To help maintain the grounds, the university has recently hired a development director, Bob Bledsoe, to solicit donations.
Recognising his weakening ground on universities, Clegg has begun in recent weeks to bet the shop on his pupil premium.
To fill them, "companies need boots on the ground at universities," says Henry Chesbrough, a business professor who studies innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.
He argues: "Kew is one of the last bastions of taxonomy, a branch of biology that has been driven to ground in universities because it doesn't yield immediate impact.
He said: "Outside this tiny supergroup, the global higher education world is changing, and some leading lights in the US and UK, for example, household names, have lost ground, while universities in China, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea are all making progress.
"Tar sands need to be kept in the ground and universities should divest from any company digging them out".
"I want an exemption from the result on the grounds the university did not conduct the review and re-marking procedures they were supposed to," he said.
The hangings often took place on the grounds of universities, with fellow-students and parents forced to watch.
Currently, people are allowed to carry concealed handguns in the grounds of universities but it is illegal to take them inside any public building.
With global energy demand projected to nearly double by 2050, the world needs America's leadership, its ability to innovate, its ground-breaking universities and its educated and engaged people.
"When I visited my old stamping ground near the university, it had all changed.
