Justin puts it in perspective:
So, we’re all jolly cross at the London School of Economics for taking Gaddafi’s cash. We’re less cross (if at all) at the arms trade for doing the same. I haven’t heard any calls for the head of BAE Systems to resign, for instance. After all, BAE Systems were only flogging anti-tank missiles while the LSE were flogging management training, the bastards.
Which is fair enough, but when this sentiment mutates into something like what Charli Carpenter argues:
The graduation of a plagiarist raises my eyebrows (as you might guess) but as recent discussions have suggested going easy on academic dishonesty is hardly a problem limited to LSE. And simply the choice to make good-faith engagements with authoritarian elites or their children should not be treated, in hind-sight, as evidence of collusion.
Then methinks you’re protesting too much. If getting easy PH.Ds for the children of dictators as part of a general buttering up for the purpose of getting lots and lots of arms and other sales for British industry is not collusion, what is? Why should the LSE “make good-faith engagements with authoritarian elites”9or their children) in the first place? What does that even mean?
From where I’m sitting it’s clear the LSE let itself be used in a general campaign to butter up Khadaffi so that he would buy loads and loads of weapons and other equipment from British industry while also allowing Khadaffi to improve his own p.r. image through that research fund his son set up at the LSE. Now it’s reaping the whirlwind of that decision to get in bed with a dictator. That this is s.o.p. for most or even all UK elite universities does not make it right. It’s hard to feel sorry for them and it’s no use to bray about “politics of the mob” when you’re so clearly in the wrong, even if others were just as wrong or more so. That just means there are others that need to make amends too. No gangster’s pal ever won his trial by pointing out others were friends with Capone as well.
More generally, this attitude that it’s alright to do business with dictators as long as they’re our dictators is why the Middle East has never managed to become free: because our governments, businesses and universities always priviledged money over morality. It no longer suffices to argue that we should be realistic and not blame people for getting into bed with dicators because there was no alternative: the people of Egypt, Libya and Tunesia have shown us otherwise.