Recession isn't all badThe upside of a bankrupt liberal government

In the U.K. budget woes mean tougher entry requirements. The Daily Telegraph reports "thousands of teenagers will be rejected by top universities which have toughened entry criteria after spending cuts ordered by Lord Mandelson."

Nineteen of the country’s leading 20 universities have quietly increased the A-level grades required to study some popular courses in an attempt to restrict student numbers.

Not only have universities been ordered to reduce the students they accept, they will be fined £3,000 for any extra student they take.

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While it's a shame the Labour government and universities have done so before in order to provide quality education and reduce the burden of taxpayers, it's likely the student reduction will not necessarily mean a reduction in the faculty or administration. God forbid, one civil servant should lose their job while Britain courts bankruptcy.

The really bright side of the equation is since U.K. universities have become an incubator for muslim extremism and a handy recruitment tool for Al-Queda, less students mean less radicalized students. To see how bad it is, read Ruth Dudley Edwards' article, "British universities: seats of learning – and loathing".

The truth is that a mixture of greed, knee-jerk Left-wingery, anti-Semitism and pusillanimity have combined to make our universities breeding grounds for Islamism. The greed is two‑fold. Starved of funds and bullied by the Government into dropping standards in the name of social and ethnic diversity, universities court more foreign students than they can cope with and do nothing to upset them. Equally alarmingly, they woo benefactors from such rotten societies as Iran and Saudi Arabia.

In A Degree of Influence: the Funding of Strategically Important Subjects in UK Universities, the Centre for Social Cohesion revealed how universities have been seduced by vast sums of money from Arabic and Islamic sources. At Cambridge and Edinburgh, for instance, appointees of Prince Alwaleed, the Saudi principal donor of the Islamic Studies centres, sit on the management committee. The Al-Maktoum Institute, which has its degrees validated by the University of Aberdeen, exists to disseminate the political and religious vision of Sheikh Hamdan Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, deputy ruler of Dubai.

READ the whole article. The Center for Social Cohesion report, too, is available online. (PDF)

MONEY QUOTE from Ms.Edwards:

Academics tend towards the Left and, for a variety of perverse reasons, the Left has allied itself with radical Islam, choosing to ignore the brutality, the oppression of women, the stifling of dissent and many of the other repellent aspects of countries ruled by Sharia law. There will always be a substantial body of students who are idealistic, radical and hot-headed, but all too many academics seem incapable of grasping that the Islamist variety is a threat to the very foundations of democratic society: even the worst of the small number of student lunatics in the late Sixties were not suicide bombers intent on random mass murder.

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Society has always laughed at the unworldliness of ivory towers, but the times are too dangerous now for such indulgence. If vice-chancellors of universities that contain festering ideological cesspits do not clear them out, they should be replaced.