… proceeds apace.

… has, in the wake of the Libya scandal, resigned. I’ll get some links in a moment.

Here you go. It’s actually got a tiny bit of good news in it. The LSE has – had – at least one faculty member in this game with integrity.

The Financial Times [has] obtained fresh details about opposition from one of the university’s experts on the Middle East to the LSE’s acceptance of £300,000 in donations from a charity run by Seif al-Islam Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator’s son and an alumnus of the university.

Fred Halliday, an emeritus professor of international relations who died last year, wrote to the LSE council in late 2009 to say that Libya had made “no significant progress in protecting the rights of citizens, or migrant workers and refugees, and remains a country run by a secretive, erratic and corrupt elite”.

From The Daily Telegraph:

… The Gadhafis … ingratiated themselves into the upper echelons of British society, handily aided by Saif’s charm and the sage-like status apparently conferred by his [London School of Economics] doctorate.

… So successful was his adoption of British ways that he was lauded at the LSE by Professor David Held in a speech. It described his former student as: “Someone who looks to democracy, civil society and deep liberal values for the core of his inspiration.”

Now keen to prove that it is not as amorally venal as many suspect, the LSE has announced it will not take more of the $2.3 million pledged by Saif than the $472,800 it has already spent on its weighty purposes.

… [Perhaps] London’s …academic circles might be more fastidious … about consorting with such a grotesque as this ghastly murderous man.

Well, yes, there was a seven-foot high screen keeping me and my sisters away from the men… But if it weren’t there, our London School of Economics brothers would rape and ravish us and that wouldn’t be lovely, would it? I mean, for us. For the sisters hidden behind the curtain. That wouldn’t be lovely.

I thought it was a very tasteful way of keeping them from raping us. I so look forward to next year’s dinner. Maybe place the curtain a tad higher and put more layers of clothing on us.

… when dealing with moneybags hanging around your university in search of respectability. You need to do some vetting before you take their money. You may not be aware of this, but some of the ways people accumulate large personal fortunes are illegal.

Yeshiva University’s distinguished trustees (Bernard Madoff, Ezra Merkin) are again in the news as yet a third Yeshiva trustee (Moshael Straus) succeeds in wresting some of his stolen cash from Merkin. It’s a convoluted big-time New York City crime story, and Yeshiva probably would have preferred not to feature in it.

In a dissenting opinion, Cravath Swaine & Moore lawyer Rory O. Millson, the member of the arbitration panel chosen by Merkin, found that Straus, a member of Yeshiva University’s board of trustees, lied to the arbitrators, including about his knowledge of Madoff acting as a manager for Ascot. He noted that Ascot was referred to as “Bernie” at Yeshiva and that Straus invested in Ascot shortly after joining the university’s board in 1999.

Huh? Don’t try to figure it out. Just a lot of university trustees in each others’ pockets. What’s the point of being a trustee if you don’t get inside access to elite money managers like Bernie and Ezra?

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Well, but now it doesn’t look pretty. It didn’t look pretty when Yeshiva had to do a lot of rapid trustee-erasure, in the wee hours after Madoff and Merkin first got in trouble; and it still doesn’t look pretty with Yeshiva’s name dragged through the long aftermath.

And speaking of long aftermaths — the London School of Economics continues to struggle, not just with its Libyan connections (scroll down), but, more recently, with one of its honorary fellows, Victor Dahdaleh.

On Monday, Mr. Dahdaleh voluntarily surrendered to police in London. Britain’s Serious Fraud Office alleges he paid bribes to officials of a smelting company in Bahrain for contracts with U.S. aluminium giant Alcoa Inc. The deals involved large supplies of alumina, a raw material used to make aluminium, shipped to Bahrain from Australia.

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(Dahdaleh also has long ties to McGill University, but

“I know very little about him,” said a school official who did not want to be named.

Nice try.)

… Roger Cohen.

There’s a video of Dr. Alia Brahimi of the London School of Economics greeting Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi as “Brother Leader” at the school three months ago, and presenting him with an L.S.E. cap — a tradition, she says, that started when the cap was handed to Nelson Mandela.

It may be possible to sink to greater depths but right now I can’t think how.

… in trying to get a grip on the London School of Economics/ Benjamin Barber/ Other Academic Friends of Libya controversy, scandal, whatever you want to call it. Start with a university story that has nothing to do with Libya.

Frank Rich recently wrote, in the New York Times:

[Lawrence] Summers [did] consulting work for [a] hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard.

That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution … would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. [Summers was] moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university.

And he was making millions and millions of dollars. At a one day a week job.

He was paid, what, $800,000 or so to be Harvard’s president.

Put aside whether, as Ben Stein suggests, such a beneficiary of Wall Street money could ever, in his government capacity, “crack the whip” against it (“Wall Street knows how to get its hooks into government. This is how the world works. Money talks.”) and ask rather, from the point of view of the university, whether his raking it in while president is seemly.

It’s not unseemly if you regard a university as an institution like any other in a capitalist economy, primarily geared toward generating profits (in its athletic program, in its entrepreneurial scientific work) and generating personal wealth (for consultants to money funds, like Summers, for consultants to wealthy dictatorships and other countries, like Barber, and for university presidents like Shirley Ann Jackson, who sit on corporate boards and earn millions to attend board meetings).

As Barber says, in his defense, “Everyone gets paid.” It’s exactly the same way university presidents defend giving four million dollars a year to football coaches: There’s a market for everything, and everyone gets paid the going rates.

Absolutely none of this is unseemly (I’m not talking, by the way, about the astounding salaries made by presidents of for-profit colleges. These guys are for profit, baby, and you better believe it.) if a university is a corporation with classrooms, run and staffed by people seriously distracted by big money elsewhere. But a lot of people have a nagging feeling that universities are something more. Indeed these people note that our government seems to feel they are something more, since they receive remarkable tax benefits. Some of them are even public institutions (Barber taught at two of these, Rutgers and the University of Maryland), direct recipients of taxpayer dollars. What happens to Americans’ support for non-profit universities when so much that goes on at those places is outrageously profit and personal wealth driven?

The Libya dust-up is only the latest lesson in a gradual education taking place among the American public as to what really goes on in higher ed.

From The Telegraph:

Col Gaddafi was feted by senior staff at the [London School of Economics] during a meeting conducted via video link just two months ago.

In a video, understood to show a closed doors meeting, the Libyan leader is seen being applauded by members of the LSE staff as he launches into a rambling speech in which he spouts offensive views about Lockerbie.

He also uses the speech to attack former world leaders including Baroness Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

The LSE student who leaked the video said she was disgusted at the way senior college figures had behaved towards Col Gaddafi and his son…

… a professor of history at Kansas State, looks into Saif Gaddafi’s London School of Economics PhD:

I spent an hour on google and found big chunks of plagiarized material, evidently not caught by the academics whom Saif thanks in his dissertation: Nancy Cartwright, David Held, Alex Voorhoeve, and Joseph Nye.

Go to his group website, The Russian Front, for details.

London School of Economics professor Lord Desai, on his reaction to one of Saif Gaddafi’s recent speeches:

“I was disappointed … because he was not behaving as if he had had an LSE education.”

Timothy Burke first talks about the London School of Economics, which awarded Gaddafi a PhD:

One of the basic roles of the London School of Economics and some of its most immediate peer institutions in the contemporary global economy is to grant technocratic credentials to the well-connected children of authoritarian functionaries…

What LSE faculty should have seen in Gaddafi’s dissertation is another mode of mimicry, a kind of neoliberal pantomime. It should have reminded them of how little in the end any of the white papers and policy summits and good-governance roadshows do to actually change the regimes which are the most odious examples of bad governance, and how easy it is to tailor a certain kind of earnest social science into some new clothes for the emperor.

He then turns to Saif Gaddafi’s Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, Benjamin Barber:

I can find some sympathy in the case of Saif Gaddafi’s teachers for David Held, but it’s hard to feel the same for Benjamin Barber. Rather than begging for a more reflective, contemplative understanding of the human heart, Barber is doubling down… Saif Gaddafi’s choices have uncloaked some of Barber’s choices, that he’s been acting as an auxiliary member of the regime, a lobbyist, a geopolitical launderer. So he talks of tragedies to come in Libya in order to not have to have an accounting of the mountain of tragedy beneath his own feet.

Busy, important people, like Germany’s defense minister and Muammar Gaddafi’s son, often have their dissertations written for them. We know this. Perfectly respectable universities, like the London School of Economics, sign off on these things because they hope to get money from the dissertation writer. Perfectly respectable professors, like David Held and Benjamin Barber, approve and promote the scholarship of people like Saif al-Islam Qaddafi because these professors like the image of themselves as kingmakers. It is hard to read Barber’s recent keening over the fact that “Oxford University Press, which contracted to publish the two extraordinary books Saif wrote on civil society and democratic reform in the developing world, will presumably now cancel publication” without laughing.

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From Mother Jones:

On his [dissertation’s] acknowledgments page, Saif noted that his thesis was made possible, in part, due to the assistance of a “number of experts…especially Professor Joseph Nye” of Harvard. One of the godfathers of the international relations theories of neoliberalism and soft power, Nye read portions of the paper and provided “advice and direction.” Probably not coincidentally, Nye twice visited Libya in 2007 and 2008 as a paid consultant for the Monitor Group, a Boston-based consulting firm then working for the Qaddafi government. He tells Mother Jones that he read one chapter of the dissertation and “found it intelligent.” After the 2007 trip, Nye wrote an essay for The New Republic, extolling Qaddafi’s efforts to clean up his image.

… In The New Republic piece, Nye noted that he had visited Libya “at the invitation of the Monitor Group.” He did not disclose that he had been there as a paid consultant for this firm — a relationship he acknowledged in an email to Mother Jones. That means The New Republic published an article sympathetic to Qaddafi written by a notable academic on the payroll of a company hired by Qaddafi to boost his standing in the United States.

… [The Monitor Group] helped [Saif] conduct research for his dissertation — raising the possibility that this thesis was another component of the Monitor Group’s makeover campaign for the Qaddafi regime. The consulting firm pocketed $3 million a year for its pro-Qaddafi endeavors.

Extraordinary.

He led a life of intense activism and intense meditation.

Throughout, he worried about humanity’s desire and capacity for freedom. Here’s a good interview with him.

When Mr UD was working for the United Nations in East Timor, he got to know, a bit, Dahrendorf’s daughter Nicola, who was also working there.

From this interview: “[A]s Director of the London School of Economics, [I] have always regarded it as my job to protect academics from the obsession with realities, even the obsession with funds. That is to say, if you do administer, if you are in charge of an academic institution, you really have to see to it that those who are there as academics can do their job. So you have to relieve them of some of the burden of living in the real world.”