Who can tell where the popular uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East will lead? Potentially they have huge consequences for the world — as big in their effect as the collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11 or the financial crash of 2008. Nobody predicted this revolution (or if they did, we didn’t hear) and Western nations especially have been caught on the back foot. No regime between the Gulf and Morocco seems secure, always of course excepting Israel (though Israel now feels much less secure as a state). The crash of moral gears is a pitiful sound, as a bunch of Western leaders, including Obama and Cameron, shift from praising the dictatorships of Egypt and Libya to supporting their opponents in the streets.

Britain has changed tack twice in the past 10 years in its attitude to Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Originally he was seen as a vile enemy whose agents sold weapons to the Irish Republican Army, shot a policewoman on the streets of London, and supplied the bomb that brought down the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie. Then came Tony Blair’s ‘deal in the desert’, where Gaddafi renounced his plans for nuclear arms in exchange for the friendly embrace of the West and revenue from the oil wells that BP was soon sinking in the Libyan desert. Whether in fact he was close to getting nuclear arms is a moot point — maybe he just liked scaring people with talk — but the pact transformed his image from mad, bad and dangerous to merely eccentric. Quite charming in his robes and military outfits, if you like that kind of thing, and close to Michael Jackson in style, down even to the face-lift and ringlets. Now, with blood on the streets of Libya, we’ve gone back to the original version. Gaddafi is a bloodthirsty dictator who bombs and shoots fellow Libyans, and Britain (and pretty well everyone else) wants him out.

So far, the biggest victim of these turnabouts in our moral attitudes has been the London School of Economics. The LSE is one of Britain’s most distinguished educational institutions, and over more than a century it has produced economists, social scientists and politicians who’ve helped shape the world for better or worse. Founded in 1895 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw — all three of them Fabian socialists — the LSE soon gained a reputation for its international outlook and Leftist ethos. Sixteen Nobel laureates either studied or taught there and its alumni include people as various as B.R. Ambedkar and George Soros. That reputation came close to the brink of ruin this month when the LSE’s director, Howard Davies, resigned following allegations of the LSE’s unscrupulous dealings with Libya.

What did the LSE do wrong? In 2007 it signed a £2.2 million contract with Libya’s Economic Development Board by which LSE staff could train the country’s civil servants and young managers. Then in 2009 it agreed to accept a £1.5 million donation from the Gaddafi International Charity Foundation, £300,000 of which was received and has now been converted into scholarships for students from Libya. Given that British universities are always hunting out private money and that British foreign policy then thoroughly approved of Gaddafi — even Amnesty International reported his regime was improving — only hindsight allows us to condemn this behaviour as unwise. More questionable is Howard Davies’s role as an advisor to Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, which paid the LSE about £35,000 for his services. The real trouble, however, comes with something that happened between the £2.2 million contract and the £1.5 million donation. In 2008, the LSE awarded a PhD to Gaddafi’s son, Saif, who just happens to run the Gaddafi International Charity Foundation. Later, Saif gave an LSE lecture in honour of the late Marxist academic, Ralph Miliband (father of the Labour leader), where he was introduced in the warmest terms and praised for his beliefs in ‘soft power’ and civil society.

The money and the doctorate may be entirely unrelated, but it would take a saint not to suspect a connection. The professor, David Held, Saif’s tutor, was appointed to the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation in June 2009, almost a month before the LSE announced that it would accept the £1.5 million donation. (Later the LSE quietly forced Held to give up the appointment.) Speculation persists that Saif’s thesis depended on plagiarism. Meghnad Desai, an emeritus professor at LSE, was one of Saif’s two external examiners and says that he didn’t treat Saif or his thesis in any way leniently. As to the charges of plagiarism, the truth of which Desai now seems to accept, he wrote in the Guardian that he could “only say that we were never informed of this by his supervisors or anyone else”. Saif Gaddafi, meanwhile, hasn’t turned out to be the progressive young chap the LSE took him for — it wasn’t soft power but the iron fist that became evident when he promised last month that his father’s regime would fight the crowds in the streets “to the last man”.

It amounts to a sad and chastening story. The LSE isn’t alone in its turning a blind eye to the sources of its funding: Oxford’s Saïd Business School was, after all, financed by the Saudi arms dealer, Wafic Saïd, and Arab oil money is a fact of life in many British institutions, including Premier League football. How many recipients asked questions about democracy and human rights before they took cash from repressive regimes? As the world’s prosperity depends to a large extent on the Middle East’s oil, why would they? In recognizing this reality, you might say that the LSE has behaved no worse than most governments, oil companies and car-drivers. But the idea that universities and academics live in a purer world, the so-called ivory tower, untainted by the grubby needs of commerce, devoted to the disinterested pursuit of learning — that idea has been dealt a blow by a branch of academe now sometimes known as the Libyan School of Economics.

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If Saif Gaddafi did plagiarize his doctorate he wouldn’t be the only one. Plagiarism — that is, using some other writer’s words and thoughts without acknowledgment — has soared as a student crime since the invention of online search engines in the late 1990s. The favoured method of detection is a program of textual comparison called Turnitin, which ranges far across the web to find forms of words similar to those in the student’s essay. If such passages are found they appear marked yellow in the work under investigation. Every British university uses Turnitin and, according to reports, Saif’s essay has recently been revisited with the Turnitin treatment. But it’s by no means foolproof. Texts need to have a digital presence before duplication can be discovered, and even in 2011 not all texts are online. And what Turnitin can never discover is whether the essay or thesis has actually been written by the student who claims it as his own. There is at least one company in Britain (and perhaps more in the United States of America) who, at a price from £500 to £5,000, will knock out a ‘bespoke’ piece of work that it guarantees is ‘plagiarism proof’. The true authors of these works are hard to discover, but former or present academics must be high in the list of suspects.

Plagiarism has become such a headache for places of higher learning all over the world that there are now academic conferences devoted to it. Three years ago I attended a two-day event in Newcastle, where one delegate described this form of cheating and its detection as an ‘arms race’ between university authorities and ever-more resourceful students. But are some subjects more prone to plagiarism than others? I expected English literature — the scene of illicit borrowings for centuries — to feature, but that wasn’t the answer. According to many people I met in Newcastle, business studies provided the most culprits, especially in second degrees. And what about the students — was a certain kind of student more likely to plagiarize? The delegates became careful in their language at this point, but there is no disguising the fact that ‘international’ (i.e. foreign) students are disproportionately represented among offenders.

The reasons are much the same as those that led the LSE to Libya. British universities need money and foreign students, paying three or four times the fees of British students, have become an essential part of the educational economy; two-thirds of the LSE’s intake, for example, come from abroad and last year foreign postgraduate students outnumbered those from the UK for the first time. Well-known brand names, such as the LSE, can select the best-equipped applicants. Less distinguished institutions may not be so lucky. The standard of written English among foreign students is often poor — and yet the student’s future life may depend on sticking the letters MSc or MB after his or her name. So they consult Google and press cut-and-paste.

Memorably, a college lecturer put it to me like this: “Imagine. Your family — maybe even your village — has clubbed together to pay your fees and expenses, which could be many thousands of pounds. How could you go back home without your degree?” I murmured that the temptation to cheat must be very great. “Temptation is the wrong word,” she said. “They’re making a completely rational, pragmatic decision. They’re here to collect a qualification, a piece of paper, and then go away again. You think they’re going to go away without the thing they’ve come to get?”

All we can safely say about Dr Saif Gaddafi is that he certainly didn’t.