Melbourne's hypocrisy on gender naive

THE news that Australia's most prestigious university is allowing apartheid is as shocking as the response it has issued to defend the practice.

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THE news that Australia's most prestigious university is allowing apartheid doesn't shock as much as the bureaucractic response it has issued to defend the practice.

Pathetic isn't quite the right word to describe Melbourne University's support of an Islamic organisation that directs any human born with a vagina to go to the back of the room. Perhaps hypocritical is more accurate, given that Melbourne markets itself as a bastion of human rights education, global citizenship and social inclusion.

There is a civic responsibility that accompanies being a leader in education and the university appears to have forgotten it somewhere in the apparently ambiguous space between social inclusion and culturally imbibed misogyny. But perhaps we should not be surprised.

In the past decade, universities have been issued with increasing requests for special treatment of groups seeking shelter from the basic democratic responsibility of treating their fellow human beings as equals. The requests are often made by groups claiming religious exemption to have separate prayers rooms in universities that are constitutionally interfaith.

The organisation sending women to the rear at the University of Melbourne is the Hikmah Way Institute. The Institute has booked events over the coming weekend at the University of South Australia, the University of Melbourne and in May at the University of Auckland.

Will any of their vice-chancellors stand up for women's basic human rights?

On its Facebook page in 2012, the Hikmah Way Institute linked to a quote against polytheism: "Beyond a shadow of doubt, the biography of Prophet Muhammad manifestedly represents an exhaustive embodiment of the sublime Divine Message that he communicated in order to deliver the human race from the swamp of darkness and polytheism to the paradise of light and monotheism."

Monotheistic extremism is not unkown to university campuses. In 2010, the Centre for Social Cohesion published a report 'Radical Islam on UK Campuses' which listed dozens of students who had been radicalised in British universities and graduated to become terrorists and mass muderers.

Monotheism and sending women to the back of the room are not the stuff of which enlightenment is made. It is a sad day indeed when Australia's university leaders allow the democractic values of liberty and equality to fall victim to archaic religious mores.

Dr Jennifer Oriel is a Melbourne-based writer.