But the commentary is important. The heads of England’s universities just issued an apartheid document. That is stunning. It shocked and outraged the nation, and within hours of this document’s appearance the Prime Minister called it for what it was: A disgraceful expression of separate-but-equal coming from the very custodians of British culture.

When something this twisted happens, you don’t merely wipe out the document (this was done quickly and briskly); you settle in for a review of the circumstances that might have made possible, in the heart of one of the world’s great liberal democratic cultures, this grotesquerie.

And so, in the Telegraph, Graeme Archer begins.

… “Universities UK” … has given succour to injustice-merchants whose politics are just as wicked as those who devised race-based apartheid.

… [Gender apartheid] is alien to the British way of life, and intolerable. … “We’re just promoting tolerance of those who wish to be segregated.” My response to that is unprintable in The Daily Telegraph… [I] despair that creatures exist in British public life capable of writing such moronic “guidance” in the first place.

GENDER SEGREGATION ADVICE WITHDRAWN.

His office has entered the fray because of the “massive public backlash” against the original segregationist document.

And how do the original segregationists dig themselves a deeper hole? They say things like this:

“It is very hard to see any university agreeing to a request for segregation that was not voluntary and did not have the broad support of those attending.”

Broad support, you see.

I mean, ol’ UD walks in and sees that friendly little SISTERS MAY ONLY ENTER BY THIS DOOR AND MAY ONLY SIT HERE sign, and let’s say she sees several burqas in her mandated section and you know she’s actually strongly opposed to full veiling; she actively supports the French law banning it…

So how awkward. Really, how awkward to find herself in a setting forcing her to identify, to sit only, with this particular group of people who turn out to be her sisters…! Most events of this sort just have people in them – fellow students, faculty, interested locals – but this event turns out to be a family event, and UD is enjoined to regard her fellow segregated women as her sisters.

Yet these women are not her sisters; she is in fact appalled at the way the organizers of the event have forced her into a profound lie about her deepest familial as well as social identity.

Finding it totally unthinkable that she would ever sit in a room and accede to these constraints and manipulations, UD flees.

Still, there’s broad support for the segregation, you see…

… for Universities UK to support the policy of separating men from women at lectures and debates.”

Speaking on the Today programme, Nicola Dandridge, the chief executive of Universities UK, had the gall to insist that gender segregation is “not something which is so alien to our culture that it has to be regarded like race segregation”. But requesting that women in a public place sit separately away from men is entirely alien to 21st-century British culture, and something that should be condemned as strongly as Islamophobia. Universities UK needs to review its guidelines, urgently.

That review has been done for it (see post just below this one).

Official guidelines which endorse sex segregation at British universities have been declared potentially unlawful by Britain’s equality watchdog, The Telegraph can disclose.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) announced it will help re-write guidance, published by Universities UK (UUK) last month, which said Muslim societies and other groups were entitled to practice gender segregation at public meetings on campus.

Mark Hammond, the EHRC’s chief executive, said gender segregation was “not permissible” under equalities laws, adding that UUK’s guidance required clarification.

Fuck clarification. It requires getting its butt kicked.

Bravo to everyone who signed the petition, gathered in front of the offices of the yucky UUK, and just kept this thing at the front of the news in England.

“[I]n an academic meeting or in a lecture open to the public it is not, in the commission’s view, permissible to segregate by gender.”

Yes, well, the Telegraph just a few minutes ago reported that the “backlash” against sanctioned sex segregation in British universities is getting rather intense. Opponents to enforced segregation (which turns out to be almost everyone who has weighed in, except, of course, the suddenly very very quiet people at Universities UK) are going to

send … teams to meetings and use the kind of techniques that were pioneered in countries like the US and South Africa in terms of black segregation.

…The prospect of groups deliberately provoking the organisers of gender segregated events, raising the prospect of tempers flaring, will be a matter of concern for vice-chancellors whose guidelines were intended to defuse tensions rather than enflame them.

It’s easy for the vice-chancellors to get a glimpse of what fun awaits. They need only Google Beit Shemesh.

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More commentary.

On the Today programme this morning Justin Webb covered the decision by Universities UK to allow fundamentalist speakers to segregate women from men at public meetings.

With a characteristic disdain for accepted standards of behaviour, Universities UK refused to go on air and answer his questions.

This should get interesting. Making a fuss about enforced separate but equal seating at British university events will have one important side effect: It will draw attention to the social views of separatist speakers, some of whom call not merely for the separation, silencing, and total veiling of women, but also for the death of homosexuals.

… in front of the offices of hapless Universities UK, the organization that, in a recent document, told that country’s universities that they can enforce segregation of men and women at public, university-sponsored events.

The news clip starts with invited speaker Laurence Krauss [scroll down] expressing disgust, and leaving the room, when he scans his audience at a recent university-sponsored forum on religion and realizes he’s been tricked into appearing at a separate but equal event. The clip continues with coverage of yesterday’s well-attended demonstration in front of UUK’s offices.

Krauss’s disgust and exit were spontaneous, the instinctive reactions of a decent human being to indecency. The various forms of protest at sanctioned gender apartheid in British universities – a petition, the demonstration – are planned, organized responses. As long as both forms of response continue to be expressed – instinctive disgust on which one is willing to act, and considered political strategies – democracy will win through.

Nick Cohen, in the Spectator, is as shocked and embarrassed as the rest of us that leaders at British universities have officially condoned separate but equal.

Universities UK is taking a momentous step, which goes against 150 years of struggle for women’s emancipation… They want to allow segregation at public meetings in publicly financed institutions. Or to put it another way, obscurantist clerics are trying to take over public spaces, and the universities are going along with them… . Rosa Parks … fought back. Naively, I assumed that her battle had been won. Now it looks like we must fight it all over again.

And once again let UD note that the very momentousness of this step, its outrageous offense to universities and to free societies, seems to have been a healthy shock to many people’s systems.

The petition to rescind the endorsement of sexual apartheid at British universities is already at seven thousand signatures.

Don’t let the vice-chancellors who issued the endorsement get away with the segregation of women at their universities.

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On some level, this action is so grotesque that UD continues to have trouble believing that it has happened.

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But it has happened. Aux armes.

… “Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever.”

The petition condemning sanctioned gender apartheid in British universities is here.

The petition calling for the rescinding of a Universities UK document permitting sex segregation in British universities is heating up the airwaves, having in only a couple of days attracted almost seven thousand signatures.

Manfredi La Manna, an economist at the University of St Andrews, writes to the vice-chancellors of Scottish universities:

[M]ake a stand for Scottish universities and state unequivocally that the abhorrent guidance on external speakers issued recently by [UK Universities] does not apply to Scottish
 universities.

The document mandates any British university to accede unconditionally to the conditions imposed by any external speaker who demands a gender segregated audience.

Indeed, in the Orwellian newspeak language of the UUK document, it is the “imposition” of an “unsegregated” area contravening the “genuinely held religious belief” of the speaker demanding segregation that British universities should oppose so that the “freedom of speech of the religious group or speaker is not curtailed unlawfully”.

Do you really want your female students to be treated as sex 
objects and second-class citizens and to be marshalled into special female-only pens so that the 
“genuinely held religious belief” of external speakers is not 
challenged? Would you have 
acceded to the demand for race segregated audiences by the Dutch Reformed Church (before it apologised for its role in propping up apartheid)?

La Manna is quite right to note the Orwellian newspeak by which, as women are herded into pens, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

After pointing out that the document is “horrible,” “wretched,” and “stupid,” Charles Crawford goes on to sketch a non-disgraceful policy.

[For] an open event no segregation along gender or other lines is acceptable…

As with all grotesque illiberal eruptions, the UUK document is in fact bolstering freedom of speech by mobilizing people against its vileness. Sometimes people need to be reminded of the democratic basics. Fools like the authors of this document provide reminders.

… many of them distinguished. Whew. I always worry that people won’t get their act together when things this bad happen. Women will not be segregated by bigots in British universities. Not if the rest of us have anything to say about it.

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Already over five thousand people have signed the petition. That was fast.