A donation of €1.78 million from the Gaddafi family and a PhD granted to one of the Libyan dictator's sons has put the London School of Economics in a pickle, just as a fresh study on EU universities highlights the problems of dwindling public funds for education.
The London School of Economics, one of the top-ranking universities in Europe, on Monday (21 February) acknowledged it had received a gift of €1.78 million from the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, chaired by Saif al Islam, one of the Libyan dictator's seven sons and a former graduate.
The university also admitted it had "delivered executive education programmes to Libyan officials", but said it had now decided to sever all those links "in view of the highly distressing news" about hundreds of protesters killed by armed forces.
"The school intends to continue its work on democratisation in north Africa funded from other sources unrelated to the Libyan authorities," it said in a statement published on its website.
Seen as one of the 'reformists' in the Gaddafi clan, Saif al Islam had spent four years at the LSE researching his PhD entitled "The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance Institutions: From Soft Power to Collective Decision Making?"
But in a speech broadcast on Sunday on public television, the LSE graduate threatened demonstrators with "rivers of blood" and called them Western agents and drug addicts, warning about civil war, an Islamist take-over and the splitting of the country into a petro-rich east and a poor west.
One of his LSE mentors, David Held, a professor of political science, on Monday also dissociated himself from his former student.
"My support for Saif al Islam Gaddafi was always conditional on him resolving the dilemma that he faced in a progressive and democratic direction. The speech last night makes it abundantly clear that his commitment to transforming his country has been overwhelmed by the crisis he finds himself in. He tragically, but fatefully, made the wrong judgement," the professor said in an emailed statement. [...]
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