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".
Read more about this topic: Malcolm Grant
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)