… the Labour Party’s spokesperson, Chuka Umunna, who was way out in front on the UUK gender segregation scandal. Before any other politician went on record, Umunna spoke very strongly on BBC Radio.

Go here and start listening at 2:45:17.

“I was horrified by what I heard in that report. Let me be absolutely clear. A future Labour government would not tolerate or allow … segregation in our universities. It offends basic norms in our society. Universities are public funded places of research and teaching… There is no place for state-sponsored segregation… We won’t have it.”

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.

Barry Petschesky at Deadspin reminds us that you can identify everyone at your university who wears glasses and take them out to the public square and shoot them through the head, but that won’t necessarily help your football stats or put more butts in the seats on game day.

His caution is prompted by the panic and confusion at the University of Kentucky, a school that has sacrificed everything for football, but isn’t able to fill its stadium. Seeking a cause, one fan tells a local radio host that the problem is that the school’s too intellectual. There are professors and students there. Professors are hostile to football. A lot of the students are from foreign countries, and they don’t even understand football, much less watch it.

Cosmopolitans and intellectuals will have to go if UK wants to bring its football program back.

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UD says this guy is jumping the gun. The picture is not as urgent as he would have you believe. UK has succeeded in making its academic ranking plunge, and there’s every reason to assume this trend will continue.

And do you really have to purge the university of its students and professors? UK hasn’t even begun looking into, for instance, the system of threats, retaliations, and incentives many other university ticket offices have adopted in order to get people to attend their football games. Let’s exhaust moderate measures before we go nuclear.

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UD thanks Derek.

Programs that bleed money schools could use to educate their students; programs that feature games in huge expensive stadiums full of nobody in the stands; programs that have brought academic shame, ridicule, and corruption to their universities; programs that…

You know the drill.

Among several such freak shows in this country, some stand out as truly pathological in their drive to debase themselves. One of these is the University of Massachusetts, haunt of hopeless teams, gaping stadiums, and marauding students.

Now most professors, as I’ve noted before, cultivate a studied indifference toward the loud non-stop foulness big-time sports brings to their campus; but at places like U Mass things have a tendency to get so repulsive that eventually, for a few professors, repression fails. Like take for instance Max Page (here’s his cool website). Page is a real misfit at U Mass – a seriously educated, reflective, activist intellectual. He’ll surely leave the campus soon. But meanwhile he is making one hell of a fuss about the sports program there. He co-chaired a faculty committee on football, and made a little speech about the game to his colleagues.

Page … said “There are far, far better uses for these millions of dollars.”

He went on to describe the current state of UMass football as a “failure of epic proportions” …

“I want to have everyone be aware about promises about the future costs, given that none of the promises have been realized, in terms of the costs,” Page said. “Attendance is far below what was promised. The revenues are much lower than expected. The team has not performed well, and the coach, some have argued, has behaved even worse. And the move to Gillette (Stadium) – the ace in the hole of this effort – has been a resounding disappointment, to say the least.

“How much of our precious resources and our tax dollars and our student tuition dollars should we waste on the enterprise?” he continued. “Is it $10 million? Is it $20 million? It’s it $50 million? You should ask yourself ‘What is the point at which you say enough is enough?'”

Well, let’s see. What has, say, another big public university, Penn State, had to pay out lately because of its football program? There’s a running tally. UD has been following it. The latest reports have put it at $171 million.… But no, that’s not fair. That’s just the scandal. The scandal has cost that much so far. The football program’s a whole other thing.

I’m sure U Mass football will never generate any scandals. The only, uh, outside cost U Mass football consistently produces is post-riot clean-up bills.

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.”

It started with Bernard Madoff (it’s his anniversary!) and Ezra Merkin, and the world of vicious greed they brought to Yeshiva University. By the time these two venerated trustees of the school were brought down, Yeshiva had not only lost over a hundred million dollars to them; it had lost its reputation. Yeshiva is after all a religious school, and is held to high moral standards. Now it was in the gutter.

Yeshiva tumbled yet further with revelations that sexual abuse of students at a Yeshiva school had taken place for decades and been ignored, denied. A class action against the university will cost it hundreds of millions of dollars by the time Yeshiva decides to settle.

Throughout these and other scandalous instances of mismanagement and moral turpitude, the school has been led by a man who is one of the highest compensated university presidents in America. So there you have greed again — a greed shared with other top administrators at a school that presents itself as an institutional embodiment of spiritual piety. Even as Moody’s has downgraded this shabbier and shabbier operation, to the point where Yeshiva’s credit rating is now in the same gutter as its reputation, this president and his top managers continued to reward themselves.

Professors? Those who are due to retire cannot retire; their retirement funds are suddenly nowhere to be found, and they will have to keep working for a long, long time.

It’s within the realm of possibility that even here they will run into difficulty. (Repulsive details of the human cost of robbing your school blind here.) Yeshiva may have to close its doors.

… of humiliating and battering to death nineteen year olds.

In addition to the more than 30 student complaints against [Naropa University Professor Don] Matthews filed in the last 18 months, [Naropa President Charles] Lief described the two incidents that led administrators to suspend him for the rest of the semester.

Lief said Matthews informed officials and students that he would not speak for the rest of the semester in his classes until bias was eliminated at Naropa.

“We got significant expressions of concern from students about what that meant about finishing their coursework,” Lief said. “Students who were in courses that were required for their degrees naturally did express some concern.”

It’s the details that get to you. That university students riot after football games and fuck up the neighborhoods unfortunate enough to lie near campus is obvious, routine. But that university students rip trees out of the ground – that Michigan State University students hacked trees to death and then jumped up and down on their limbs while burning them (enjoy the positively medieval imagery here) is, UD will admit, shocking. She’s been covering, for years, drunk students rioting after football games; but this new form of barbarism truly rivets her attention.

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.

You understand the primitive sadism at the heart of many fraternities when this sort of story breaks, when the media doesn’t yet have all the information, but knows that a college student has been ritualistically killed.

[A Baruch College freshman died in the hospital after having been] at a Tunkhannock Township [Pennsylvania] residence… [About] 30 members of the New York City Pi Delta Psi fraternity had traveled there for the weekend. [The freshman,] one of four pledges to the fraternity, was allegedly injured early Sunday morning in a ritual in the yard of the residence, which is about 30 miles north of Allentown.

Ritual, ritual, ritual — what might that be?

Look no farther than Florida A&M. Last year, their marching band beat a band member to death in a hazing ritual. If UD had to guess (we’ll see if she’s right when the police report comes out), she’d say the fine folks at Pi Delta Psi simply beat the kid to death.