It’s embarrassing for London Business School that it awarded an honorary fellowship to ex-Royal Bank of Scotland CEO, Fred Goodwin, on July 17, 2008, just as the financial crisis was about to get into full swing.
And it’s understandable, perhaps, that LBS would not exactly want to crow about its association.
Goodwin, after all, is a leading face of the meltdown – a man reviled for his pension, over-extended deal-making, and vicious cost-cutting.
But, if you were LBS, would you pretend the award never happened?
That appears to be what London Business School is trying to do. Go to Fred Goodwin’s Wikipedia page, and click on footnote 35 (“London Business School Press Release, 17 July 2008, Sir Fred Goodwin awarded an honorary fellowship (PDF)”) and you’ll find the link goes to the main News page, rather than the press release.
A similar thing happens if you search from LBS’s home page (although the title does appear in the results).
Most intriguing of all, if you go to LBS’s News Archive, you’ll find the whole of July 2008 missing – as if nothing happened that month. See here (click to enlarge):
LBS’s spokesperson, Katherine Lakeland, says the school has not removed anything intentionally; a web overhaul is to blame:
We’re looking into this at the moment, and, as you pointed out, the whole folder for that month’s news is missing, not just the press release about Sir Fred, so we would certainly not have intentionally removed this. Thanks for drawing our attention to that and our tech team are trying to resolve this glitch (hence the need for our web-fit!).
July 2008, though, is the only month missing, and links to other press releases work fine. The archive has been incomplete since at least early-March, when I first tried it, and it’s ten days now since Lakeland said LBS was fixing the problem.
At the time of the crisis, there were calls for LBS to strip Goodwin, but LBS resisted the idea. It now says:
The decision to award an honorary fellowship to Sir Fred was taken by the School in autumn 2007 and awarded in summer 2008. It was made in recognition of the breadth of Sir Fred’s achievements during the entirety of his career to date, including his service as chair of a number of government task forces and membership of a series of international advisory panels as well as his eight year role as Chief Executive at the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Other schools, such as the LSE, have been accused of handing out fellowships in return for gifts or favours. But Lakeland says LBS has never received any financial contributions from Goodwin, or RBS.
LBS made its award, it seems, simply because it thought Goodwin was doing a good job.
(Image: from LBS’s “Alumni News” issue 117, still available at LBS’s web site, PDF).
UPDATE: As of September 2nd, 2011, the link had not re-appeared. Either LBS’s site overhaul is taking a long time, or there’s another explanation.
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