Member

Apparently, in the document we are asking universities to manage external speakers to ensure that we keep out extremists. I am not sure I want university managers, who tend to be on the progressive side, deciding who the extremists are—especially on a day when we have just heard that 27 UK university Islamic societies, including at UCL, Imperial, Bristol, Leeds, Warwick, Cambridge and all sorts of places, have had memorials to Iran’s Supreme Leader. It is not the external speakers, but what is happening in the universities. We think about Professor Michael Ben-Gad, an economics lecturer who has been called an extremist by his own students because he was in the IDF, and been threatened with beheading, or the Jewish chaplain at the University of Leeds whose wife and two children, only a couple of years ago, were forced into hiding. The university authorities let all that happen.