Meghnad Desai, Labour peer and Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics, has protested at his name being “unfairly” dragged into the plagiarism row surrounding the Libyan leader Colonel Qadhafi's son, Saif-al Qadhafi.
Mr. Qadhafi, who was a student at LSE from 2003 to 2008, is accused of plagiarising parts of his PhD thesis and the University has launched an investigation. After leaving LSE, he donated £1.5 million to his alma mater.
Lord Desai, who examined the thesis along with Tony McGrew of Southampton University, said, some media reports had wrongly described him as Mr. Qadhafi's “supervisor.” He said he had already retired from LSE by the time Mr. Qadhafi came there and he had nothing to do either with his admission or PhD supervision.
Lord Desai said he had been “hurt” that his “academic integrity” was being questioned by suggesting that he had cleared an allegedly plagiarised thesis or had been “soft” on Mr. Qadhafi because of his connections.
“There were two of us — me and Tony McGrew. We reviewed his thesis and gave him a fairly tough oral examination that lasted for more than two and a half hours at the end of which we concluded that the thesis needed some improvement. We felt he seemed to have a very idealistic view of global governance, which was the subject of his thesis, so we told him to incorporate issues of real politics. He did that and resubmitted the thesis. We re-examined it and we were satisfied with the improvement. All rules were followed and we were not soft on him,” Lord Desai said.
There was “no evidence,” he pointed out, that the thesis had been “ghost-written” or plagiarised. He said Mr. Qadhafi appeared to be a “good student” and “genuine” about bringing democracy to his country. It was “wrong,” he said, to link his donation to his PhD.
“What's happening in Libya now is shocking and his own role in it has been despicable but it has nothing to do with LSE. The donation came without any strings and it was accepted in good faith,” he said.
Lord Desai said that Mr. Qadhafi had violated human rights and should be tried by the criminal court of justice but the demand that he should be stripped of his PhD made “no sense.”
