London Met University Considers Banning Sale Of Alcohol To Attract Muslim Students

By Rizwan Khatik - Sat Apr 14, 3:55 pm

A London University may become the first in the country to ban alcohol from part of its campus to attract more Muslim students, its VC has said. London Metropolitan University is considering banning the sale of alcohol from some parts of the campus because a “high percentage” of students consider drinking “immoral”, Professor Malcolm Gillies said.

One-fifth of the university’s students are Muslim, and of those the majority are women. It is an issue of “cultural sensitivity” to provide drink-free areas, Professor Gillies told a conference, adding he was “not a great fan of alcohol on campus”. “It’s a negative experience in fact an immoral experience for a high percentage of our students,” he said.

He went on, “Many of our students do come from backgrounds where they actually look on [drinking] as a negative. And given that around our campuses you have at least half a dozen pubs within 200m, I can’t see there is such a pressing reason to be cross-subsidising a student activity which is essentially the selling of alcohol.”

“Because there’s no majority ethnic group, I think it [selling alcohol] is playing to particular parts of our society much more [than to others]”. Professor Gillies said the University was “much more cautious” about the portrayal of sex on campus than universities had been 30 or 40 years ago, the Times Higher Education reported. Many of its female Muslim students “can only really go to university within four miles of home and have to be delivered and picked up by a close male relative”, he said. daily times monitor