What Friday's arrests and deportations bring home is that universities are workplaces much like any others, microcosms where all the stresses and contradictions of our society – inequality, the exploitation of migrant labour, the expansion of state power – are manifest.
Compounding and intensifying these issues of race and gender, they include concerns about the deep structures of inequality in our society — inequalities of wealth, privilege, and opportunity (including educational opportunity), and the attitudes of superiority those inequalities breed.
In the old society, inequalities of wealth had been limited, and their effects were restrained, on the one hand, by the traditional social bonds and obligations that linked rich and poor and, on the other hand, by the privacy of Muslim home life.
Second, gender is structured into the organisation of social relations of production and reproduction of every known society, in the same way class inequalities structure capitalist societies, racial inequalities structure South Africa, and caste inequalities structure India.
The reality is that in democratic free-market societies, more inequality tends to mean more growth.
"To achieve results for children, it is essential to address one of the most fundamental inequities found in all society – gender inequality," said UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Geeta Rao Gupta, placing the aspirations of the GAP within a larger perspective.
These attitudes and their potential dissemination through society counterbalanced inequality, but how far they were accepted cannot be known.
The halo of the prize has lent credibility to policies that harm society, to inequality and financial disorder.
In complex societies, these inequalities define different strata, or classes, that form the stratification system, or class structure, of the society.
Deborah Hargreaves, director of the think tank, said: "There's this huge dislocation in British society and inequality creates well-known social problems".
