Criticism
In the Telegraph, Malcolm Grant was criticised for allegedly downplaying Islamist radicalisation and extremism on the UCL campus. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab – who attempted to explode a bomb on a flight to Detroit – was the president of the UCL Islamic Society from 2005-08. He was the fourth president of an official Islamic society at a London university to face terrorist charges in three years. In response to the criticisms, Malcolm Grant stated that he had ordered a review into the issue. He also denied that there was a problem with Islamic extremism at UCL, and accused some Telegraph writers of "Islamophobia". Consequently, the CSC issued a press briefing listing a number of Islamist extremists who had recently spoken on the UCL campus after being officially invited by UCL's Islamic groups. Ruth Dudley Edwards criticised Grant's response, writing: "Rather than producing mealy-mouthed defensive statements... Provost Grant should seriously reconsider his position." On the other hand, Professor John Sutherland, writing in the Guardian, defended the university's response of constructive engagement, which recommended "debate with extremists" and the promotion of an Islamic Awareness Week: "My own, partisan, view is that UCL's openness is morally justified.... But there are clear risks".
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—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
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