UCL must be defended

I’m unclear of what exactly Effendi actually wants of universities. In an earlier post, Effendi makes a link between “pant bomber” AbdulMutallab  and the East London Mosque, and in a more recent post says that UCL must take responsibility for AbdulMutallab ‘s radicalisation, and in another where he accuses Sunny of “insidious and ignorant propaganda” again highlights a link with the East London Mosque. I know some people who want to turn UCL into an open-source software house, but this to call for it to transform into a counter terrorism unit is just silly.

Moazzem Begg spoke at UCL in January 2007, and didn’t broadcast an interview with Al-Awlaki until December 2007, and after AbdulMutallab  passed on the reigns of the ISOC presidency to another. How is UCL supposed to have taken action ex-ante of any actionable information? Surely it would be better to point the finger at intelligence agencies? Qasim Rafiq, who was ISOC’s president 2006-2007 reported that Islamic Societies were under pressure in the wake of 7/7 and some action was likely to take place if there was any clear information, and he didn’t have any knowledge of what AbdulMutallab was up to.

I also find the “gateway drug” hypothesis less than compelling. The “gateway drug” analogy is a common trope of the right, applied to everything from Grand Theft Auto to Durex ads. There’s a clear distinction between on-campus groups, such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir, and violent extremists. There’s enough internecine ideological conflict within the neofundamentalist movement that means that HuT neither condone AQs methods nor have any formal links with them. Most individual members also seem to hold an internal psychological limit as they trade off being an active member of an organisation against other desires and interests – which tend to grow after finishing at universities when they realise that a family and job security matters more to them than a political cause built up on a deck of cards. Those who are going to move towards violent extremism will self-select and seek out opportunities for radicalisation.

The Hizb phenomenon, as well as the claims being made about UCL ISOC’s 2007 War-on-Terror must be seen in the context of the wider politics on the campuses of universities. Political parties remain generally unrepresentative, and tend to have small presences on university campuses today. Their members are invariantly career politicians, unconcerned with grass-roots mobilisation and persuasion unless they’re going to play well to the national audience. Labour can say what they will, but the Iraq invasion amidst huge public opposition ended any pretence of representation that many British Muslims felt they had. Which tends to leave the far-left and Hizb-ut-Tahrir to fill in the gap to attract people interested in the politics of the disaffected, and HuT has the social network advantage amongst Muslim students.

However, we cannot deny students from being involved political activities directed against at the policies of the nation-state or that do not call for violence to be enacted against its citizens. Whereas the oft-thinly veiled anti-Semitism of HuT does violate this principle, Islamic Society or SWP members rallying against the “War on Terror” and suggesting that prisoners of all sorts are entitled to due process and humane conditions, and framing the Israel/Palestine conflict as one of between an “imperial power” and “freedom fighters” does not, no matter how unpleasant that statement may seem to rest of us.

When staff and students see comments such as the one quoted by Malcolm Grant, about why we would allow a non-national to become a president of a Students’ Union society, we won’t see it as anything less than an attack on the founding liberal principles of the college. Here’s article 6 of the 1977 UCL Charter (I was trying to find the 1836 original, but it’s somewhere in the library stores):

All persons of the requisite academic standard, whether resident in Our United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland or elsewhere, shall be eligible for admission to the College without any distinction whatsoever and no religious test shall be imposed on any Member of the College nor shall any disability be imposed on the grounds of political belief, sex or race.

We cannot regulate the actions of students due to their religion or any other part of their identity. It should be stated, that UCL was the first university in England to accept students without requiring an Oath to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, was the first to admit women, and the first university to establish a Students’ Union.

Jeremy Bentham, UCL’s spiritual founder and resident of the South Cloisters, was offended by having to make an oath to the Thirty-Nine Articles at Oxford. He later argued against the idea of oaths even in public court, saying that testimonies on oath were required “not in pursuit of the ends of justice, but in pursuit of private sinister ends – indirect hostility to the public ends.”

To which “private sinister ends” are some pursuing in today’s age in “indirect hostility to the public ends” and without benefit to justice? Nothing less than the subjugation of free speech on campuses and the private beliefs of our students to mere public opinion.

Good night and good luck with that.