Afghan Captive’s BU, Harvard Ties Probed

Last Monday, Clark R. Bowers called his wife and told her he had been kidnapped by an Afghan warlord. She immediately alerted the media.

The next day—halfway around the world in Harvard and Boston University’s press offices—the calls started coming in.

Journalists called and called, trying to find out more about this man, Bowers, who has claimed in the past that he was a Harvard professor and a graduate of BU.

Bowers was apparently in Afghanistan on a privately organized humanitarian mission when a local Afghan warlord captured him and his interpreter and held them for ransom, according to the story his wife relayed to her local newspaper in Birmingham, Ala.

The Associated Press picked up the news, two days later an article appeared in the New York Times and the reporters’ calls continued.

But after a week of searching current and past records, Harvard still is unsure whether Bowers ever had a teaching appointment at the University. A BU spokesperson said yesterday that Bowers never finished his dissertation there.

To these universities, Bowers is something of a mystery man.

The 37-year-old Bowers now says, through his wife and his mother, that he has been released. Federal authorities, including the FBI, have said they have no reason to doubt Bowers’ claims, but have not been able to confirm them.

Over the past week, as journalists looked into Bowers’ story of humanitarian work in Afghanistan, they came across biographies Bowers had written that included many claims about his personal and professional life—from having played basketball during his undergraduate years at Pepperdine to having held a Defense Department advisory position. Many of those details subsequently didn’t check out, and other proved difficult to confirm, including his Harvard and BU connections.

Eventually the reporters found out that Bowers had attended both institutions at the same time. From 1993 to 1996 he was a special student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and from 1993 to 1998 he was a doctoral candidate at BU, spokespersons at both institutions confirmed yesterday.

But the reporters also found that the universities were either unwilling to reveal more details or unable to confirm basic facts about Bowers’ affiliations.

Several newspaper reporters, including a Birmingham News writer and an Associated Press correspondent have telephoned the Harvard News Office—and each one called back four to eight times—trying to confirm Bowers’ affiliations with Harvard, said University spokesperson Rebecca Rollins.

Rollins said she and the press office librarian have spent several hours each day for the last week fielding calls and checking on Bowers’ Harvard ties with administrators and other public information officials within the University.

Bowers’ student status was easily confirmed with the registrar, she said, but even now the University is still not ready to rule out the possibility that Bowers at one time was a visiting fellow or a professor.

“It’s not as simple as you’d think. But the more telephone calls we make and the more people we talk with and the more people who come up with a blank stare,” she said, “the less likely that information is accurate. So far we haven’t been able to find someone who can say he was a professor.”

Confirming individuals’ affiliations with the University is routine, Rollins said. But she said this case is unusual because the vague reports did not say what school Bowers supposedly taught at or the rank Bowers was supposed to have held.

“It’s been kind of a frustrating experience,” she said.

At Boston University, Bowers finished his course work in an interdisciplinary program known as the University Professors, but he never completed his dissertation, said BU spokesperson Bob Zalisk.

A woman who answered the telephone in the University Professors office yesterday would say only that Bowers had finished his course work sometime “in the ’90s” but had not finished his dissertation.

“That’s the only information I can give you,” she said before hanging up.

Further details were not forthcoming—even to Zalisk himself. In fact, the first time he called the University Professors office looking for information about Bowers, the person who answered the phone wouldn’t even give him the name of Bowers’ adviser, Zalisk said.

A subsequent phone call confirmed only the fact that Bowers was once enrolled in the program, Zalisk added, but Bowers’ adviser offered no details and pointedly refused to speak with the media.

At some point Bowers had submitted a working title for his research called “Zeitgeist, Ideology and Foreign Policy.” But Zalisk said that title became outdated and he did not know what new research subject Bowers had taken up. Bowers was last listed as an active student in 1998 and Zalisk said he does not know what happened since then—whether Bowers never finished the dissertation or whether he simply left to do field work.

“The trail runs dry after that,” he said.

—Material from the Associated Press was used in the compilation of this story.

—Staff writer Andrew S. Holbrook can be reached at holbr@fas.harvard.edu.