The links between the London School of Economics and the Gaddafi regime have damaged the university. Its talented director, Sir Howard Davies, has resigned, while a pall has been cast on the judgement of his predecessor, Anthony Giddens. A university once associated with the likes of Webb, Hayek and Shaw is now associated with accepting money from a tinpot Arab dictator. And unfortunately, LSE is far from the only British university willing to accept funding from morally dubious sources.
Top British universities regularly accept multimillion-pound donations from regimes with extremely poor human rights records, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. “Britain’s best universities taking money from the world’s worst governments is an established trend,” says Robin Simcox, author of a 2009 report that looked into the links between British universities and governments with a poor record of human rights.
The report by Simcox, A Degree of Influence, published by the Centre for Social Cohesion, showed that over the past 30 years top British universities have accepted numerous donations of between £150,000 and £8m from organisations linked to autocratic regimes – and even the regimes themselves.
Since 1986, the University of Oxford and the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies have accepted a combined total of more than £105m in donations from sources such as the Saudi royal family, the Malaysian government and even the Bin Laden dynasty, among others. In 1997, the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies received £20m from the now-deceased King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.
In 2005 the university received £1.5m from the United Arab Emirates’ Zayed Bin Sultan al-Nahayan Charitable and Humanitarian Foundation. Sheik Zayed’s previous endeavours included establishing a think tank that, according to A Degree of Influence, published a report claiming that Zionists “were the people who killed the Jews in Europe”. The University of Cambridge also received £1.2m from the Zayed foundation.
Elsewhere, the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) accepted a donation of £1m from King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to set up a chair of Islamic studies in 1995. Four years later, there was an outcry when the university accepted a donation of between £35,000 and £180,000 from the Iranian government. Cambridge, meanwhile, offers a studentship that is fully funded by the Iranian regime.
The reputations of Oxford, Cambridge and Soas, however, have not suffered in the past few weeks for a simple reason: unlike Libya, the morally repugnant regimes they accepted money from have yet to collapse in voilence.
LSE’s reputation suffered not when it accepted the money, but when Gaddafi started massacring his own people in response to an uprising. Howard Davies knew the potential risks to the university’s reputation when he accepted the money. The university was not cautious, it was greedy – and now its name lies in the gutter. A number of vice-chancellors will look at Davies, however, and think: “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Saudi Arabia’s abuse of human rights is well documented. If Saudi Arabia were to follow in Libya’s footsteps and launch a bloody crackdown on a restless populace, Oxford and Soas would have a lot of explaining to do. The House of Saud, however, would only be exhibiting its continued contempt for human rights – a contempt that was clear when the British universities accepted the regime’s money. It won’t be just those in Riyadh hoping for the Arab uprising to stop short of Saudi borders.
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