Neda Agha-Soltan Graduate Scholarship the country the status of "international basket case". While the problems of Iran were no longer front-page news, it said, they still existed. In the circumstances, the editorial concluded, "A scholarship at The Queen’s College in memory of Neda Soltan is, indeed, politically motivated, and admirably so". UK diplomatic sources, speaking anonymously to "The Times", said that if the government had been asked, it would have advised against the creation of the scholarship, because Iran would see it as an act of provocation, and because it would interfere with efforts to free Iranians working for the British Embassy in Tehran
Neda Agha-Soltan Graduate Scholarship financial resources of their own to study at Oxford. He said that other universities were winning the competition to attract the best graduate students, adding that donations such as these were "absolutely vital" for the college to be able to "attract and retain the best young minds". A college spokesman said that the scholarship had not been set up as part of a political decision, and if the initial donations had been refused, this would have been interpreted as a political decision too. The university (which did not receive a letter of complaint from the embassy) made it clear that