That's Johns Hopkins, the university of the ghost report

It does not have the fame of Harvard or UCLA outside the United States, nor the pedigree of Oxford or Cambridge. But within its country, the so often mentioned these days in Spain, Johns Hopkins University is one of the most respected. There is no media outlet that has not mentioned it in its headlines and in many of its informative texts, in line with the controversy over the false report that the Spanish government continues appealing to in an attempt to prove that Spain is in fifth place in the number of coronavirus tests carried out worldwide. The insistence on using this report provoked a question from a CNN journalist who unsuccessfully asked President Pedro Sánchez himself to have the communications services of La Moncloa broadcast the work of the Johns Hopkins researchers. Subsequent information from the American network stated that the president could not prove the existence of the report. 

The institution is a university with a 144-year history, located in the heart of Baltimore, the most populated city in the state of Maryland, and half an hour's drive from the District of Columbia. It is one of the most powerful research centers in the world, its budgets in this field are billions and it is a true oasis (private, of course) for researchers who are fortunate enough to be able to work in its laboratories and offices. Its expertise in research was the expressed wish of its founder, Johns Hopkins, an industrialist who contributed to Baltimore's boom and growth in the 19th century. The final 's' in his first name, which is so confusing and seldom pronounced correctly, was taken from his great-grandmother Margaret Johns. Her family, an abolitionist and Quaker, had thrived on food businesses in Anne Arundel County, now known as Davidsonville, where traditions are still so ingrained that the community currently has no connection to water, gas or sewer services.

The Homewood campus is the main academic focus, a true college town with tens of acres of land and all the facilities and services imaginable. But Johns Hopkins also has two other university campuses in Washington, D.C., and Montgomery, Maryland. Outside the United States, its chairs have been established in the Italian city of Bologna and the Chinese city of Nanking. The university's School of Arts and Sciences is named after Zanvyl Krieger, a Jewish distillery entrepreneur from Baltimore City. It is also home to the world's largest and most important school of public health, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, founded by Nelson Rockefeller, but promoted by the former Democratic mayor of New York. The collaboration between the public and the private is a determining factor in American education, and this is the understanding of all the players involved in the educational and academic process. The other jewel in the legacy of the founder of this cathedral of knowledge and collective interest is the Johns Hopkins Hospital, also located in Baltimore, the other institution that employs most of the city's inhabitants. It was opened in 1889 and is highly respected in medical circles around the world especially for its advances in minimally invasive surgery for the treatment of different types of cancer. 

Few people know that, at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, the focus of controversy thousands of miles away because of the constant mention of his reports by the Spanish president, the seed of neoconservative political thought germinated in the nursery of ideas that constituted the school of international studies that belongs to its structure. Paul Wolfowitz was dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) for seven years, until George W. Bush appointed him in March 2001 as Deputy Secretary of State for Defense, Donald Rumsfeld's right-hand man in the Iraq war. During his farewell speech, Johns Hopkins President William R. Brody stated that "the bad news is that Johns Hopkins is losing a great dean. The good news is that the country is gaining a very smart, very focused and clear leader as Under Secretary of Defense. Paul Wolfowitz will serve the nation well.

During his years as dean, Wolfowitz maintained close relations with some of the neocons who would later take over the Bush Administration, such as Richard Perle, Robert Kagan or Paul Bremer, and above all with Francis Fukuyama, professor of political economy at the SAIS and ideologue of neoconservatism. The doctrine defended by Bush to respond to the 9/11 attacks with the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq was the work of Wolfowitz. Among those names of the liberal hawks so condemned in many countries like Spain, are the great defenders of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. They postulated from university offices to achieve peace through military force and a harsh rejection of communism, with Ronald Reagan's theories as a support base. They are all opposed to the new left and defenders of Israel in the Middle East conflict. The neocons see only free market as an economic theory, capitalism and fiscal conservatism as possible, with minimal government influence on society. Someone called this "compassionate conservatism," which illuminated Bush's first election victory in 2000.

Although it must be remembered that the positions in favor of unilateral decision-making already came from Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton: Madeleine Albright, his secretary of state, defended a phrase that would be outlawed today: "Multilateralism if we can, unilateralism if we must. And Anthony Lake, Clinton's security advisor during the first term of his presidency, justified an aggressive stance on post-Cold War foreign policy in a September 1993 speech with a paper entitled "From Containment to Enlargement". Those words were not uttered in any randomly chosen location. They were heard at the SAIS School of the Johns Hopkins University in its building on Massachusetts Avenue in the heart of Washington, just a quarter of a mile from the White House (mentioned in Achin Vanaik's Casus Belli: How the United States is Selling the War). 

Some years ago, the University of the Ghost Report named former Spanish President José María Aznar a "distinguished member". Along with all this, it must be noted that students organise themselves to protest angrily on the main campus when an unwanted speaker appears, such as former presidential adviser Karl Rove, another of those neocon hawks.