A review of policy on radicalisation will call for more monitoring of students by university and college lecturers, the BBC understands.
Calls for more analysis of work to look for signs of a growing threat are likely to be resisted by staff who fear they would be seen as spies.
I would hope they do resist. Indeed, I would expect them to categorically refuse. It is not up to university lecturers to get involved in the politics of their students – unless that is the subject, of course. They are there to teach. That’s it.
However, it seems not:
One suggestion is that lecturers should more closely analyse essays and work submitted by students to spot troubling or revealing ideas, for example a student who is consistently arguing that attacks on civilians are justified.
Troubling ideas? What might they be? Are people not allowed to have ideas that the state might find troubling? I’d have thought the idea that the political class should all be dancing the Tyburn jig might trouble them just a little – others of us might find it less troubling, even a little pleasing. But it is just a thought and thinking thoughts – no matter how gory and misanthropic – is not a crime… yet.
This little gem form James Brandon of the Quilliam foundation (an organisation that smells suspiciously like a fake charity):
“The same as university lecturers for example see it as their duty to tackle racism, sexism, homophobia, I think they should also feel it’s their duty to tackle radical, extreme and intolerant thoughts which are justified through Islamist ideology.”
No. It. Is. Not. None of this is the duty of a university lecturer. The duty of a university lecturer is to deliver lectures on their subject matter. It is not to delve about in the private thoughts and beliefs of their students. Because, and this is really, really important; it is none of their business.
The law is set up, rightly, to deal with actions not thoughts.
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Addendum. It seems that the government is ceasing funding the Quilliam Foundation. That’s no bad thing, given their use of 1984 as a handbook.
Now, the government proposes to end core funding for the organisation and to restrict it to bidding for project funding on a case-by-case basis. Quilliam predicts that, if this happens, it will fold, and do so very soon.
Fine by me.
Pleased to see you’re against this. It’s positioned as “if a nuclear engineering student joins the Radical Muslim Society”, but as with all of these things, once the principle is set, it’s easy to erode into a general Stasi-light scenario.
I always thought that universitis should encourage freedom of thought and freedom of speech (even though they somehow cannot provide a platform for organisations deemed right wing) rather than stifle it by spying on and reporting on their students. Never happened at Cambridge during the 1930s so won’t happen nowadays either.
Sinister indeed. Rather like this scheme.
Harmless enough in itself, you might say. But look what they did with their energy, in the last para…
It is not up to university lecturers to get involved in the politics of their students – unless that is the subject, of course.
Never stopped them in the past. Universities are hotbeds of socialism.
I wonder how they would have gone about unearthing radicalism in my fellow Iranian students suspension and damping calculus.
Except, perhaps, to gently point all students in the directin of atheism?
Religion (all religion) kills (and tortures and blackmails)
Oddly enough, and English Queen got it right:
“I will have no making of windows into men’s souls”
This specious drivel has been knocking around for about a decade now in academic circles, and so far nothing has happened. But this just made me howl with rage:
““The same as university lecturers for example see it as their duty to tackle racism, sexism, homophobia, I think they should also feel it’s their duty to tackle radical, extreme and intolerant thoughts which are justified through Islamist ideology.””
Duty? Duty? No, Mr Quillam Foundation, speaking as a former member of that profession, we as lecturers had and have no duty to modify the belief systems of our students. The University has a legal obligation to prevent one individual causing physical harm or fear of such harm to another on the basis of irrational prejudices (in any direction), but our responsibilities were to teach content and skills – and that requires the ability to think critically and flexibly. Anyone who would make an assertion that such-and-such a group were revolting/stupid/abnormal, and could not justify or explain why they thought so, with evidence, would not remain a student for very long because they would fail.
One of the beauties of the academic world – which still persists in most places – is that it still sees that no one has a right not to be offended. It’s the nature of the beast – vigorous debate, even full-on arguments with raised voices, the only unacceptable thing being to turn it into a physical dispute.
I have wondered, on and off, what to make of the fact that the only person to walk out of my classroom in a state of high offendedness was a nun, while the trainee Imam (from a different class) stayed and fought his corner with wit and good humour.
Perhaps the time has come for the universities to become part of the big society and to forego public money comp[letely. They can raise it by providing courses that the students want to take at the prices students are willing to pay, together with contract research. If University X has a reputation for producing good, ie employable, graduates in, say, chemistry, it will be able to charge a premium over University Y whose chemistry course turns out no-users whom no-one will employ.