but they may be the sort if thing your tutor says oh 'so and do us coming to talk about his position on goats -if you gave time you should go...
They really aren't. These events are nothing to do with the academic life of the university.
Let's lay out the issues, because there seems to be huge confusion here.
In the manner of a sea shanty, you can imagine a chorus in which I sing "I don't approve of any of these people because they are fascist, bigoted extremists whom no-one decent should associate with, and the presence of these ideas in this country is a massive problem which should be confronted wherever it arises" in between each paragraph, to save me the effort of ritual condemnation every sentence, yes?
Y A-B are posters here are conflating two problems.
The first is that a very small number of extremists in, particularly, London universities are haranguing what me might call "visible Muslims" and demanding that they be more fundamentalist. In the manner of the "Muslim Patrol" they are approaching female students in lectures and making demands of them about dress and "mixing". No-one, repeat, no-one has any doubt that this is completely unacceptable, and universities can, will and do take disciplinary action.
The second is that ISOC-affiliated campus associations, and others, are holding meetings on campuses which they want to be sexual segregated. The speakers at these events are firebrand radicals who challenge the limits of "conducive to the public good" visas. They want space on campus either because they are, in fact, campus associations, or because the spurious credibility of the event happening at a university is attractive to them. The provision of these rooms is the subject of this debate,
People who are talking about "their countries" and "foreign students" and "I wouldn't go there and..." are talking out of ignorance. Neither of these problems are associated with overseas students. The student organisations involved are populated almost exclusively by second and third generation British Muslims for whom their parents' and grandparents' assimilation is a step too far and therefore they want to adopt a more "authentic" (and I can't stress how scare those scare-quotes are) Islam than the "compromised" (ditto) version their parents and grandparents practice. Students from Wahhabi-influenced countries rarely come to the UK and those that do are mostly very pleased to escape the constraints of their home countries and in many cases move away from those religious barriers and refuse to be bound by them. And of course, those that have, or come from families with, strong objections to Western decadence don't come to the UK to study anyway. This is a British problem, made in Britain, with most of the actors being British. Just as campus Trots of yore were fonder of communism than people who actually lived under it, the noisy Islamists all have British passports.
Put aside the "Muslim Patrol" type bigots. They're not a new problem, as anyone who's every been around a Christian Union and had to deal with biblical literalist entryists will attest; many campus CUs are now very much dominated by fundamentalists. If they get out of line they will be disciplined and/or arrested, and they are a tiny, tiny problem. There are occasional rows on my campus about alcohol in SU events, for example, but they are resolved very quickly with little or no compromise. Unlike at one school no-one is suggesting that non-Muslims should modify their behaviour, nor that a self-appointed group of hardliners should be able to intimidate moderates.
The issue of people wanting to rent rooms is the big one. Pace whoever said upthread that organisations that breach university policies can't obtain rooms, many universities (I'm thinking particularly of UCL, which is the centre of a lot of these problems) take free-speech very seriously. The idea that universities should pre-screen speakers is anathema to what a university is, and unless the university has clear and immediate reason to believe that violence is going to ensue, it can be argued that universities should stay out of the issue. Gender segregation is extremely unpleasant, and if it results in violence should not be permitted; however, no university would or should have a problem with renting a room to a DV survivor group, a rape survivor group, a Lesbian support group or, indeed, the women's hockey team. STEM departments, particularly the T and the E, have semi-official women's groups, too, and again no-one seriously suggests they shouldn't.
So we're left with the problem of University-affiliated clubs and societies using their right to book rooms, and then suggesting, offering or imposing gender segregation on the audience. The audience is largely, of course, supportive: why would people who are not supporters of fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam be attending a meeting on the topic? This all slightly smacks of the patronising protection of innocent young Muslim women who need big strong white people to stand up for them: who exactly is it who is going to these meetings and then finding to their horror and distaste that sexual segregation is in force? How many in the audience don't worship at least weekly in a mosque with precisely the same precepts?
As I said at the outset, I think the whole situation is deeply dispiriting, and the speakers involved are obnoxious, violent and bigoted. But I don't think much to Nigel Farage, either, and the gap from "I would not attend a speech, nor would I want to associate with anyone who does" and "these people should be banned" is a wide one. The victims of the segregation largely don't exist or aren't very sympathetic characters (who are the women who want to attend meetings by fascist bigots but whose rights of free-association at those meetings need to be defended?), the unintended consequences of a policy of gender integration for campus room bookings are significant (someone upthread mentioned Mens Rights Activists: there are enough tossers on campus who might use challenges under such rules as a weapon against women that it cannot be discounted as a risk) and the problem isn't that big to start with.
Cameron's grandstanding. There's a whiff of racism in the air. There aren't any actual victims. The problem isn't large. Leaving well alone is the best policy, and the Universities UK proposal was pretty decent.