Dangerous Minds?

Within hours of the 9/11 attacks, speculation began about the nature of the U.S. military response. It was clear that the United States would go out into the world and punish those responsible for preparing the attacks. Then it would strike against the terrorist camps that were training the next wave of suicide bombers. But after London was hit on 7/7, there was no such discussion. How could there be? Britain had been attacked by its own citizens. Instead, the question was: How had Britain allowed this murderous extremism to fester inside its own borders?

Ever since the 2005 bombings, Britain has been trying to work out where it went wrong and what it needs to do differently to prevent its citizens from turning to terrorism. And amid this dialogue, institutions are pondering what they can do to help. “When Students Turn to Terror” is the first public report to examine the role of universities in ensuring that more young people do not decide to become terrorists.

The focus of the report makes sense. Just over 40 percent of Britons now go through higher education, and as the report points out, many of the terrorists that Britain has produced have been through the system. The first two British suicide bombers, Asif Hanif and Omar Sharif, who blew themselves up in a Tel Aviv bar in April 2003, were students. Two of the 7/7 bombers had attended university in Britain, and the man who murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl had studied at the London School of Economics. The overwhelming majority of British universities are publicly funded institutions, so asking what they can do to make the state more secure is not unreasonable.

The report is written by Anthony Glees, an academic at Brunel University, and Chris Pope, a former Brunel graduate student who now edits the Monitor, one of the Royal United Services Institute's journals. They contend that universities have ceased being places of learning where teachers take a keen interest in the intellectual and personal development of their pupils. Instead, these institutions have become production lines, churning out graduates. This lack of supervision has allowed extremist recruiters a relatively free hand, the authors argue.

Glees and Pope make an effort to be inclusive in their definition of extremists. They include white nationalists and animal rights activists who espouse violence, as well as members of Islamist groups. However, the clear emphasis of the report is on the latter, suggesting that the inclusion of the former was born more out of a desire to appear balanced than intellectual rigor.

Two of the authors' major policy proposals are that universities should “interview all students to test them for their commitment to higher education” and that the “clearing” process be abolished. (Clearing is when students can obtain a place at university just weeks before the term starts.) There is undoubtedly some truth to the charge that pupils are paid less individual attention now than they were 40 years ago, when only around 6 percent of the population went to university. But it is hard to see how every prospective student could be given an in-depth interview when so many students are entering higher education. (It would not be surprising if the authors of the report think that far too many people are going to university. If they do, they should have said so explicitly.)

Another problem with this proposal is that it is totally subjective. One can imagine few better ways to alienate young Muslims than by telling them that they can't go to university because the authorities are not convinced of their “commitment to higher education.” The authors also do not address the question of what is to be done with those who are rejected on these grounds. Presumably, those attracted by militant Islam will simply find another venue to make contact with the like-minded. Reading this proposal, one can't help but suspect that the authors are using the threat of terrorism to push for a series of educational reforms they believe in, hoping that the “T” word will win their ideas greater attention from politicians and the media alike. This suspicion is bolstered by the fact that another of the policy proposals calls for the “stamping out of activities such as plagiarism which undermine the concept of a community of scholars.”

The report talks in general about the left-wing atmosphere of British campuses. It even goes so far as to suggest that “universities might be teaching [students] subject or theoretical tools for understanding the world Marxism, for example–which could encourage them to believe Britain and other Western states are in terminal decline.” This statement fails to recognize that if British universities were to refuse to teach aspiring historians and social and political scientists about Marxism, it would prove that they were in terminal decline.

Glees and Pope's report has ruffled all the usual feathers–not least because they also implicitly endorse the idea of law enforcement conducting covert surveillance on campuses. The president of the National Union of Students denounced the report as “contributing to a climate of fear and hostility.” Indeed, police work and greater screening by universities cannot solve the problem. What may succeed is a proactive approach from Muslim students themselves. It is on Britain's university campuses that progressive Islamic activism should be fostered, nourishing an ideological movement that can flourish within a liberal, tolerant, multi-ethnic, multi-faith society. To date, the moderate Muslim leadership in Britain has failed to successfully challenge the extremists within their own community. If Muslim students can achieve this task, then Britain's universities will have demonstrated their true role in the fight against the hatred that spawned the attacks on 7/7.