That’s a significant part of the problem right there, isn’t it? If the question is How does a university suddenly break into the global limelight for having graduated Jihadi John and sponsored Haitham al-Haddad? part of the answer lies in the fact that the Westminster University student I quote in my headline believes he’s saying something good about his school when he tells us it’s a place that believes all opinions are valid. He’s boasting.

Presumably not everyone at Westminster University thinks it’s valid to opine that homosexuals should be slaughtered like pigs, or that women whose clitorises are still attached to them are apostates. Probably some people at Westminster can think of yet other invalid opinions, opinions that reflective institutions like universities shouldn’t spend time discussing. The Holocaust never happened. The Earth is flat. The Bush administration planned and carried out 9/11. All non-Islamic artifacts must be destroyed.

To be sure, reflective people should be interested in the phenomenon of large numbers of people believing things like this. The more we know about cruelty, fanaticism, conspiratorial thinking, and the failure of any element of the empirical tradition of thought to take hold, the better off we are.

A university graduating people unable to make basic distinctions between valid and invalid beliefs creates a safe space for fanatics. This is what Westminster University appears to have accomplished.

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Joseph Weissman:

… Emwazi studied in an environment where his sympathies for jihadi terror were considered “the norm”, and therefore unremarkable; praiseworthy, even. Here, his perverse ideas could be nurtured by his surroundings, rather than flagged up as a concern…

In 2006 at the University of Westminster, the ISOC Annual Dinner from that year featured the Al Qaeda recruiter, Anwar Al Awlaki. It also featured hate preachers Murtaza Khan and Haitham Al Haddad – both of whom support Islamic terrorists killing those deemed “apostates”.

… [Jihadi John] walked into a university which had welcomed hate preachers dreaming of an Islamic State.

… [T]here will be a brief flurry of media interest in how Emwazi attended a university which hosted a leading Al Qaeda recruiter just before he joined, and in university extremism in general. When that dies down, [Haitham] Haddad’s invitation to the University of Westminster may well be restored, and we will all go back to ignoring Islamist extremism on-campus, because it takes too much effort to solve, and it’s too awkward to talk about in polite company.

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Avinash Tharoor:

I recall a seminar discussion about Immanuel Kant’s “democratic peace theory,” in which a student wearing a niqab opposed the idea on the grounds that “as a Muslim, I don’t believe in democracy.” Our instructor seemed astonished but did not question the basis of her argument; he simply moved on. I was perplexed, though. Why attend university if you have such a strict belief system that you are unwilling to consider new ideas? And why hadn’t the instructor challenged her? At the time, I dismissed her statement as one person’s outlandish opinion. Later, I realized that her extreme religious views were considerably more prevalent within the institution.

The only thing shocking here is the instructor’s failure to challenge the student. Totally irresponsible; and, for students like the Westminster graduate writing this opinion piece, totally demoralizing.

I don’t think the university itself is advocating extremism, but by failing to prevent the advocacy of such ideas, the institution is attracting students who are sympathetic to them. Students who do not identify with extreme Islamist ideology are being put at risk of discrimination, intimidation and potentially radicalization by the university’s failure to properly handle the situation.

… for having spent years pandering to dangerous ideologues.

************

Getting huffy (“Jihadi John Went to My University – So What?”) isn’t going to solve your problem.

Eh. You don’t wanna know.

You do?

Go here. Scroll down. Start reading.

Charles Horton, a computer sciences professor at the University of Alabama, required his students to buy a textbook he’d written, published by a company he owned.

The you have to buy my book so I can make some money bit is as old as the hills, of course; but Horton went one better by owning the publishing company!

You can’t argue with his results: Over many illustrious years of teaching, he made close to four hundred thousand dollars in this way.

However, this is apparently a felony.

Rev. FGM’s talk at Westminster University has been postponed (awkward timing).

I’m sure he’ll be back soon, with some self-mutilation tips.

See there? Nothing to worry about.

UD thanks an anonymous reader for noticing that the University of Westminster has more than Rev. Female Genital Mutilation to be proud of! The biggest boldest beheadingest believer out there graduated from none other than Westminster University.

Mr. Emwazi, I’m calling from the Westminster University development office…

Sorry? Let me just put this knife down…

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“The timing [of the Rev. FGM] could not be worse for Westminster University, after it was [revealed] that infamous … terrorist killer Jihadi John is a computer studies graduate.” The reverend will share some of his favorite clit-slitting techniques at the university tomorrow. Be there or be sexually intact!

Necks, clitorises – When it comes to the slicing of the body, Westminster University is the go-to place. Maybe it should open a medical school.

The source of the poem is here.

*************************

What Will Survive of Us Is Love

A team of excavators find
Bony lovers intertwined.

The crania of their burial bones
Have been pelted by occultic stones.

… the prodronal stage.

She’ll keep looking out the window.

She’ll let you know if this develops into something.

… is a bit of a mouthful (though it rather nicely echoes AmeriCorps). It refers to American academia’s enormous, and always growing, corps of adjunct instructors. These non-tenured, often massively underpaid, professors do the heavy lifting at many of our schools, teaching lots of classes with little institutional support.

UD‘s friend Joe Fruscione has, with some colleagues, started PrecariCorps, a foundation that offers temporary financial support to adjuncts.

It reminds UD of her town’s Betsy White Fund, whose quiet good works UD has admired for decades.

… antidepressants.

Everest (cough) College, long perceived by observers as a towering fraud on all Americans, has now collapsed, hurling hundreds of suckers down to Base-Camp Debt.

In Canada, the government has forced the for-profit’s closure (UD thanks a reader, Jack, for this news); here in the States, Shit-Mountain Everest has shut itself down

as part of a deal with the Department of Education, which last summer froze the institution’s financial-aid payments after it failed to provide the DOE with a series of required records, including job-placement and attendance statistics.

Why was this stupid scheme allowed to go on for so long? And why are the many other Everests out there still allowed to strand American and Canadian debt-mountaineers? Is anyone really surprised that the latest thing to happen is a debt strike?

On Monday, [fifteen] people who took out loans to attend … announced that they are going on a “debt strike,” and will stop repaying their loans. They believe that they have both ethical and legal grounds for what appears to be an unprecedented collective action…

Wow, unprecedented. Who could have foreseen that if your country has no laws against criminal for-profit antics, suckers will fall for their ploy and eventually – with perfectly plausible moral justification – refuse to pay up?

Hold onto your happy button! Guest speaker Haitham al-Haddad, an expert in the best ways to chop off clitorises, will address Westminster students and faculty tomorrow.

AKA Yeshiva University.

Reynold Levy, in an article about the failure of some significant New York City non-profits, singles out Yeshiva:

Teetering on the brink is Yeshiva University, together with its Einstein School of Medicine and its Cardozo Law School… Where were the board members, whom we assume were holding [Yeshiva and other] precious agencies accountable for prudent and responsible service to others? How is it possible that they utterly failed to exercise basic fiduciary responsibilities? What explains the apparent absence at these institutions of due diligence and the checks and balances normally afforded by well-functioning finance, audit, investment and executive committees? And what about government oversight for [institutions like] Yeshiva …on the receiving end of major public grants and contracts?

Yeshiva’s massively overpaid president, who oversaw the destruction of this school, remains in charge.

Paid shills are always wedging themselves onto university faculties. These people are essentially lobbyists, spokespersons, promotional writers, and any other form of cheerleader you can think of for corporate and government uglies desperate to look less ugly. Think pharma and big oil. Think rich dictatorial post-communist and middle eastern states. These guys want to look legit, and there’s nothing like a life-sized professor doll who, when you pull its string, says A liberal application of antipsychotics will make America’s children all better or Gaddafi represents the middle east’s great democratic hope or the fossil-fuel industry and climate change have nothing to do with one another or Azerbaijan is one hell of a country and a crucially important security partner for America.

These people are often outed, and when they get outed the university gets a wedgie, which is to say that nothing much happens except that the university gets its knickers in a bit of a twist. The Deniability Office is called into play, and it says This person isn’t on a tenure-track, pays her own salary, is an adjunct temporary visiting part-time what was the name again…? Most of these people don’t even lose their academic affiliation. Instead, petulantly, under orders from their department chair, they, okay, disclose on their stupid publications that, okay, their work is paid for by the people they’re praising in the publications, okay? Are you satisfied? Are you happy now? Sheesh!