… for Universities UK to support the policy of separating men from women at lectures and debates.”
… for Universities UK to support the policy of separating men from women at lectures and debates.”
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December 13th, 2013 at 5:18AM
I usually really admire you but you haven’t bothered to check this at all.
1. It was a hypothetical.
2. It has nothing at all to do with class time.
3. It is do to with open, voluntary activities.
4. The original legal opinion (and it was a legal opinion) was that as long as it was voluntary it was fine.
5. There are huge numbers of segregated activities at universities ranging from women’s groups, sports teams to choices.
December 13th, 2013 at 6:54AM
Hi Farah: You need not only to reread the original document, but to update yourself as to reaction to it. It has already been subject to a more serious legal review (Universities UK itself requested the review because of the uproar) and its segregationism has been rejected. I’ve been covering the story as new events occur, so for details just read my last few posts.
More important, arguably, than the legal niceties, is the powerful cultural reaction – from the Education Secretary, the Labour Party, and thousands of ordinary citizens who’ve signed petitions and gathered in protest – to the original document. Labour calls the document’s defense of sex segregation, and Dandridge’s subsequent defense of its defense, a “horror.” The Education Secretary calls it “a disgrace.” All of us seem to be missing the innocuous, routine, gloriously voluntary aspect of this that seems so obvious to you.
Then there’s the Prime Minister.
December 13th, 2013 at 8:32AM
Hi, Farah,
For me the difference is that sport teams and student groups, although they might enrich university life, are not part of the core purpose of the university. A university’s core purpose is to provide an open forum for civil intellectual enquiry and discourse. That forum includes not only coursework, but also research, lectures, symposia, and so forth. Requiring people to self-segregate on the basis of sex (or race, or sexual preference, or . . . ) as a precondition for participating in a university’s intellectual life does (among other things) limit dialogue and suggest that it is somehow a problem that these different groups exist at a university.