Robert E. Klitgaard

Robert Klitgaard is a University Professor at Claremont Graduate University, where he served as President from 2005-9. Before coming to CGU, he was Dean and Ford Distinguished Professor of International Development and Security at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, America’s leading Ph.D. program in policy analysis.

Along the way Bob has been an associate professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he also served half time as Special Assistant to the President of Harvard; Lester Crown Visiting Professor of Economics at the Yale School of Management; Professor of Economics at the University of KwaZulu, Natal; Li Ka-shing Distinguished Chair Professor at Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore; and a Visiting Fellow at Oxford. He received his BA, MPP, and PhD degrees from Harvard.

In 2024, ScholarGPS ranked him in the top 50 scholars in the world in three areas: corruption (27th), policy analysis (42nd), and exploratory data analysis (48th).

In October 2024 he received the Anti-Corruption Excellence Award in Academic Research and Education, which has been compared to the Nobel Prize for anti-corruption.

Since ChatGPT emerged on November 30, 2022, Bob has been fascinated by the potential of Generative AI. One result is the 2024 KDP e-book "Using ChatGPT in Graduate Education: A Beginner's Guide (and We're All Beginners Here)."

Bob's sixteen books include "Controlling Corruption," which helped launch the global anti-corruption movement; "Choosing Elites," which is included in The Harvard Guide to Influential Books; and "Tropical Gangsters," which was named one of The New York Times’ Books of the Century.