… 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.

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

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.

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.

[The University of Florida] is now studying new ways to combat cheating as it launches an online university in the spring. This includes software that uses cameras to monitor students as they take tests, said Jen Day Shaw, dean of students.

Surely you can do better than that. Multiple cameras monitored by multiple camera monitors glaring down at a person trying to be engaged in independent thought is nothing. After all, getting a friend to dress up like you and take your exam (take your whole course) is a piece of cake.

No, no. Here’s where you have to go, UF. Body sensors. That person trying to focus, think, and write needs to be hooked up – heart rate, sweat production, digit-movement patterns… Fingerprinting each time the person logs on. And more.

And what of the authentication of the professor/ facilitator/ air traffic controller? Ever met the person you’ve hired (or your for-profit vendor has provided) to teach the course? Even if you have, how do you know that’s the person teaching the course? If you can’t authenticate the instructor’s identity, the instructor can give the course to a drudge in India, take payment for the course, and give the drudge a cut. That way the instructor can spend her time in a spa or writing an article or something. Just like Julius Nyang’oro, she has figured out a way to collect a salary for doing nothing.

So the instructor will have to be surveilled pretty constantly too. Recall the AAUP draft report on online courses:

Online teaching platforms and learning management systems may permit faculty members to learn whether students in a class did their work and how long they spent on certain assignments. Conversely, however, a college or university administration could use these systems to determine whether faculty members were logging into the service “enough,” spending “adequate” time on certain activities, and the like.

Dylan said it long ago:

I would not be so all alone. Everybody must get stoned.

Everybody – student, air traffic controller, supervisor of online air traffic controller, executive vice president in charge of whether faculty members are logging in often enough — everybody must get filmed.

Well, they’ll film ya when you’re trying to be so good
They’ll film ya just a-like they said they would
They’ll film ya when you’re tryin’ to go home
Then they’ll film ya when you’re there all alone
But I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get filmed

Well, they’ll film you when you walk all alone
They’ll film you when you are walking home
They’ll film you and then say you are brave
They’ll film you when you are set down in your grave
But I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get filmed

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.

“Somebody once asked me how many professors work for me, and I said if you can ever find a professor who thinks he or she works for anybody, let me know.”

University of Washington President Michael K. Young.

… Rice.