Note to Neocons: Universities Don't Create Extremists

The attempted terrorist attack on 24 December has brought out a familiar line from the previously subdued neocons: British universities are to blame. The Telegraph's foreign editor Con Coughlin led the attack last week by thundering over the fact that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was "allowed to be elected" president of the Islamic Society at UCL:

Can you imagine a British student going to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, getting elected head of the local Christian Union, and then arranging a series of debates on the need to launch a new Crusade against the Islamic world?

That's right. We should be looking to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia for guidance on student liberties. Neoconservative ideologue Douglas Murray, meanwhile, told the Telegraph that by studying at [University College London], Abdulmutallab "could hardly have found a place more conducive to his views". The Jewish Chronicle's editor Stephen Pollard wrote in the Daily Express: "The role of British universities in breeding and fomenting extremism is one of our country's most shameful secrets."

Singling out universities as potential conveyor belts for terrorists is an old talking point for neocons. The most notorious example in recent times was American commentator Daniel Pipes's project Campus Watch, which created dossiers on professors and universities that did "not meet its standard of uncritical support for the policies of George Bush and Ariel Sharon", according to one critic. Anthony Glees, professor of security and intelligence studies at the University of Buckingham, told the Telegraph: "UCL boasts on its website that it has 8,000 staff for 22,000 students, which is an enviable staff/student ratio. What have they been doing?" Their jobs, perhaps?

There are two issues here. The first is about academic freedom of speech and civil liberties, which have been completely sidelined in the debate. Abdulmutallab was at UCL from 2005 to 2008 and was president of the student Islamic Society in 2006-07. The charge against UCL is that he was allowed to organize a week of debates around the US "war on terror". It included debates on Guantánamo Bay and terrorism. Fancy that. There's no evidence that he was radicalised at this point – almost every university in the country holds several such debates every year.