Tag: Universities UK

Since Maryam saved the original UUK guidance, I’m reading pages 27 and 28 again for the nostalgia. It read as if it had been written by a robot.

The segregation request is not yet in the public domain but the students’ union has an active feminist society which is likely to protest against the segregation request. Other societies are likely to express similar concerns. The event is also due to take place a few days after a number of campus-based activities to coincide with International Women’s Day.

See what I mean? A robot or an extra-terrestrial. There – might – be – some – groups – who – would – not – like – the – idea – of – segregations – by – sex – at – a – public – event – at – a – university. Ya think??? Only it wouldn’t be some groups, it would be everyone. You don’t have to be organized, you don’t even have to be political, to bristle at the suggestion that some reactionary external speaker gets to tell you where to sit and separate from whom.

Things to consider

Legal framework – points likely to be particularly relevant

• Aside from freedom of speech and the S.43 duty, the paramount issue is to consider how equality obligations apply, and how those interact.

Robot again, you see? As if everyone needed to sit down and think really hard and make a list of issues and decide which ones are paramount.

Some issues have been decided. There’s a ratchet, and where there’s not there should be. We don’t wake up every morning and re-decide what we think about slavery. That’s over. Slavery is out. Burning people for heresy is out, genocide is out, letting children work in factories and coal mines is out. We don’t need self-appointed university unions starting over from scratch; we already know what we think about gender segregation.

Granted there are people who go berserk and dynamite the ratchet, but that doesn’t mean university boffins should be following their lead. We don’t need robots here.

Kate Maltby on the gender segregation dispute.

I spent much of Tuesday afternoon shivering outside the offices of Universities UK. I was there to protest their publication of guidelines which suggest segregated seating of men and women may be legally required where guest speakers demand it. It’s reassuring to learn that protest sometimes works: by Friday, the beleaguered body had shifted their position twice within 24 hours, thanks in part to criticism by Michael Gove and David Cameron.

It is reassuring, isn’t it. I’m still surprised at the speed with which it happened.

But for all their fair words, I’m told the Cabinet have no plans for legislation to clarify the law. And I hear some members of the Islamic Education and Research Association, the group behind most confrontations over this issue, are agitating to launch a test case, heading to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary, to argue that their Islamist speakers do not enjoy freedom of speech unless they can speak to audiences segregated exactly how they like.

And, if they succeed, setting a useful precedent for racist groups, anti-Semitic groups, the WBC…Oh yes, that should work out really well.

… this isn’t some hypothetical we can forget about: as Nick Cohen notes, a notorious incident occurred earlier this year at my university, UCL. Meanwhile, the University of Leicester’s Islamic Society has been in the spotlight for routinely running segregated events, including several with the iERA.

Most such Islamic societies are affiliated to the student union, receiving funding and support. As I told Radio 4 yesterday, as a member of the same student union, I have a right to engage fully with the intellectual life of the campus. The ECHR protects my right to education regardless of sex – and as a woman, even if I’m allowed the privilege of a seat, I don’t engage intellectually on equal terms at an event whose organisers think I need to be kept away from men in public.

And the union of university vice-chancellors doesn’t get to impose such a situation on students who have the bad taste to be female.

There was a new comment yesterday on Nicola Dandridge’s November 25 blog post about the gender segregation bit of Universities UK’s guidance on external speakers. The new comment is by Jane Kelly, who went to the protest.

Seats For Women!
On Tuesday 10th December  I joined  ex Muslims from One Law For All, and various secular groups to attend a demonstration outside 20 Tavistock Square,against sexual segregation at lectures and debates. My mother laughed heartily at the thought of me going on a demo, something I have not done for thirty years, not since I was supporting Polish Solidarnoc. I promised her I would resist knocking off any police helmets.

The demo was for a cause which should get the attention of anyone interested in basic, long held principles of equality. Astonishingly sexual apartheid has just been allowed by UUK, the body which represents university Deans and faculties. This has been done to appease Muslims, probably in the hope of getting more wealthy students in from the near East.

Only of course it didn’t and wouldn’t “appease Muslims,” because so many Muslims want nothing to do with it and are insulted that university administrators would think they do. Islamists are not all Muslims.

There was about fifty of us there in the cold and fog, including Yasmin Alabi Brown, who is a tiny lady but speaks very forcefully. The following day  the event was reported on Today, but Maryam Namazai,  http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/ who is behind it,  can never get interviewed by the BBC, and is ignored by Woman’s Hour. The radio report also included a report from the LSE where some atheist students were banned from having a stall and wearing T Shirts bearing the names Jesus and Mohammed, in case they offended Muslims.

It’s not quite true that Maryam can never get interviewed by the BBC, I think.

If these segregated university lectures go ahead, there are plans to disrupt them which may mean  women like me dressing up as Muslim clerics to get into meetings to sit among the men.  Later at my church coffee morning, I mentioned what I had been up to. One of the older ladies, who spends most of her time cooking for our social events, got very excited.
‘I fought for gender equality’ she expostulated.

Well yes. We older ladies did fight for gender equality. Noisily, visibly, obstreperously. We older ladies aren’t from Victoria’s day, yaknow. We’re battleaxes from the 60s and 70s.

Many people who were students in the 1960s believe that they did this, even if they never left the bar or library. I told her about the plans to disrupt segregated meetings. ‘I’ll come, I’ll do that!’ She said, and I think she will. Suddenly I was back in another age, one we thought was long, long dead, my Grandmother’s time, when she as a young woman had to take a view on her sisters who were joining the Suffragettes. Some women in our family were chaining themselves to metal railings in Liverpool, while others, like my Granny, remained quietly at home.

When I was a teenager I saw a wonderfully good BBC drama series called, ‘Shoulder To Shoulder,’ about the suffragette movement and how I longed to join Christabel Pankhurst’s radicals, and then Sylvia’s socialists. Those women were all the world to me for awhile, but it was fiction and it was history. But now in 2013,  the same issues of equality before the law have to be redefined and fought for all over again – I once regretted not being able to join a struggle which started in 1903 and ended in 1914, now I am getting into a struggle which also  has the disadvantage of being utterly unnecessary before international law, and absurdly forced on us by men from Pakistan.

And resisted by other men and women from Pakistan and Bangladesh and India and Iran and Algeria and Egypt to name only a few. Shoulder to shoulder.

Radio 4′s afternoon news program PM had the UUK-gender segregation story as its lead item, and then its first in-depth story. The talking heads were Kate Maltby, a Christian and a PhD student at UCL, and Fatima Barkatulla of Seeds of Change which (PM failed to say) is part of iERA.

Barkatulla pushed the UUK line that it’s voluntary, with extra added “live and let live” and “religious Muslim women just want a space.”

But that’s all nonsense. You can’t have separate space in a public auditorium or class room or lecture hall without keeping the “wrong” people out, so it can’t be voluntary. The minute some “wrong” person tries to sit in that space, some sort of action is required to keep that wrong person out. It might be just a very polite request, but that still makes the keeping out not voluntary.

Suppose a bunch of women went together and went very early, so that there was a big bloc of women. Then maybe any men who came later would simply decide not to sit there, to be polite. That’s still not voluntary. It may look voluntary to the willfully naïve onlooker, but it’s not.

And anyway it’s all just fake. it’s at a university. People mix there, all the time. Trying to create segregation at particular debates isn’t really for the sake of people who go all wobbly without it, it’s to make a point. A bad, illiberal, creepy point.

The Telegraph has the skinny on what the Equality and Human Rights Commission thinks of the gender segregation issue.

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.

By agreeing to go back to the drawing board with the EHRC’s help, the vice-chancellors’ organisation appeared to have headed off the prospect of a legal challenge from the official watchdog.

The Telegraph reported on the gender segregation protest.

Maryam Namazie, a researcher at the University of London and one of the organisers of the event, said that she has noticed a rise of Islamism across UK Universities that is not truly representing the views of most Muslims.   She said: “In the UUK’s efforts to be inclusive they are encouraging sexism and endorsing discrimination.

“It’s about free speech and its about Islamists imposing their rules and projecting women as symbols of chaos in society.” 

A whole host of speakers were at the protest that climaxed in the chanting of ‘shame on UUK’ directed at the organisation’s headquarters.

There’s a picture of people at the protest above that passage, with Maryam in the foreground. (And trees overhead that look oddly leafy for December.)

“Words cannot fully describe what I feel today,” said Pragna Patel, director of Southall Black Sisters, a feminist group. “Rage, indignation and sorrow are just some that spring to mind.” And she went on to say “that the assertion of religious political power obliterates the very ideas of liberty and equality that so many people lived for and died for”.

‘Separate but equal’ is not equal at all was the message being spread by protesters. And of course it isn’t. By pursuing the appeasement of these religious fundamentalists anyone is right to question where this might end?

You would also be right to question why splitting people on race or sexuality would cause public outrage but splitting people on gender has received relatively little attention?

Last night’s protest echoed much of what Nelson Mandela fought for. Ms Patel likened the two examples by saying that UUK’s justification for its actions was that it was “trying to uphold equalities law [but] this was the same defence they used for racial apartheid in South Africa”.

Trying to uphold equalities law by throwing women overboard. Hmm.

Two young women at the rally, from Oxbridge, were concerned about the progress of girls in higher education.

Radha Bhatt, 19, a student at Cambridge University, said: “I am absolutely shocked and concerned that this segregation is still going on … the idea that Muslim leaders are uncomfortable with men and women sitting together and that UUK is appeasing them shows that they have a problem with co-education.”

Geetanjali Normande, 20, from Oxford University, said: “It scares me that institutions like UUK which exist to represent universities and the student body find that it is acceptable to condone this. It sounds like they are so   far removed from what it is to be a student and to be told that you can’t sit where you want to in your lecture.

“I grew up in a very religious background but my family are extremely supportive of me getting an education.”

It’s only Universities UK that’s not so supportive.

I’ve just been listening to Today’s Today programme on UUK and gender segregation. I’ve got to run off so will post later but there it is for your listening pleasure fury. It starts just before 2 hrs 10.

I find Dandridge simply astonishing. I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. Fortunately Justin Webb sounds almost as incredulous as I am, and he keeps pushing back.

Jack Straw is very definite about what he thinks.

The BBC and everyone really needs to stop saying UUK represents UK universities, because (if David Colqhoun is right, and I think he would know) it doesn’t, it represents the vice-chancellors, not the universities. That does make a difference.

Dandridge actually seems to think that not acceding to an external speaker’s demand that the audience be segregated by gender is a violation of free speech. She certainly says that.

The BBC reports on UUK’s statement.

Universities UK says it has today requested legal clarification from the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

In a letter, Universities UK which represents 132 institutions, has asked the Commission to consider having the issue clarified by the High Court, “or provide a clear and public statement about the law and the relevant policy considerations”.

The row over the UUK guidance has sparked protests from students and some MPs.

UUK actually doesn’t represent 132 institutions, it represents 132 vice-chancellors.

Along with students and MPs the row has also sparked protests from journalists and activists and bystanders like me.

Shadow business secretary Chukka Umunna told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme he was “horrified”.

While former home secretary Jack Straw said it was “wrong” for universities “to indulge in such extraordinary behaviour”.

That’s good. Jack Straw was terrible about the Danish Motoons; it’s good that he’s better on this subject.

Ms Dandridge told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme: “We are not talking about universities enforcing segregation.

“One of the questions that runs through our case study which illustrates this question is, ‘Is this segregation voluntary, have the people who are likely to come to this event agreed to the segregation?’

“That is something that would be fundamentally important to the university in making a decision.

She is so confused. Her question makes no sense. “‘Is this segregation voluntary, have the people who are likely to come to this event agreed to the segregation?’” She talks about “the people who are likely to come to this event” – in other words an unknown – and then talks about whether this unknown has agreed to the segregation or not. That does not work! This is not a set of people who have been asked for their agreement in advance. It’s an unknown set of people, and their “agreement” is simply being guessed at. She doesn’t even know what people are likely to come to the event! It could be a lot of curious secular people, or people who admire the opposition side in the debate. That whole claim is incoherent.

“In practice if the people coming to this event said, ‘We do not want to segregate and separate out men and women,’ it is inconceivable that the university would impose it on them.

Oh really? Because a lot of people going to the Krauss-Tzortzis debate did say exactly that, yet the segregation was imposed anyway. It was imposed by the organizers but the university did nothing to prevent it, or prevent it from being imposed.

Ms Dandridge emphasised that the case study was about a very specific scenario: “We are not talking about teaching, lectures, the core business of universities.”

She rejected comparisons to racial segregation.

Well I reject her rejection.

I am seriously tired of people cheerfully doing things to women that they wouldn’t in a million years do to Other Races.

“It is not something which is so alien to our culture that it has to be regarded like race segregation.”

Really? It’s not? People in the UK are quite accustomed to being told to sit with their own gender in public places? On buses, on the tube, in cinemas, at the theatre, in libraries, in restaurants?

The hell they are. That kind of pious, squeamish, cootiephobic sorting is extremely alien to UK culture.

Mr Umunna told Today a future Labour government would outlaw segregation on campus.

“I was horrified by what I heard…

“Let me be absolutely clear. A future Labour government would not allow or tolerate segregation in our universities.

“It offends basic norms in our society.

“Of course people should be free to practise their religion privately in places of worship and at religious events but universities are publicly funded places of research, learning and teaching and as such there is no place, in my view, for state-sponsored segregation.”

See that, Minnow? Universities are publicly funded places. We didn’t make that up.

Universities UK has today also published legal advice on its guidance from Fenella Morris QC which concludes that it “is lawful and provides an appropriate foundation for lawful decision-making by universities”.

If Fenella Morris QC is correct then I hope Parliament changes that law quickly.

Universities UK has issued a press release on the gender segregation issue.

Statement from Universities UK:

Universities UK’s publication External speakers in higher education institutions aims to provide guidance to institutions in managing the process for inviting external speakers onto campus, both in terms of upholding principles of free speech, and also complying with the law. It was produced with significant input from a range of organisations and individuals (referenced in the full report) as well as extensive legal advice.

The guidance is not prescriptive. It is intended to provide practical assistance to universities in making decisions about who they choose to invite to speak on campus, steering them through all the different considerations, legal and otherwise, that apply. Universities are independent institutions and will make decisions themselves on a case by case basis.

The guidance includes a hypothetical case study (case study 2) involving an external speaker invited to talk about his orthodox religious faith, who had subsequently requested segregated seating areas for men and women. The case study considers the facts, the relevant law and the questions that the university should ask, and concludes that if neither women nor men were disadvantaged and a non-segregated seating area were also provided, it might in the specific circumstances of the case be appropriate for the university to agree to the request.

Defensive. It’s guidance! There was extensive input! The guidance is not prescriptive! We were just trying to help! Universities are independent and they don’t have to listen to us anyway!

And then they just recycle the same bullshit  – “and concludes that if neither women nor men were disadvantaged and a non-segregated seating area were also provided, it might in the specific circumstances of the case be appropriate for the university to agree to the request.” But the trouble with that of course is that UUK buys the ridiculous claim that formal pre-arranged gender segregation can possibly be anything other than disadvantageous to women. It ignores history, it ignores much of the world, it ignores reality. It ignores the obvious objection, which many many people raised: the objection that segregation of, say, Jews and non-Jews, or blacks and whites, or gay and straight, would not be “appropriate” even if there were a non-segregated seating area also provided. You may remember that Nick Cohen asked Nicola Dandridge about that point and her utterly dense reply was that Parliament had made racial segregation against the law. You may also remember that he asked her why is sex different then, and that she said “because it’s visible.” Yes really.

The guidance does not promote gender segregation. When faced with requests for segregated seating, universities will consider all the circumstances: they will consider questions of disadvantage to men or women, and will inform themselves about the speaker’s views and the context of the event. Many, taking account of all factors, may legitimately refuse the request. It is for example 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. But with different circumstances, as with the case study, the university may agree to it.

No, UUK, it may not. Stop issuing “guidance” that says universities may accept discriminatory practices at the behest of external speakers who demand them on religious grounds. Just stop.

The case study has generated considerable public concern and media coverage, some of which raised questions about our previous legal advice. In the light of that, we sought an opinion from senior counsel, Fenella Morris QC. We have now received her advice which confirms that the guidance is correct and provides an appropriate foundation for lawful decision-making. The advice is also clear that in adjudicating between conflicting priorities in relation to gender and religion, institutions have to balance a range of competing interests and strike a fair balance between them having regard to all the individual circumstances of each case. A copy of senior counsel’s advice is available at the link below (see notes).

Given the continuing public concern we have also today written to the Equality and Human Rights Commission to request that they consider having the issue clarified by the High Court or provide a clear and public statement about the law and the relevant policy considerations in this area.

That one sentence is…quite frightening.

The advice is also clear that in adjudicating between conflicting priorities in relation to gender and religion, institutions have to balance a range of competing interests and strike a fair balance between them having regard to all the individual circumstances of each case.

In other words universities have to “strike a fair balance” between theocracy and women’s rights. Jesus fucking christ.

The iERA, the Islamic Education and Research Academy, has issued a press release agreeing (surprise surprise!) with UUK’s guidelines on girl cooties gender segregation. Tl; dr: it’s religious freedom, it’s great.

The debate about separation came to the fore earlier this year at an iERA event entitled: “Islam or Atheism: Which Makes More Sense?” between Hamza Tzortzis and Professor Lawrence Krauss at the University College of London (UCL) on 9th March 2013. UCL subsequently refused to take any further bookings from iERA, accusing them of “forced segregation”.

iERA later released its own findings of an externally supervised investigation into the accusation of forced gender segregation at the debate. The investigation concluded that there was no such policy or evidence that it occurred on the night. Rather, in line with its duties under the Equality Act 2010, iERA had attempted to provide for the needs of all attendees by providing separate areas of seating for men and women (for those that wished to adhere to their deeply-held religious beliefs) as well as a mixed seating area.

Leaving aside the fact that it wasn’t just “providing,” it was enforcing, that is still a worthless attempt at justification. As many of us have pointed out ad nauseam in the last few days, you could just as easily talk of providing separate areas of seating for whites and blacks (for those that wished to adhere to their deeply-held religious beliefs), or for Jews and Gentiles (for those that wished to adhere to their deeply-held religious beliefs), or for straights and gays, or for those with university degrees and those without. You could, and it would be wrong in all cases. Citing “deeply-held religious beliefs” as an excuse is beside the point, and an unsubtle form of theocratic bullying.

Abdurraheem Green, Chairman of iERA, stated: “With a growing number of Muslims countries seeing a revival in adherence to normative Islamic practices, the idea of being forced to sit with people of the opposite sex and observing the adoption of anti-Islamic policies by British Universities might well lead many to avoid choosing this country to further their education. Such behaviour is not in the economic interests of universities or indeed the country as a whole. iERA as an organisation is known and respected throughout the Muslim world for its work in inviting people to Islam. Hearing of iERA being banned from UCL and other universities certainly does not send a positive message about how welcome they will be to study in this country.”

Ah yes, there you have it – a growing number of Muslim countries seeing a revival in adherence to normative Islamic practices, and a growing number of fans of that revival doing everything they can to foster and impose it everywhere else in the world.

No thank you. No normative theistic practices of any kind, thank you, not in the public sphere. Revive in your living rooms and your mosques or churches all you want, but not in the shared public space.

The Universities UK blog continues to get strongly critical comments on Nicola Dandridge’s post defending its position on gender segregation. It also continues not to reply to any of them.

The latest is by Chris Moos, summing up the state of play.

43 comments, each and every one of them negative. And still no response from UUK.. Who is charge of PR again? or is everyone too busy writing reports that figure out how to [defend?] other kinds of segregation practices?

There’s also one from a University of Manchester physicist.

UUK: Perhaps you might like to take a look at the top of this page where you say:

“We are the representative organisation for the UK’s universities”

No you are not. You have just abdicated any right to be regarded as a respected organisation as a result of your astonishing Kristallnacht against women in UK, in 2013. Unbelievable!

So take away that header please, and stop insulting us.

Reply

Zing.

At the New Humanist, Rory Fenton says no thank you.

It is astounding how quickly we forget or wilfully ignore that human rights are there to protect people – not beliefs. At the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies, of which I’m president, we increasingly see this confused notion of rights being applied on UK campuses. Whether it’s our student groups intimidated for “blasphemy”, as at LSE and Reading, or religious societies refusing unmarried women permission to speak, as at Bristol, this trumping of individual rights by the supposed rights of “beliefs” is increasingly common.

…

…nestled in the report was a bizarre and backward recommendation; universities should be willing to enforce sex segregation between male and female audience members if a speaker requests it.

The report’s peculiar logic ran as follows: speakers have the right to free speech but if their demands for sex segregation are not met they will refuse to speak. Therefore to not enforce sex segregation is to deny the speakers’ freedom of speech. The report is careful only to endorse the ‘nice’ kind of segregation with men and women split on the left and right hand sides of a lecture theatre rather than front and back, the logic here being that men and women are being treated ‘equally separately’, whatever that means.

That it’s equally insulting to both of them?

That wouldn’t be much of a recommendation if it were true, but it’s not true. So yeah, whatever does that mean?

This logic has echoes of the old racially segregated Deep South of the United States; separate but equal. To argue that segregation is not inherently unequal is to fail to see just why men and women are being kept apart in the first place; this drive for segregation stems from ideologies that view women as very much inferior to men. To allow these ideologies power in UK universities is to betray hard-won individual rights and the principle that in public spaces all must be treated equally. Separate is never equal.

That is correct. And it makes me very, very angry that UK university vice-chancellors are just flinging all that away.

The report goes as far as to say that non-religious beliefs, such as feminism, should take second place to “sincerely held” religious beliefs. That’s right; the mere fact that they are religious makes some beliefs more important than others because, of course, Feminist can’t be sincere in their beliefs.

Because those “beliefs” are secular, so they can’t be “sincerely held.” They can only be held, loosely and kind of sloppily, the way secular people do.

The Universities UK report focuses on sex because it’s an issue that has come up before but there is no reason for its logic to stop there. If a racist is invited to speak – should he not have the audience forcibly segregated into whites and non-whites? What if his beliefs are really “sincerely held”? Could the EDL insist on all Muslim students sitting separately? Of course Universities UK would never support this.

Just what I keep saying! I said it on their horrible blog post, too. I hope they (or rather, Nicola Dandridge) answer (answers).

The BHA condemns Universities UK’s guidelines on gender segregation.

BHA Head of Public Affairs Pavan Dhaliwal commented that ‘Universities are secular institutions, not places of worship, and sex segregation should have no place in secular spaces in which we expect to find equality between men and women.  It would be completely unacceptable if a visiting speaker tried to segregate an audience along racial lines, so sex segregation should be equally unacceptable.  Universities UK have characterised this as a freedom of speech issue, but this is misleading.  A visiting speaker’s right to freedom of speech entitles them to express their political and religious views, but not to impose these views on the audience.’

Damn right. If it’s obviously unacceptable on racial grounds, which it is, why is it acceptable on gender grounds?

It isn’t.

Nicola Dandridge of Universities UK has written a blog post explaining that UUK is not promoting gender segregation. That’s nice, but I don’t know of anyone who said it was. The objection is that UUK is treating gender segregation as permissible, and that it said it’s not unequal.

Since its publication, there has been some public debate on a small component of the guidance: a hypothetical case study (p.27) in which an external speaker on faith in the modern world requests that the audience is segregated according to gender. The case study reflects the challenges of accommodating everyone’s views, from those whose religious beliefs require them to sit separately with their own gender, to those who wish to sit with the opposite gender – hence the mixed seating alternative which is part of the solution in this case study. The issue is how to ensure that no one is unlawfully excluded from the event.

Ah that’s sneaky. The case study reflects the challenges of accommodating everyone’s views, from those whose religious beliefs require them to sit separately with their own gender – no no no, it’s not that easy. The religious beliefs “require” that everyone sit with her or his own gender. It is not a matter just of what I am required to do, it’s a matter of what others are “required” to do, and of the right of the male speaker to “require” it of everyone who attends the lecture, including people who share his religion but not his reactionary version of it, and people who don’t share his religion. Dandridge frames it as a matter of allowing people to obey their own religious “requirements” but ignores the issue of forcing other people to obey “requirements” that 1) are not theirs and 2) are on the face of it obnoxiously and impertinently discriminatory.

Suppose a white guest speaker says her religion “requires” white people to sit with white people and black people to sit with black people. I wonder if Dandridge would phrase that as “The case study reflects the challenges of accommodating everyone’s views, from those whose religious beliefs require them to sit separately with their own race, to those who wish to sit with the opposite race.” I wonder if she would feel more squeamish about that; I wonder if she would say it at all. My guess is that she would feel more squeamish and wouldn’t say it.

And nobody is “unlawfully excluded from the event” on the basis that she describes. A racist is not unlawfully excluded from the event if the racist says her religion requires racial segregation and the university refuses to arrange any such segregation. The racist can still attend the event; she is not excluded; she is simply not granted an unreasonable and malevolent demand.

Universities have a vital role to play in securing free speech and promoting debate. This practical guidance has been developed to ensure that as many debates as possible on sensitive and emotive issues can continue to take place. By promoting free speech and open debate the rights or wrongs of gender segregation can be challenged and discussed.

Bollocks. We can perfectly well challenge and discuss the rights or wrongs of gender segregation, and racial and ethnic and religious segregation, without putting the actual segregation into effect. We can also, frankly, perfectly well treat some questions as settled and just fucking move on. We don’t need to challenge and discuss the rights and wrongs of genocide, and we really don’t need to challenge and discuss the rights and wrongs of gender versions of Jim Crow laws.