Professor Geoffrey Alderman - News

Alex Strom writes an opinion column for the Jewish Tribune [JT], an Anglo-Yiddish newspaper owned by the Agudist movement and which circulates in the orthodox Jewish communities of the UK. In its issue of 24 August 2006 the JT carried a piece by Strom highly critical of a motion passed at the AGM of the large and prestigious Adass Yisroel Synagogue of Hendon. This motion called on the Synagogue to sever its ties with the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations [UOHC] should the Union not openly disassociate itself from Neturei Karta [NK], an allegedly orthodox extreme anti-Zionist group whose leaders travelled earlier this year to meet and make friends with the Jew-hating and Holocaust denying government of Iran, which is of course the patron of Hamas and Hizbollah. But Strom did not mention that in recent years the UOHC has made donations totalling over £58,000 to NK. The story of these donations was first broken by the Jewish Chronicle earlier this year. But the JT has never reporte

Next month Barnet council-taxpayers will be invited to go to the polls to elect their local council. The size and impact of the council tax will be the major issue at these elections, and the political parties have been hard at work reassuring us that council-tax rises are being kept as low as possible. Since the last local elections four years ago, the council tax in Barnet has risen by some 32.5 per cent - an average rise over over 8 per cent each year. These tax hikes are way beyond the annual rate of inflation, which is now less than two per cent per annum. The Conservatives, who have been in power throughout this period, argue that the increases are due to extra demands - precepts as they are technically known - made by the London Assembly and various other London-wide public services, such as the Metropolitan Police. In regard to these precepts the Tories argue that they have had no discretion - they must pass on the increases, collect the revenue, and send it to the precepting

Geoffrey Alderman issues this statement in a purely personal capacity. "Last year I accepted an invitation from the Southern Assocoiation of Colleges & Schools (SACS), based in Georgia, USA, to make a presentation to its annual meeting in Atlanta in December 2005. The presentation involved, inter alia, a critique of the SACS' university and college accreditation methodology. In January 2006 I was pleased to receive from SACS details of the very positive feedback on that presentation. I was invited to propose a subject for a presentation at the forthcoming SACS annual meeting, which will take place in Orlando, Florida, next December. Meanwhile, the "Chronicle of Higher Education ran a long article (13 January 2006) on American InterContinental University (AIU). This article triggered a lively debate on the Chronicle's "Forum" website, in which my colleague Dr Grace Telesco (South Florida Campus) and I (London Campus) took part, in defence of the univers