Davies quits, Gaddafi still hanging on

… SNP Foreign Affairs spokesman Angus Robertson said: “Amid violence and unrest across the Middle East and North Africa, it is extraordinary that the Prime Minister has embarked on a tour promoting arms sales – particularly when questions remain over whether the UK sold the weapons and riot control equipment being used against demonstrators by various regimes. …”

When I read “Davies quits,” I assumed that his long reign of terror over this blog had finally ended.

To paraphrase his earlier quip at Michael Howard’s expense: “My name is Howard and I am responsible for the operational direction of this university”.

Peter Sutherland, chair of the LSE Council, said:

The Curse of Suds strikes again.

Goldman Sachs
RBS
BP

and now LSE.

He sure knows how to pick them.

engels – In his newsletter to staff, Malcolm Grant tried pretending the arms dealers weren’t there:

UCL was the only university to be so represented [in the delegation], primarily because of our research campus in Qatar which will open later this year… Many other UK economic interests were represented in the delegation, principally construction, architecture and the energy industry.

At this week’s academic board meeting, he apparently explained that he had no idea of the company he’d be keeping when he agreed to make the trip. The student rep invited him to resign but he declined.

I don’t see anything there about Davies resigning from his position as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. (h/t Richard Menary over in comments at New APPS). I take it that means that hobnobbing with mad dictators doesn’t bring any discredit on that institution.

The Boston Globe has more about the thesis.

Isn’t it his job to get large donations from rich people?

“I don’t see anything there about Davies resigning from his position as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. (h/t Richard Menary over in comments at New APPS). I take it that means that hobnobbing with mad dictators doesn’t bring any discredit on that institution.”

Just as telling is the absence of any word of his standing down from his position as a student at Bowker Vale County Primary School. (h/t TARDIS.)

Good article below about the fetishisation of ‘external funding’ although we have to wait for the last paragraph to find out the ‘why’: Why do universities love ‘external funding’? Because it is opposed to ‘internal funding’: i.e. funding from central government.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/04/university-funding-lse-libya-legitmacy-source?INTCMP=SRCH

“known”, obviously.

On a more serious note than my previous comment, I think the following might shed some light on why Howard Davies said, in his resignation letter, that he made ‘a personal error of judgment’ in accepting a ‘Libyan invitation to advise their sovereign wealth fund’ in 2007 (and for which the LSE was paid $50,000):

But now new evidence has emerged that despite his denials, Saif in fact controlled the multi-billion-pound Libyan sovereign wealth fund, the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA).

“I’ve seen the Godfather. This is the closest thing in real life,” commented a Libyan investment banker familiar with how the LIA was run.

“It is as if it is his own private farm. This was almost like a mafia operation.”

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12626320

What if donations from tyrans to academia (or to any presumably valuable institutions) were double good ? First, it is money that the tyran will not spend on tyrranical activities. Second, it is money that will actually be spent on valuable activities, i.e. research.

I don’t see anything there about Davies resigning from his position as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England

This is presumably because he did that in 1997, to become Chief Executive of the Financial Services Authority, which he in turn resigned from in 2003 to take up the LSE job.

Who was Saif’s supervisor?
To date the name of this person (or persons) has not emerged.
It was a thankless task, to be sure, but why is the name of this person being kept secret by LSE? Prof. David Held claims he was not his supervisor, only an informal mentor. If that was indeed the case, someone else must have been appointed as his supervisor for the Ph. D. programme (possibly more than one). Did he hand in draft chapters to his supervisor during the four years of his PhD. ? What was his supervisor’s final report before signing the necessary form for handing him the PhD thesis for examination? Knowing these facts would help to determine the real authorship of the final thesis, in view of the claims of plagiarism or ghost-writing.
Another person on the academic staff must have acted as his supervisor for the MSc. previously. We don’t know his or her name. It is not a question of blaming anyone, only so that we have a full picture of his academic career at LSE.

I am a current student at the LSE
I must say I am baffled by the superficiality, hypocrisy, and moralism of some of the comments I have read here and elsewhere
to recap
the thesis seems to be that the LSE has sold a PhD to a dictator who paid for it with blood money….
I believe this is a crazy representation of the situation, and you might want to consider the following:

1) david Held was not the supervisor of said gaddafi
2) the amount of money received from the school is, in proportion to general expenses, ludicrous
3) the amount of money received by the research centre on global governance is less than 20% of its annual budget
4) the money was not given, or did not appear to be given by the lybian governemnt, but by a charity who raised money from the private sector in europe and internationally
5) at the time, said gaddafi was credited to have convinced his father to drop his nuclear programme and open up to the west; even if you think this is unproven, there are no doubts that many government saw him as the future for a power transition that would have brought lybia back into the international community in a more peaceful position
6) the LSE was creating a reserch programme on civil society and training civil servants (and frankly I doubt that teachings included rpj or granades handling, I haven’t seen it yet on any of the professional profiles or school courses)
7) and this is what triggers my deepest feelings of, well yes, resentment, ALL BRITSH UNIVERSITIES ARE DROWNED BY MONEY COMING FROM A) SAUDI ARABIA; B) E.U.I C) BAHRAIN… think of Oxford’s Said business school, and its Middle Eastern Centre (and here we are talking of almost 100% funding, 10s of millions of pounds, so where is the outraged talk about lost academic independence??)… perhaps all of this should be reconsidered but to do so, arbitrarily, by confining our so-called ‘moral outrage’ to one single institution and two or three people is just frankly unpleasant to watch, a very bad spectacle akin to hyenas trotting around the soon to be corpse of a bleeding animal…

and for the people at UCL, particularly unpleasant form a human point of view: years of envy for reputation and ability to attract funding and fully paying students seem what drives their comments, rather than genuine thinking.

I, for myself cannot claim to be fully impartial, but frankly, I have been shocked by the superficiality of the discussion, and the readiness to condemn and damage people’s reputation. If this is what years of moral philosophy teach us, if this is the attitude we take towards complex real-life situations … well I am seriously thinking to get into banking: I will become simplistically immoral, but at least go home with a big paycheck.

Chris, an addition to what you mentioned on a previous thread, Open Democracy has published Fred Halliday’s memorandum to LSE regarding his concerns about accepting money from the Qadaffi/Gaddafi foundation: http://www.opendemocracy.net/fred-halliday/memorandum-to-lse-council-on-accepting-grant-from-qaddafi-foundation?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=201210&utm_campaign=Nightly_2011-03-07%2005%3a30

Thank you RS. That’s the document I had seen, but I didn’t know it was in the public domain.

given that the Saudis have not afaik, committed assassinations and other acts of terrorism in the UK.

No, just paid for them.

(Saudi Arabia: definitely funded the widespread dissemination of the lunatic ideology that led directly to 7/7 bombings. Libya: shot one cop and definitely didn’t bomb an aeroplane. You’d have to be pretty willfully blind to pick Libya as the morally worse player out of those two…)

pit, if your hold on morality is _that_ weak, then I suggest you go into banking now, and spare the world your one-to-two years of handwringing before you abandon the pretense of morality that you’re now acting out.

Ok,

perhaps I misunderstood the comments from people at UCL who write here, so I can withdraw those on this specific blog.

That said I am still puzzled by the overall attitude people have taken to this whole affair. It seems to me that the move has been like this: first judge harshly then perhaps evaluate.

It is not simply the personal comment that need an answer:
When and from whom do we accept money for research?
Why is the money from Saudi Arabia good and the money from a Lybian charity bad?
Chris Bertram writes that the indepedence of the said gaddafi charity is a fiction. Perhaps that is the case, but how much independence does one need to have from an authocratic government in order to donate money that is not tarnished?

Chris Bertram also questions the universality of the practice of taking money form authocratic regimes in british unis, but it is unquestionable that places such as Oxford and cambridge or exeter do get far more money and much more targeted (that is constituting a far bigger share of a given research centre) than it has been the case at the LSE

Pit: read the Halliday memo.

pit,

Thanks for your apology, which I appreciate.

I’m not, however, among the morally outraged anti-LSE ‘hyenas’ to whom these questions are addressed.

I have enormous respect for people in the Philosophy Department at your institution. I’ve been especially impressed by Alex Voorhoeve. When all the facts of the Woolf inquiry come out, I believe that he will be revealed as someone who consistently displayed good judgment, integrity, and responsibility throughout this.

Since you obviously care a lot about LSE and are pained by the damage that has been done to your institution, I think you ought to direct some of your outrage at the reckless imprudence of those at LSE who accepted and approved the donation from the Saif Gaddafi Foundation, in spite of clear warning at the time of how unwise this was.

Even though I know nothing about Libya compared with Fred Halliday, even I was able to work out in the summer of 2009 that it was a mistake for LSE to accept money from the Saif Gaddafi Foundation at the time. I came to this conclusion after watching this BBC interview of Saif on Lockerbie from 2008 (i.e., well in advance of LSE’s decision to accept his money):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/south_of_scotland/7573244.stm

In an email entitled ‘Wouldn’t touch with a 10 ft pole’, I pointed to various things in the video that struck me as alarming and disturbing and at odds with the depiction of him as a liberal reformer. I wrote at the time that that ‘one has to wonder what such a person will be prepared to do in the future that might prove highly embarrassing to, e.g., someone whose academic centre is named after him’. After the recent events in Libya, one doesn’t have to wonder anymore.

To p o’neill and Mike Otsuka

I believe we have to make a basic distinction here: do we want to say that ‘mistakes were made’ and with hindsight we can agree that it is a reasonable opinion to entertain. Or do we want to say that there was a moral failure in the institutional behaviour at the LSE?

I am not sure that given the current funding politics I can see any real difference between what the LSE did and what, say, Oxford did and is doing (and Oxford is only an example, becauser I know that they are heavily funded by the saudis). I am pretty sure that human rights vilations in Saudi Arabia as a bad as in Lybia (pre-crisis). At least if we include fair treatment of women. I am also pretty sure, but wold have to research the topic, that if we interviewed the persons behind the Saudi donations in british universities, their opinions and worldview would seem morally repugnant for the vast majority of the readers of this blog. Although, perhaps, Davies did the honourable thing, I believe that he did resign to protect the LSE not because he believes that something wrong happened. In the end reputation, depends on how you are portryed by the media and only loosely tracks real arguments.

The real issue is the following: how do we discriminate between sources of funding? In the type of academic environment created in the UK, to accept funding only from persons and institutions that share in thoguht and action what the a School and research centre stand for in terms of values, in most cases, would mean to accept funding from a very limited number of sources. Perhaps that s the most ethical thing to do, but the collective policy we have chosen, I mean in british universities, or at least some important ones in the UK, is that preserving academic independence is paramount. Money, given that it can be put to good use, can come from almost anywhere, provided that it does not affect the way in which the institution is run. If these are the assumptions that are at work, when we selct donors, and it seems to me that they are, then to diversify sources of funding and to limit the preponderance of certain donors on budgets is perhaps one way forward.

Again, perhaps this is not the honorable thing to do, perhaps we should revise this policy. But then, I would like to see all donations to top brtish insitutions by authocratic regimes properly investigated. How many persons from the Saudi royal family attended Oxford in the past 10 years? Are we sure that all of their essays, dissertations and whatever else are free of plagiarized sentences ? Have we checked all dissenting advice on receiving money from a regime that is internally repressive, affords almost no political rights, and treats women as children? Did we go through all the interviews of their princes to check that we did not think they are creepy?

I would like to conclude with the follwoing thought, which is banale, but still…i am almost 100% sure that Halliday (a great scholar) could not really predict what would have happened this winter in North Africa. No one could have seriously claimed, based on evidence, that they believed that the whole of North Africa would have undergone the largest political transformation for at least a generation. And yet, I believe that if these transformations did not take place we would not be talking about the small (because it is small) donation made by said Gaddafi to the LSE and I am practically sure that no newspaper would have mentioned it.