focused on educating men. The idea is that no amount of progress by women- and no number of well-meaning projects- would be enough if men themselves did not change. According to the United Nations' Partners in Prevention, more than half of men interviewed in Bangladesh said they had been violent against women. One in five men in Cambodia admitted to committing rape. The list of reasons - sexual entitlement, alcohol, fun, anger and punishment - were just as alarming as the statistics.

Somsouk Sananikone, an activist in Laos, said that it was important to education young men, in particular, before they engaged in these behaviors.

“We're looking at how every man may become violence, not just those who are already violent,” he said.