Petraeus is Coming to CUNY. Just “like the invasion of Iraq.”

In case you were wondering about this

David H. Petraeus, who resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency last November after having an extramarital affair with his biographer, will serve as a visiting professor at the City University of New York next academic year, the university announced on Tuesday.

Mr. Petraeus, who will be the next visiting professor of public policy at the university’s Macaulay Honors College, had been approached by many universities, but settled on CUNY because he admires its diversity of students, locations and offerings, his lawyer, Robert Barnett, said in an interview.

Buzzfeed reports this (h/t Michael Busch):

There is a quiet and conventional path from shame to redemption for American political figures brought down by personal sins, and David Petraeus has, just six months after resigning as director of the CIA, followed it with his signature focus on strategy and on his own image.

“The rollout is devised like the invasion of Iraq,” said one person who spoke recently to Petraeus.

But people around Petraeus say he’s been thinking hard about how to manage his comeback, his image, and his new role outside the national security apparatus in which he’s been a key player for a decade, and in which he’s spent his entire adult life. Petraeus has always been famous both for his intelligence and for his ability to manage the press, and he has signaled that he has thought hard about his predicament.

8 Comments

  1. Gaurav Khanna April 29, 2013 at 12:50 am | #

    CUNY should make sure they only give him one email account 🙂

  2. wahoofive April 29, 2013 at 1:16 am | #

    Shock and awe?

  3. jasdye April 29, 2013 at 7:15 am | #

    Students, prepare to be liberated from your petty idealism.

    Also, I’m sure he’s going to get the same fee for teaching that adjunct professors get. amirite?

  4. Chris Harlos April 29, 2013 at 8:34 am | #

    Yeah, I’d say image management was his forte. When you look at his record, he’s not that brilliant…bloody awful actually. But in a culture that values fraud over all, Patreus is a very tall dwarf.

  5. Glenn April 29, 2013 at 11:12 pm | #

    How will–or will not– CUNY deal with Petraeus’s plagiarism issues in his masterwork Counterinsurgency Field Manual, U.S Army Field Manual 3-24?

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