Between 2010 and 2012, Durham was criticised for accepting a number of donations from controversial sources. On 28 January 2010, Durham hosted a seminar sponsored by the government of Iran, which attracted protests and coverage in the national press. In February 2011, the Durham Student newspaper Palatinate broke the story that a WikiLeaks cable revealed that a series of Iranian seminars at Durham had been funded by the US State Department as "political cover" for contacts with Iran. Vice-Chancellor Chris Higgins claimed in an interview with Palatinate that the funding had not been deliberately hidden and would have been revealed if anyone had asked, but accepted that more should have been done to let participants know the source of the funding. In March 2011, Conservative MP Robert Halfon accused Durham of accepting "blood money" from the Iranian government and launched an Early Day Motion (which attracted no other signatories) calling for a Government enquiry. Later that month it was revealed that the university had accepted a £2.5M donation from the prime minister of Kuwait, Sheikh Nasser Al-Sabah, to endow the Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammad Al-Sabah Chair and a related research programme in global security, leading to further criticism.
