The Political Theory of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi

So, a thesis like this in the UK would typically have two examiners, one internal and the other external. I think we ought to know who they were.

I think there’s a passage in A Theory of Justice that can be read as endorsing this claim.
I think this is so, at least in the reading given by Alex Rawls.

Was the second to last sentence a joke or should one believe the events in Libya and this thesis correlated? If so, could someone explain why?

This story in today’s Globe and Mail describes an interview with Saif Gaddafi in 2004 and quotes, from The Guardian, David Held, one of his tutors at LSE. Held claims that Gaddafi junior changed radically between his LSE days and today. The Globe writer finds both continuities and differences between Gaddafi junior in 2004 and today, but does attribute to him Libya’s abandonment of terrorism and the pursuit of nuclear weapons in the early 2000’s. Does anyone know if that’s true?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/doug-saunders/once-committed-to-democracy-gadhafis-son-now-crushes-all-dissent/article1915482/

Just in case any mobs ever come after me demanding I step down from my position of absolute sovereignty over the corner office on the third floor (right beside the elevator) of the Davis Building here in Wichita, I’d like my colleagues to know that I actually don’t believe a word of my own dissertation either.

And Vernon Bogdanor thinks he has to be circumspect when asked to describe his influence on a certain former pupil!

Saif’s Facebook fanpage is here. He doesn’t appear to have updated it since his bro’ shut down the Internet.

~alec

“…drawing on Hume, Rawls, and Ned McClennen…”

Oh ****, now I’m going to have to go find out who Ned McClennen is. He doesn’t appear to be in the first online resort of the lazy and ignorant. (I’m tired, think I’ll put it off till tomorrow.)

And Vernon Bogdanor thinks he has to be circumspect when asked to describe his influence on a certain former pupil!

Be thankful that Cameron was at least tutored. George W. Bush went to Yale and didn’t even get that, and he ran the most powerful country in the world for eight years, being thus untutored.

I wish I could say with confidence that the next relative of a dictator/child of a Russian oligarch/family member of the Chinese hierarchy who makes an application to Oxford/Bristol/LSE/Duke/Harvard … will be treated solely on their academic merits and that the promise of a few millions in donations will be refused by principled academics and university administrators anxious to avoid dirty money and stand up for human rights. It isn’t going to happen, and those, like Fred Halliday, who try to stop it will be belittled and ignored.

(Incidentally, when the name Henry Clay Frick comes up, do most people think “benefactor of the arts” or “ordered the shooting of workers in the streets”?)

17: you can bribe your way into Oxford or Bristol? Really? Who’s done it?

“Because person A didn’t manage to do it, it follows that no other person could do it.”

Wouldn’t survive the first year studying logic.

Wouldn’t survive the first year studying logic.

Yes, except I am talking about the ideal case here. We are talking about someone who would more or less have had a good shot of getting in sans donation, who still didn’t get in. This is the most plausible case possible. I mean, he’s happy because he’s off somewhere there are even more toffs, but seriously.

However, at Oxford I taught at least one very thick uk whose family had made a substantial donation, I heard of a case involving the admission of the nephew of a prominent German politician described as a “royal princes case” and at another university, the admissions office once made a “mistake” which over-rode the negative judgement of academics and admitted the nephew of a prominent peer.

I have heard that Oxford does make exceptions for foreign royal houses, but that’s been a part of a long tradition, and not really related to bribery. It’s unjust, but it’s not about money. WRT the peer’s nephew, it’s extremely unlikely if it’s a hereditary peer (because I have heard people talk about how Oxford is filling up with “riff-raff” and the rest of that sort of talk, so people are mentally adjusting to being shut out), but I mean, if the peer had been an actual politician (life peer) then the consideration would presumably be about funding. But I mean, a nephew.

At postgraduate level, you can be assured that standards will be much much slacker, since universities are chasing unregulated fee income (whereas numbers are capped at ug level).

This is the same in America, so this is not surprising. I wouldn’t really get too exercised about it, because this is basically win-win for British institutions: free money, and very little downside prestige-wise. The President of Taiwan has some sort of degree from Harvard (some sort of “research” law degree), so does the son of the former president of China; I mean, seriously.

However, at Oxford I taught at least one very thick uk whose family had made a substantial donation

I think you’ll be surprised at where some of my thicker friends from school ended up, without any donations being necessary. Systems fail. It’s not impossible to game the system. And people who are good at gaming the system also tend to be wealthy and thus likely to donate, so there’s a correlation without any necessary causation. It’s a lot more likely that the system just failed in his case, with the attendant correlation.

(The interview, for example, is ideal for gaming by people from public schools.)

” It doesn’t happen. Oh all right, it does happen, but when it happens, it doesn’t count. Oh all right, it does count, but it’s a good thing, hey?”

The point is about money, and one’s own money doesn’t buy admission as an undergraduate.

In general, this sort of thing is very hard to do, and much harder than is commonly presumed. Even in the case of the U.S., I know one fellow whose pater is a leading partner at a huge law firm and sits on serious charity boards, and whose mum went to the Ivy he was applying for, who still didn’t get in. I have known of one case where someone bought his way into NYU, but a) it’s NYU and b) he was worth the GDP of a small country.

Have you escaped from Downton Abbey or Brideshead Myles?

Just thought it was rather pregnant subject matter for that sort of thing, after all. But the story is completely reliable, because the relevant facts about the background were verified by information I later saw in the New York Times, and I saw his bloody application, so I know he applied.

I know of no definite recent cases at undergraduate level and everything I do know is based on hearsay and anecdote.

Well, that’s good enough for me!

(Giving credence to unsourced, unbacked rumour when it happens to coincide with your preconceptions will get you to all sorts of places. Baghdad, for one.)

Cool, so for only 1.5 million I can get a PhD in PolSci – what a bargain!

^ Don’t forget to add the fees for the ghostwriter to write the thesis for you!

I’d do it for around £100,000. Call 0800 -WRITEAPHD for more info!

“Although it used to happen, it might not happen now.”

Since I know of very few actual cases where a businessman’s receipt of government contracts, or a title, have been specifically linked by those awarding them to the donation their political party received from the lucky awardee, I am disinclined to think that there is any connection between large political donations and the fortunes of those who make them.

“very few” != “none”, by the way. This is sort of an obvious point but it needs making.

@ Chris 17: “and those, like Fred Halliday, who try to stop it will be belittled and ignored” – I’m not familiar with this Chris, is there a link/brief comment you could add? Thanks

Some may be interested in the presentation Saif Alqadhafi gave at the LSE last year, where he talks about some of the stuff in his thesis and responds to a few generally easy questions (though D Held does try with a couple of direct questions related to Saif’s family and its control of Libya. Its available as an mp3 (http://richmedia.lse.ac.uk/publicLecturesAndEvents/20100525_1830_libyaPastPresentAndFuture.mp3) and video (http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/publicEventsVideos/publicEventsVideosPrevious.aspx)

Thanks Chris

It was long rumoured that a pupil from the top private school I attended made a 6 figure donation to the Oxford college he/she was admitted to (back in the early 1990s). Whether this student would have got in without the donation is of course unknown. For the rest of us, just paying the school fees and having 5 hours extra tuition each week in ‘Oxford Entrance’ throughout the sixth form was enough to get in.

Europe has been hand in glove with the regimes in Middle east, Africa, Asia and South America. The regimes sons and daughters attend oxford/Cambridge, keep money in Swiss banks , spend on Football clubs (and night clubs), weapons etc etc. All the time preaching democracy and human rights.

I hope LSE does a thesis on this.

40: it’s a bit of a low-grade retort, really, because you are probably hoping that I will not notice the little jump you made from “cases where this has demonstrably happened” to “cases where the perpetrator has admitted doing it”.

The list of claimed instances of plagiarism on the wiki is growing (http://saifalislamgaddafithesis.wikia.com/wiki/Saif_Al-Islam_Gaddafi_Thesis_Wiki)

I wonder how long it will be until LSE revokes his PhD.

When the name Frick comes up, I think of someone I read once who said, “The Frick is the only museum where I have ever been shooed away by a guard for standing and looking at one painting for too long.”

Brilliant.

Interestingly, I was informed of Frick’s less salubrious activities in art history, so he’s not gotten off there.

Well, the University of Bayreuth today revoked the doctoral degree of Karl-Theodor Freiherr zu Guttenberg. Seams like it isn’t only the Libyan aristocratic politicians that are into plagiarism.

The trick is to apply as an international (where there’s no subsidised funding and student numbers aren’t capped, and to make a big deal of your background as academics are downgraded because of the benefits of having an internationalised student body).

The only place where that trick works on a large scale is St. Andrews, which I unfortunately elected not to attend, out of sheer ignorance.

That evening standard article is hilarious. So Gaddafi funded an institute of global governance, eh? Excellent. Show us how it’s done Mr. G (or should that be Dr?)

I love this pearler:

I grilled him for two hours on it — there was no suggestion he hadn’t written it himself.

Perhaps the good folk of LSE need to move into the 20th century. Perhaps they haven’t heard of google? Perhaps they are unaware that anti-plagiarism software exists and is very good at catching this shit? Or perhaps they weren’t too eager to catch him out.

What follows is classic though:

We were struck by how idealistic it was. We said it was not realistic and needed some realpolitik in it

Well, he certainly added some realpolitik, didn’t he? And I’m sure that when the Libyan people are done with him, he’ll have had a chance to see realpolitik up close and personal, along with a bit of “peaceful democratization”.

Is this what British educational institutions have been reduced to? passing rich thugs’ plagiarism?

Elites in what used to be called the 3rd world have been sending many of their children to be educated in the West for a long time. With one or two exceptions, probably the entire first-generation governing class of independent India and Pakistan was educated in Britain. Then U.S. institutions got more into the act. The long-time former head of the Saudi intelligence service, Prince Bandar (can’t remember his full name), went to Georgetown. Benazir Bhutto went to Harvard. And lots of their peers continued to go, I’m sure, to LSE, Oxbridge, etc., etc. Bracketing for the moment the issue of the alleged plagiarism, there is thus nothing especially unusual in this case, ISTM. The disjunction between the political slant of his thesis topic and his recent speech is striking, but the combination of wealthy foreign student receiving degree and then later giving large donation is not. I bet virtually every university in D.C. (and probably much the same in other big U.S. cities) has either a building or a professorship or something donated by a wealthy Arab alumnus or his relatives.

Of course Lord Desai advised the global governance center at LSE to take the money. It was really a no-brainer.

Elites in what used to be called the 3rd world have been sending many of their children to be educated in the West for a long time.

It’s a heavily British phenomenon, curiously enough. England seems to do it to an even greater extent than America, which to me is intriguing. But the basic reasoning is sound; sending your kid to Harrow and Balliol (as Chinese minister of commerce and now Chungking governor, Bo Xilai, did) is a life insurance policy on their behalf. One of the chaps I know failed his gaokao (the Chinese national matriculation exam) and so was packed off to a Canadian university, paying international rates. The really clever parents pack their kids off to traditional boarding schools in Canada and Australia and so skip the entire Chinese system. I know at least one chap who by virtue of having gone to the right boarding school got into Columbia, and is now working for Goldman in HK.

The long-time former head of the Saudi intelligence service, Prince Bandar (can’t remember his full name), went to Georgetown.

Prince Saud did him one better: he was a Princetonian.

Is this what British educational institutions have been reduced to? passing rich thugs’ plagiarism?

Given how much London has been shaped by expatriate Arab and Russian largesse, I don’t think one should be too surprised when its institutions get caught up in Arab or Russian affairs.

I’ve thought about it more, and decided LFC is right. Western universities would have much less going for them without the input of those from other places. There was no reason the LSE should have been embarrassed about admitting him until the apparent fact of his alleged plagiarism became known.

Bianca @64: I agree, obviously. Posted 65 before seeing your comment.

64 – Are you being sarcastic? The omens don’t look good for Saif Gaddafi being alive in a few days time, nevermind taking over as ‘an enlightened rule’. I’ve just watched Benjamin Barber on BBC 2’s ‘Newsnight’ programme get very heated when pushed about his work for Gaddafi’s foundation. First Held and now Barber; this is not, I’m sure, the kind of publicity liberal democratic theorists like to receive. Will any more be outed?

Glad to see that he has the sense to put Gillian Brock’s and my co-edited book in his bibliography.

Universities should be run by the state, education should be free and selection of students should be based on merit. And before you call me crazy, that’s how it works in e.g. Germany (for the most part).

So what if there is mounting evidence that this PhD was plagiarized? Few PhDs these days are original works! In any case, Lord Desai who I believe was one of the markers argued that there is really no evidence to suggest that Gaddafi had earned his PhD