Students’ Union leaders at the London School of Economics have condemned their university’s decision to name a new lecture theatre after the founder and lifelong ruler of Abu Dhabi, which has a history of human abuses.

LSE was pledged a £2.5 million donation by the Emirates Foundation, an Abu Dhabi-based charity, to build the theatre in December 2006.

The theatre forms the centrepiece of a New Academic Building on Kingsway designed to expand teaching space beyond the School’s small Aldwych base, and opens for lectures this week.

But LSE Students’ Union condemned the decision, saying that it was wrong to accept a donation from a state “with such a well-documented history of human rights abuses.”

They added that “to name a lecture theatre after a dead dictator with suspected links to Holocaust denial and anti-semitism is completely beyond the pale”.

The United Arab Emirates is not a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

But Professor Fred Halliday, an expert on the international relations of the Middle East told LSE student paper The Beaver that the Sheikh was “in the round, a reasonable if very conservative ruler. He did not kill or torture people.”

LSE’s vice-chancellor, Howard Davies, told The Beaver that no concerns about the theatre’s name had been raised by students since the building initiative was announced as a possibility in autumn 2006, saying, “It is surprising that twenty-one months later this has suddenly become an issue.”

The Union’s sabbatical officers said the had school not mentioned the name the theatre would have, and said that they had first heard about the Sheikh Zayed theatre when conferencing space in the New Academic Building was advertised on the LSE website.

“Sheikhgate”, as students involved in the LSE Students’ Union have begun to call the controversy, has renewed debate on the vetting of donations to the university, recalling a similar campaign against the use of Sheikh Zayed’s name for a planned interfaith institute at Harvard University five years ago.

The dispute ended when Abu Dhabi authorities retracted a projected $2.5 million donation to the institute and shut down the Zayed Centre.

Campaigners claim the Sheikh to be connected with the Zayed Centre, an Arab League think tank named after him, which allegedly published antisemitic literature and hosted Holocaust deniers to speak at its events between 1999 and 2003.

Davies has greatly increased donations to the School since entering office in 2003, raising £25 million in both 2007 and 2008 compared to between £8 and £9 million in the year before he moved to LSE from chairing the Financial Services Authority.

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