WE'RE SHOCKED, SHOCKED, TO FIND CORRUPTION IN THE ACADEMIC WORLD – AT 9:13 P.M. ET:  It turns out that the famed London School of Economics has been quite cozy with the supreme exalted dictator of Libya.  But that, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg, which itself is threatened by global warming.  From Commentary:

The Director of the London School of Economics, Sir Howard Davies, has resigned after fresh revelations of LSE ties to Libya emerged on Thursday morning. The LSE was already under intense fire for taking a donation of 1.5 million pounds from Qaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam, who studied at LSE and — it appears — may also have plagiarized his thesis. The straw that broke the LSE’s recalcitrant back was a WikiLeaks cable that revealed that U.S. diplomats were told by Libya’s “National Economic Development Board” that it was cooperating with “the UK government and the London School of Economics, among other UK institutions, on an exchange program to send 400 ‘future leaders’ of Libya for leadership and management training.”

It gets worse:

...the U.S. is implicated too. The Guardian reports that Michigan State is home to a similar, if smaller, program of training future “Libyan leaders.” Musa Kusa, Libya’s foreign minister and the second most powerful man in Libya after the Qaddafi family, got his master’s degree in sociology from MSU in 1978, which is probably no coincidence.

MSU isn't the only problem university on this side of the Atlantic.

Georgetown’s reliance on Saudi money is notorious, but it’s simply one of the crowd. I would love to be a fly on the wall at any elite U.S. university with a Middle Eastern Studies program now: administrators across the country know that what happened at LSE could happen here. And it should.

COMMENT:  The funding, by dictatorial regimes, of programs in American universities is an old story, and, while disgusting, isn't shocking.  American universities have a decidedly mixed record on democracy and human rights, despite all their pompous rhetoric.  The record will show that a number of U.S. colleges, including the elite "seven sisters," made up of Eastern women's schools, were sending students to Nazi universities right up until the start of World War II, even though the nature of the Nazi regime was well known.

Money talks.  So does the cry of "academic freedom," a war chant that is being used these days to justify all kinds of academic corruption and influence peddling.

March 4, 2011