Every year, the University of Louisville gives out five $100,000 Grawemeyer Awards. Most of the recipients aren’t celebrities — mainly academics outstanding in their fields of expertise. Mikhail Gorbachev, who won one in 1994, was a rare awardee who was also a global star. This time around, however, a faculty member nominated a famous name and, after the candidacy was very well received in the selection process, the university announced on April 14 that Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, was a winner of the 2011 Grawemeyer education prize.
Two days later, however, the school, like the rest of the country, learned of an expos by CBS’s 60 Minutes that alleged that some of the most dramatic episodes in the best-selling book and its popular sequel were inaccurate, if not largely fabricated. Moreover, serious questions have been raised over the way Mortenson has run his nonprofit Central Asian Institute and the way it pursues its objective of building schools and educating girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The university has not yet decided whether to rescind the award, says Allan Dittmer, executive director of the awards, which are named for an alumnus, H. Charles Grawemeyer, who endowed the honors. Mortenson, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee for the past couple of years, remains a very popular figure among the thousands who have contributed to the CAI and to his Pennies for Peace campaign, which encouraged American schoolchildren to contribute loose change toward the author’s Afghan and Pakistani goals. President Obama gave $100,000 from his own 2008 Nobel Peace Prize award to the CAI. “A bazillion questions are surfacing, and I’m guessing those will be looked into very carefully,” Dittmer told TIME. “We’ll wait to see if he’s vindicated, and if not we may have to make a tough decision.”
There are numerous allegations against Mortenson. Beyond the 60 Minutes investigation that aired on April 17, they are detailed and documented by another best-selling author, Jon Krakauer , in an e-book published on April 18 by Byliner Originals
