Lovely rant by Simon Jenkins about LSE.

With felicitous timing, London's Royal Court theatre is staging Richard Bean’s hilarious if chaotic play, Heretic, about a university department eager for a grant from a multinational company and ready to suppress academic rigour to do so. It is clearly based on the University of East Anglia and climate change, but the words LSE and Gaddafi could be substituted throughout.

The global-warming sceptic, played by Juliet Stevenson, is ostracised and driven to madness by her colleagues, as her professor argues that their department is merely a unit to “service clients … a virtual budget centre providing tools to the market”. Eager for money, he quotes a Chinese proverb: “Man must stand for long time with mouth open before roast duck fly in.”

For the LSE, Gaddafi of Libya was pure roast duck. Journalists trawling through the recent jobs, contacts and pronouncements of LSE academics, including directors Lord Giddens and Sir Howard Davies – who has now resigned – have been aghast. Despite references to “the context of the times”, the story is of a respected academic institution apparently in mesmerised thrall to a dictator, and actively participating in sanitising his image.

Gaddafi was seen praised by LSE luminaries in a cringe-making video link as “the world’s longest serving leader”. His son, Saif al-Islam, settled in a north London palace to write an LSE PhD and dispense trips and contracts. He was declared as being committed to “democracy, civil society and deep liberal values” and was even invited to give the Ralph Miliband memorial lecture, an unusual honour for any student. His appreciation was swift. The university accepted a £1m contract to train 400 regime-approved “future leaders” from Libya. The mind boggles at it all.

It does indeed look as though LSE had lost its ethical bearings. But so do most universities when they get drawn into the reality distortion field that surrounds large bodies of money. The Divinity School in Cambridge was built with money from the Hinduja brothers. And Oxford’s Said Business School was built with money from a Syrian arms dealer. American universities are even worse — largely because they are better at fundraising.

I have a friend who was, for a time, deputy head of a major college and whose portfolio included fundraising. He hated it, and once said that, after a day’s schmoozing with potential donors, he felt physically dirty and had to take a shower when he got home. Another prominent academic friend resigned from the Mastership of an Oxbridge college because he couldn’t stand the social and ethical obligations of fundraising.

You don’t have to go to the extreme of believing that “behind every fortune lies a crime” to concede that truly untainted money is very rare. As state funding continues to evaporate, the pressures on universities to prostitute themselves in order to obtain donations from rich individuals will intensify. So we will see more of the ethical doublethink practised by LSE and other elite universities as they pocket the loot while claiming that research priorities and academic values are entirely untouched by theiir mendicancy. It’s nauseating but — hey — ivory towers are expensive to maintain.

Nice rant by Frank Rich in the NYT.

Perhaps the most revealing window into America’s media-fed isolation from this crisis — small an example as it may seem — is the default assumption that the Egyptian uprising, like every other paroxysm in the region since the Green Revolution in Iran 18 months ago, must be powered by the twin American-born phenomena of Twitter and Facebook. Television news — at once threatened by the power of the Internet and fearful of appearing unhip — can’t get enough of this cliché.

Three days after riot police first used tear gas and water hoses to chase away crowds in Tahrir Square, CNN’s new prime-time headliner, Piers Morgan, declared that “the use of social media” was “the most fascinating aspect of this whole revolution.” On MSNBC that same night, Lawrence O’Donnell interviewed a teacher who had spent a year at the American school in Cairo. “They are all on Facebook,” she said of her former fifth-grade students. The fact that a sampling of fifth graders in the American school might be unrepresentative of, and wholly irrelevant to, the events unfolding in the streets of Cairo never entered the equation.

The social networking hype eventually had to subside for a simple reason: The Egyptian government pulled the plug on its four main Internet providers and yet the revolution only got stronger. “Let’s get a reality check here,” said Jim Clancy, a CNN International anchor, who broke through the bloviation on Jan. 29 by noting that the biggest demonstrations to date occurred on a day when the Internet was down. “There wasn’t any Twitter. There wasn’t any Facebook,” he said. No less exasperated was another knowledgeable on-the-scene journalist, Richard Engel, who set the record straight on MSNBC in a satellite hook-up with Rachel Maddow. “This didn’t have anything to do with Twitter and Facebook,” he said. “This had to do with people’s dignity, people’s pride. People are not able to feed their families.”

En passant: it’s been interesting to hear the frustration of intelligent US citizens about the non-availability of Al Jazeera on American cable channels and networks. It’s the old story: “600 channels and nothing on TV”.

If, like me, you’re finding it hard to figure out from the blurred footage on Al Jazeera what’s really going on, this typically vivid Robert Fisk dispatch might help.

Of course, it would be an exaggeration to say that stones cloaked the sky, but at times there were a hundred rocks soaring through the sky. They wrecked an entire army truck, smashing its sides, crushing its windows. The stones came out of side roads off Champollion Street and on Talaat Harb. The men were sweating, headbands in red, roaring their hatred. Many held white cloth to wounds. Some were carried past me, sloshing blood all over the road.

And an increasing number were wearing Islamist dress, short trousers, grey cloaks, long beards, white head caps. They shouted Allahu Akbar loudest and they bellowed their love of God, which was not supposed to be what this was all about. Yes, Mubarak had done it. He had brought the Salafists out against him, alongside his political enemies. From time to time, young men were grabbed, their faces fist-pulped, screaming and fearful of their lives, documentation found on their clothes to prove they worked for Mubarak’s interior ministry.

Many of the protesters – secular young men, pushing their way through the attackers – tried to defend the prisoners. Others – and I noticed an awful lot of “Islamists” among them, complete with obligatory beards – would bang their fists on these poor men’s heads, using big rings on their fingers to cut open their skin so that blood ran down their faces. One youth, red T-shirt torn open, face bloated with pain, was rescued by two massive men, one of whom put the now half-naked prisoner over his shoulder and pushed his way through the crowd.

Thus was saved the life of Mohamed Abdul Azim Mabrouk Eid, police security number 2101074 from the Giza governorate – his security pass was blue with three odd-looking pyramids stamped on the laminated cover. Thus was another man pulled from the mob, squealing and clutching his stomach. And behind him knelt a squadron of women, breaking stones.

There were moments of farce amid all this. In the middle of the afternoon, four horses were ridden into the square by Mubarak’s supporters, along with a camel – yes, a real-life camel that must have been trucked in from the real dead pyramids – their apparently drugged riders hauled off their backs. I found the horses grazing gently beside a tree three hours later. Near the statue of Talaat Harb, a boy sold agwa – a peculiarly Egyptian date-bread delicacy – at 4 pence each – while on the other side of the road, two figures stood, a girl and a boy, holding identical cardboard trays in front of them. The girl’s tray was filled with cigarette packets. The boy’s tray was filled with stones.

And there were scenes that must have meant personal sorrow and anguish for those who experienced them. There was a tall, muscular man, wounded in the face by a slice of stone, whose legs simply buckled beside a telephone junction box, his face sliced open yet again on the metal. And there was the soldier on an armoured personnel carrier who let the stones of both sides fly past him until he jumped on to the road among Mubarak’s enemies, putting his arms around them, tears coursing down his face.

Nice change from the Downfall meme.

Interesting excerpt from the interrogation of Assistant Commissioner John Yates by the House of Commons – Culture, Media and Sport Committee on September 2, 2009.

Q1891 Chairman: The evidence which the Guardian produced and indeed gave to this Committee actually came from you originally. It is evidence that was handed over to the court from the police investigation—

Mr Yates: Yes, it was unused material.

Q1892 Chairman:— which reached the Guardian. The key one, which you will be familiar with, is the email and “this is the transcript for Neville”. Why did you not think that it was sufficiently important to interview Neville?

Mr Yates: Well, again we took advice on this and it did form part of the original case and formed part of, what we call, the sensitive, unused material. There are a number of factors around it, some practical issues. Firstly, the email itself was dated, I think, 29 July 2005 and we took possession of it in August 2006, so it was already a minimum of 14 months old, that email, that is the minimum and we do not know when it was actually compiled or sent. We know from the phone company records that they are not kept for that period of time, so there was no data available behind that email. There was nothing to say that Neville, whoever Neville may be, had seen the document and, even if the person, Neville, had read the email, that is not an offence. It is no offence of conspiracy, it is no offence of phone-hacking, it is no offence of any sort at all.

Q1893 Chairman: Sorry to interrupt, but you say there is nothing to say whether Neville had read the email, but you could have asked him.

Mr Yates: Well, if I can finish, there is no clear evidence as to who Neville was or who is Neville. It is supposition to suggest Neville Thurlbeck or indeed any other Neville within the News of the World or any other Neville in the journalist community. Mulcaire's computers were seized and examined. There is nothing in relation to Neville or Neville Thurlbeck in those computers and, supported by counsel latterly and by the DPP, they both are of the view, as we are, that there are no reasonable grounds to suspect that Neville has committed any offence whatsoever and no reasonable grounds to go and interview him.

Q1894 Chairman: Well, it does seem an extraordinary coincidence though that somebody working for the News of the World sends an email, saying, "This is the transcript for Neville" when the chief reporter of the News of the World is called Neville and you think that this is not sufficient to ask Neville Thurlbeck whether he is the Neville referred to in the email.

Mr Yates: Well, there is no evidence of an offence being committed, which is what I said first.

Fascinating blog post which starts out documenting the speed and efficiency with which critical comments about Palin are removed from her page and then chokes on this.

A commenter posted the following at 18:12:

“It’s ok. Christina Taylor Green was probably going to end up a left wing bleeding heart liberal anyway. Hey, as ‘they’ say, what would you do if you had the chance to kill Hitler as a kid? Exactly.”

I think I literally gasped when I read that. Remember, Christina Taylor Green was the 9 year old girl killed by the shooter. Apparently she had been brought there by her mom, who thought she might get a kick out of meeting Rep. Giffords, having recently been elected to her student council.

I assumed, as a matter of course, that this particular comment would be deleted with greatest possible speed.

So I kept hitting refresh, hoping to use this as an example to say, “You see, Palin’s Facebook editing at least has the good judgement to remove clearly offensive content such as this.” But it didn’t come down.

Thanks to Peter Armstrong for the link.