He arrived in Britain as a Jewish refugee in 1940, aged 17, and took the name Robert Maxwell. Ján Ludvík Hoch was born in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1923. Nevertheless, times were hard, and the university administration was delighted to find a benefactor. During the slash-and-burn years of Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, Aberdeen University went through hard times, even though it shares with the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews, a unique advantage over other British universities: its continued existence is guaranteed in the Act of Union that created the United Kingdom in 1707. I encountered this problem when I spent a couple of months on study leave at Aberdeen University in the early 1990s. Think Cecil Rhodes, whose generous donations to Oxford, and the formation of the Rhodes Scholarship scheme, were based on his crackpot theories of racial supremacy, and funded by what we might today call ‘blood diamonds’.īut when a dictator or a crook is outed, how do you wash your hands of the connection? Do you, like Rhodes House, just adjust your criteria so that the scholarships can go to non-white and female recipients? (There was a precedent in their earlier decision, in 1914, not to award any further scholarships to Germans, as required in Rhodes’ original bequest) Or do you try to erase the memory of your institution’s lapse of judgment more thoroughly, by a few strategic resignations, or by eradicating the name or the connection entirely. In a way, it’s the Robin Hood principle at work: there’s no point in robbing from the poor, but soliciting money from the rich means cosying up to some pretty shady characters. Universities have a long and dishonorable tradition of accepting money from rogues and ratbags, and the odd tyrant. As far as I know, no cause and effect has yet been proved, but it looks bad. The director of the London School of Economics, Sir Howard Davies, has just resigned because he accepted a donation of £1.5m for the university from a Gaddafi foundation, just shortly after Saif Gaddafi was awarded a PhD from the LSE. When his son Titus objected, he said, we are told by Suetonius, ‘ Pecunia non olet’ – ‘money doesn’t stink’. The Emperor Vespasian, a notorious tightwad, once introduced a tax on urine – it was used for washing togas, and other chemical purposes.
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