The Universities UK blog continues to get strongly critical comments on Nicola Dandridge’s post defending its position on gender segregation. It also continues not to reply to any of them.
The latest is by Chris Moos, summing up the state of play.
43 comments, each and every one of them negative. And still no response from UUK.. Who is charge of PR again? or is everyone too busy writing reports that figure out how to [defend?] other kinds of segregation practices?
There’s also one from a University of Manchester physicist.
UUK: Perhaps you might like to take a look at the top of this page where you say:
“We are the representative organisation for the UK’s universities”
No you are not. You have just abdicated any right to be regarded as a respected organisation as a result of your astonishing Kristallnacht against women in UK, in 2013. Unbelievable!
So take away that header please, and stop insulting us.
Zing.
Kristallnacht? Really?
Did Muslims force UK universities to close down their history departments too?
What @1 said. This is bad, but not *that* level of bad.
You beat me to it. As a native German, I always flinch when I see anglophones use these terms as casual rhetoric. You don’t use them in vain here …
It’s an analogy that makes no sense. One might compare this situation to the ghettoization of Jews in Europe, and that certainly makes some sense as an analogy, but Kristallnacht was a night of coordinated violence against Jews and their shops, schools, houses, hospitals, and possessions.
Anthony K @4, it may be overwrought and even inappropriate, but I suspect it’s intended as metonymic hyperbole rather than as analogy.
I suspect that since this month was the anniversary of Kristallnacht, it’s in more people’s consciousness and so has become the wildly inapt comparison of the moment. Anything bad is another Kristallnacht, even when the analogy makes absolutely no sense. I’ve only seen one use of it recently – by Polish Jews referring to the burning of a mosque in Gdansk – that made any sense at all, and it wasn’t a direct comparison but a reference to the “frightening connotations” of the act and the atmosphere surrounding it.
Yes, John, that is exactly how I meant it and if I upset any Germans or non Germans with limited vocabulary horizons, then I can say I spent most of my working career in Hamburg and love Germany. I am just not burdened with the need to have Angst every time Repentance Day comes round. And when it comes to the use of words, holocaust is an old word in the English language, derived from Greek and it now has a completely different meaning when capitalised. So no lectures on the use of words if you don’t mind. Sometimes language has to be used to its limit in order to point out how wrong some things are. Women have been suppressed and if they were not liked in England, even as recently as 1789, burnt at the stake like thousands of others before them. This whole business of segregation is odious and like the burning of “heretics” by the English church, has no place in modern society.
Thank you Robin Marshall. And I still like that comment!
If only UUK would pay attention…
Anthony K @4, it may be overwrought and even inappropriate, but I suspect it’s intended as metonymic hyperbole rather than as analogy.
Sorry, but no – hyperbole is an exaggeration in scale, this is an analogy to something else entirely.
When you jump to extremes you leave us nowhere to go if the opposition escalates.
US segregation analogies, fine; apartheid analogies, fine; playing the Nazi card as an opening move? No
Shatterface @9, the intent is now inarguable, since it’s been confirmed by its author; but the larger point is that UUK has yet to respond to numerous discontented responses (however infelicitously expressed) to its apologetic justification which claims that accommodating gender segregation “does not promote gender segregation”.
(As I suggested elsewhere on this blog, it’s a telling lack of response)