who wrote Junior's PhD?
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- Published on Wednesday, 09 March 2011 08:43
- Written by Erik
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A part of the LSE Libya Links scandal is that the son of the dictator, Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, got a PhD from the LSE. It was clearly David Held who set this up, roping in two professors from the Philosophy Dept as his supervisors, Nancy Cartright and Alex Voorhoeve. The internal examiner for the PhD was Held's good friend Lord Desai, and the external examiner was Held's good friend Tony McGrew, with whom Held has written some seven books. Is that "conflict of interest" or what?
Now the newspapers are reporting that Saif Gaddafi didn't even write the dissertation himself but it was ghostwritten for him. The Independent claims that it was written by a Libyan who later was rewarded with an ambassadorship in Austria. The Mail on Sunday says it was written by a team which included Omran Bukres, a Libyan official, and a young Cambridge graduate, Flora Rose and an American, Bruce Allyn, who's worked at Harvard.
There are many unbelievable things about this story, but the most unbelievable is that the supervisors and the examiners didn't find out. They MUST have known! After about 10 minutes of talking to Gaddafi Junior it should have been completely obvious that he wasn't the author. There is no way you can cover up this kind of a thing. It makes you wonder whether the supervisors really were doing their job.
Another strange thing: why was Cartright the supervisor? She's a philosopher of science, which really has nothing to do with Gaddafi Jr's topic. And how involved was Alex Voorhoeve actually? In a Dutch newspaper he claims he only read two of the seven chapters. Strange!
Btw, you can read the guy's PhD right here (I've downloaded it to my own website).
