Professor Anthony Glees is Director of the Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies at Brunel University. After the July bombings of 2005 but in that same year, the Social Affairs Unit published a report jointly authored by Professor Glees and a former student of his entitled ‘When Students turn to Terror’. It documented the security risk British universities pose through providing environments conducive to infiltration by Islamist extremists seeking to acquire useful skills for their deadly trade and on the look-out for potential jihadi recruits.
In that report, Professor Glees and his co-author Chris Pope drew attention to how the recent vast expansion in higher education and the ever-greater reliance of British universities on the lucrative foreign student market has led some of them to adopt incautious admission policies that exacerbate the threat. They wrote:
‘The drive to increase student numbers ever higher, because cash depends on this has produced the most blatantly ignorant lapses in security thinking by Britain’s university chiefs… [U]nvetted or poorly vetted overseas student admission scheme[s] could give potential terrorists access to state of the art techniques not just in the field of WMD but also in information technology… [Moreover] … universities allow milieus to be constructed in which recruitment to terrorism and extremism can very easily take place, within British society but also conveniently hidden from it… In their obsession with expansion, earning money and displaying their entrepreneurial excellence to Government, university chiefs have forgotten that [Britain’s] universities are first and foremost to serve the needs of liberal democracies and their values. Cash considerations must come second, if they come anywhere.’ (p.68)
It would appear that neither Government nor Universities have taken heed of Professor Glees’ warning, judged by a report in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph. It states that Professor Glees estimates that ‘up to 48 British universities [including Oxbridge] have been infiltrated by fundamentalists and the threat posed by radicals must be “urgently addressed”’.
As well as calling for extra investment in campus security, Professor Glees is reported to be calling on the Universities to interview undergraduates to ensure that they were bona fide students. The idea that all prospective students be interviewed prior to admission to establish their bona fides seems eminently sensible, whatever the costs.
If our Universities are unwilling to set their houses in order on this matter, they should be obliged by Government to do so.