What better place to read about a controversy surrounding a degree from Oxford than in the BBC Middle East Report?

For years, Iran’s Interior Minister Ali Kordan has claimed to hold a doctorate from Oxford University and taken increased pay as a result.

But in recent months, it emerged that the document was a crude forgery, containing several misspellings.

As for the minister, he did not even seem to know the name of the institution, which he continued to describe as the “London Oxford University”.

In fact, it turned out he did not have a degree from any university, despite having worked as a university lecturer.

Things were not made better when a President’s assistant tried to bribe away the impeachment motion for Kordan. They were made worse again as the President himself suggested the degree was worth nothing more than its parchment anyway:

As for President Ahmadinejad, he angered academics and Iran’s many hard-working students by arguing that degrees did not matter as they were only “pieces of paper.”

The story makes this out to be a major stumbling moment for the President, among “growing discontent”, but somehow I think it is just a symptom of greater discontent. America certainly has seen its own share of trouble with ongoing investigations into the Bush Administration through two terms, but it was the economic conditions and clear lack of leadership qualities, rather than corruption and graft, that led to the dramatic shift in popular opinion.