University

Cambridge University’s education faculty – former home of Jason Arday – has appointed as assistant research professor a woman who wrote that Muslims should study engineering and computers ‘to produce advanced weaponry for Jihad in order that the deen [Islam] may dominate over all other deens.’ This is the fourth in our series of articles about Farah Ahmed, a former activist in the racist, extremist and separatist group Hizb ut Tahrir, now banned as a terror organisation, who has been given a senior role by Cambridge training the future leaders of the teaching profession.

During last September’s freshers’ fair at Royal Holloway, University of London, two students got into a brief verbal tiff that became subject to the administration’s immediate alarm. Our characters: Brodie Mitchell, a self-described non-Jewish Zionist, and Huda El-Jamal, the female president of the Friends of Palestine Society who is of Palestinian descent. Mitchell says El-Jamal taunted him – ‘Here’s the wannabe Jew’ – and questioned why he wasn’t wearing a yarmulke. Referring to the keffiyeh El-Jamal was wearing as a headscarf, Mitchell taunted back: ‘You’re wearing a tea towel over your head.’ A monstrous exchange, we can all agree. Naturally, Royal Holloway suspended Mitchell for nine weeks – nine weeks!

A few years ago my employer, the advertising agency Ogilvy, introduced a recruitment scheme called ‘The Pipe’. It was a ‘non-graduate’ recruitment scheme, the name a pun on the smoking implement of choice of the company’s founder, David Ogilvy. Ogilvy himself was kicked out of Oxford in 1931, so this seemed doubly appropriate. The idea was conceived and promoted by two people in our creative department alarmed by the risk of monotone uniformity which results from formalised, risk-averse recruitment procedures. Our aim, in short, was to introduce a kind of stereophonic sound to hiring. Just to be clear, we did not exclude university graduates from applying: it was simply that a degree was not mandatory.

There are several frustrating things about American college campuses, just one of which is the sheer volume of column inches they take up. Whenever an American campus has an ‘occupation’ because the students want veto powers over foreign wars, the world media study their actions with great interest. Whenever a group of farmers or truckers complain about the loss of their livelihoods, whatever media attention does arrive comes from people eager to dismiss the protestors as know-nothings who are on to nothing. I told them that while they may know something, the chances are that people older than them know more Still, in recent months Columbia University in New York has distinguished itself with especially unpleasant scenes.

Next year, Exeter University will offer an MA in Magic and Occult Science: the first of its kind in a British university. The new course has led to newspaper headlines about a ‘real-life Hogwarts’ and questions as to whether magic is as worth studying as say, economics. The course director, Professor Emily Selove, refused my request for an interview – with polite apologies, although one could hardly expect the convenor of Exeter’s Centre for Magic and Esotericism to be anything but esoteric. A similar tension, it turns out, is at the heart of the debate about the degree. For all the media snideness, the most serious objections come from Britain’s growing magical community.

My default mood at the moment is bleak despair, although it can sometimes be triggered into nihilistic loathing, which I think I mildly prefer. The most recent occasion this happened was last Monday when I drove through torrential rain to three retail parks in search of an item which – as I found out later – didn’t actually exist. While turning the car around to drive home I switched on the radio and Stephen Fry was bashfully admitting to some fawning sap of an interviewer how bloody brilliant he was. Triggered, right there, at the roundabout where you enter the old coal-mining village of Pity Me. It took ages for the bleak despair to re-establish itself.