After facing a firestorm of criticism for taking a $150,000 salary for teaching just three hours a week at CUNY, former CIA Director David Petraeus will now earn $1 for the year.
“The general never was taking on this teaching assignment for the money,” his lawyer, Robert Barnett, told The New York Times.
“Once controversy arose about the amount he was being paid, he decided it was much more important to keep the focus on the students, on the school and on the teaching, and not have it be about the money.”
The retired general — and former commander of allied troops in the war on terror — proposed waiving his salary “because he wanted it to be seen as public service,” a school official told The Post.
CUNY announced in April that it had hired him to lead a seminar on US standing in global affairs.
The Web site Gawker later obtained internal school documents — through the Freedom of Information Law — to show how CUNY aggressively courted Petraeus.
Remarkably, school officials patted themselves on the back for getting him for only $150,000.
Petraeus is set to lead a seminar on “Are We on the Threshold of the North American Decade.”
Ann Kirschner, dean of CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College, still insisted Petraeus would have been worth a six-figure salary.
“We felt that we had the opportunity to bring somebody of extreme stature to be with our students and that whether the salary was $200,000 or $150,000, he was absolutely worth it,” she told the Times.
“I sympathize with the concerns about salary, but I also believe he is an extremely valuable teacher for our students.”
In the FOI documents, CUNY officials seemed eager to hire Petraeus in hopes of elevating the school’s status to Ivy League heights.
Petraeus, 60, is a West Point alumnus who picked up his master’s and doctoral degrees at Princeton.
“The Macaulay students are talented, smart, and inquisitive, and they have academic profiles comparable to students at Ivy League institutions,” then-CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein wrote on Feb. 22, asking Petraeus to enlist at the City University.
In an April 23 note to Kirschner, a self-effacing Petraeus joked about his moral lapse and need to live up to his academic résumé. Petraeus resigned from the CIA after admitting to an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell.
“I have acknowledged publicly that I made a big mistake — and I paid a huge price,” he wrote.
“Now it’s time to show that I actually accomplished some of what is on my CV prior to screwing up.”