Imperial College Considering Banning "Religious Dress"

[liadnan]

I tried to come up with some snappy title for this but nothing seemed to fit. So well- (or badly, depending on pov) timed as to seem almost a publicity stunt...

I rather suspect Imperial has a higher-than-average population of students of British-Asian or Asian origin. Not surprising if so given that its specialisations are medicine and engineering -both of which remain, I think (I have no source for this, it's merely an impression), very popular professions among Asian/British-Asian people.

Frankly I reckon if they're going to insist on a dress code it ought to be sub-fusc. Actually, I wonder what the rules are about sub-fusc and ethnic or religiously motivated dress...

Comments

[m31andy.livejournal.com]

Well, they've been trying to ban students for years, so it's not so much of a surprise. Another reason why folk wouldn't want to go to such a college.

As for the number of Asians at Imperial? There were a sizable number although I don't remember anyone wearing heavily religious dress. Perhaps it's true that Engineers don't believe in God (or at least one that has such an excrable knowledge of plumbing!). I suspect it would be more of a problem for the medics - I'll ask my IC medic friend tonight. She's just come back from India and as her observations where that she was obliged to wear local dress and that it was incredibly unhygenic, I would say there was potential there.

Engineers Believing In God

[liadnan]

Actually I have a vague idea that most (many?) of the 11th Sept hijackers had engineering degrees, and OBL certainly trained as a civil engineer. I have a vague recollection of some article in the TLS or similar which sought to draw rather dubious conclusions about people with engineering backgrounds being more inclined to religious literalism than those of us with humanities training and all the stuff we take on about deconstructing texts -ie you can't usefully apply modern textual analysis to an engineering textbook -we waffle about points of view which isn't much help to someone who wants to know if a bridge is going to stay up or a machine work. Or maybe it is. I dunno? I hasten to add that this is not one of my own loony theories, though I have many.

Re: Engineers Believing In God

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

There are certainly branches of engineering where faith is required. Some of the mathematics in chemical engineering is so ugly that no rational person could believe it to be true.

Re: Engineers Believing In God

[sshi.livejournal.com]

actually, it is possible to apply modern textual analysis to scientific textbooks, it's what Thomas Kuhn spent years banging on about (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions). The trouble is getting the scientists/engineers to accept it, as part of a scientific education basically involves indoctrinating them in a literalist manner, not to question their place within and propping up the dominant paradigm.

Re: Engineers Believing In God

[liadnan]

Interesting: I confess I've never read Kuhn and know little about him.

Playing with the initial idea for the sake of argument, it occurs to me that the same gap in modes of thinking could also be said to be evident in passionately atheistic scientists who thus set up what to others can seem straw men in their attacks on religion (Dawkins, Atkins are the obvious ones who spring to mind).

Re: Engineers Believing In God

[sharp-blue.livejournal.com]

I've read Kuhn - at least his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - and find the conclusions that many people draw from his arguments somewhat baffling.

My understanding of the book is that he thinks that there are two modes of scientific progress: a mode in which the currently popular general theory is applied to an increasingly diverse range of experimental or theoretical problems and another mode in which the number of problems that can't be adequately solved using the currently popular theory becomes larger than some threshold and scientists start working on replacing it with a more general and powerful theory. This seems fairly unobjectionable.

However, going from the idea that scientific theories are invented by groups of scientists to solve problems to the idea that each scientific theory is purely a "social construct" with no more inherent validity than any other theory is nonsense. The popularity of scientific theories, after all, is not just a matter of fashion or the inventiveness of scientists but is also constrained by their ability to explain experimental data.

Re: Engineers Believing In God

[liadnan]

I've been meaning to ask you, by the way, whether superstring theory counts as a scientific theory in your book. Not, I hasten to add, that I really understand much about it.

Re: Engineers Believing In God

[sharp-blue.livejournal.com]

I must admit that I don't know a tremendous amount about it either. I've read about half of Zwiebach's textbook (http://www.amazon.co.uk/First-Course-String-Theory/dp/0521831431/) on the subject but I haven't worked through many calculations, so I only really have an understanding at a hand-waving level. Having said that, I think it is a scientific theory but perhaps not a very successful one. It does make some predictions of a general kind but none, so far as I know, that are both testable by current experiments and different to the predictions of the Standard Model. However, it's only a matter of time and effort before someone wrings out of the theory a prediction that meets those two criteria.

It's clearly a very interesting and beautiful theory from a mathematical standpoint but I think it's a bit of a pity that other approaches to quantum gravity have been comparatively neglected by theoretical physicists themselves and the popular press. It's pleasant to see that loop quantum gravity has been getting more attention recently though. (It's also a pity that people tend to think that elementary particle physics and quantum gravity are the only frontiers of physics. In that regard, the recent semi-popular survey of physics The New Physics for the 21st Century (http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Physics-Twenty-first-Century/dp/0521816009/) is refreshing: only two of its nineteen chapters are about particle physics.)

[talvalin.livejournal.com]

Bad time at Imperial? ;)

I graduated about 6 years ago, and can't recall seeing much in the way of religious dress. Most of the Sikh guys I knew had ditched their turbans and cut their hair short as soon as they started university, and I don't remember seeing veiled women on the campus.

[itinerantsphinx.livejournal.com]

My first reaction bears on the usual irritation about the banning of veils etc. A well-balanced approach is to come across people who are different / have made different choices and for that to make absolutely no difference to how we see them. Neither to judge them badly nor to make compensatory allowances especially for them in our minds. Ideally it just shouldn't occur to us that any viewpoint based on appearance is necessary at all.

Equally, Jack Straw does not need to see someone's face to be able to communicate meaningfully with them.

However, they are not proposing the ban of all veils, just the full ones (along with any item which obscures the face) and I can see the argument that not being able to identify people on property is a potential security threat. Not particularly a 'terrorist' one, but a way for someone to perpetrate any crimes: theft, damage to property, etc. It could be anyone underneath a veil, and by anyone I mean anyone: not just any muslim female but it could also be a white British male for whom a full veil could provide the perfect disguise for some planned crime (assuming that he did not have to speak to anyone, obviously). And meanwhile in London I guess they can't check all the people who might be wondering around university areas at any one time (as supposed to on a campus when they could check more easily). If they were really concerned about who was coming in perhaps they could check entrants to any university property (though it would doubtless required having separate rooms and a female member of staff on duty at all times to whom of course a muslim female could show her face. Quite logistic headache I imagine). But I guess that mostly the univeristy relies on security cameras and that's a bit more difficult.

And yet, when it's a matter of religious belief, how can you deny that?? It is a tricky one. I'm quite in favour of banning hoodies though, lol.

As for sub-fusc, I suppose that the traditional full muslim dress code would be one of black anyway...

[liadnan]

I agree with most of that but one point on the Jack Straw thing: Straw actually does have difficulty communicating with people if he can't see their faces because he is largely deaf. Not that this was the argument he was making.

[itinerantsphinx.livejournal.com]

Oh right. I had been quite puzzled by the whole thing actually, I hadn't expected it from him.

Privately saying to those who came to see him that he would prefer it if they would remove their veil would seem a more tactful approach than publically saying that they shouldn't wear them, even so.

And I've never much liked the 'but if you don't do it our way, can't you see what you are missing out on??' argument, in anything.

[liadnan]

Oh I think he said it now as part of a bid for the deputy labour leadership really.

[fanf]

Lots of other ministers have now come out saying how important visual communication is, without Straw's unstated excuse. Blind people are pissed off.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Why would you make a special exemption for religious belief as opposed to any other kind?

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Oh, for heaven's sake. I can understand banks and airport security worrying about such things, but does the security risk to Imperial really justify this degree of paranoia? Even on the (largely misguided) theory that universities are hotbeds of extremism, it would be too close to the extremists' backyards for an attack.

Honestly, some days I just want to despair.

Completely off topic, but...

[nicnac.livejournal.com]

This (http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1920095,00.html) is funny. Not sure which bit I like best out of the trolls, the nuns or the Kongra Gel.

Re: Completely off topic, but...

[liadnan]

Aye, pretty good. I've been following this story for a bit.