This article really angers me.  And especially this quote from Maddy McMaster, the acting Vice Chancellor:

"A university’s responsibility to its students is to provide them with a quality education," she said. "Recognising that the educational experience is not confined to the classroom, RMIT offers other services, including prayer rooms. It falls to religious communities to provide the consecrated spaces."

Now, while I agree with the first sentence, I find that the last sentence shows a complete lack of knowledge of the people who frequent her University.

Muslim’s pray 5 times a day, which includes morning, noon, afternoon, evening and late at night.  Now the first one and the last two aren’t that relevant to RMIT (unless a student is studying late).  But the middle two are relevant.  And if Maddy had done her research, or even checked Wikipedia, she’d know that an orthodox Muslim will stop everything to pray at the prescribed times.   Now if there was a mosque within walking distance of RMIT, I’d accept the University’s argument.  But there isn’t.  And to be frank, it aint the Islamic communities responsibility to build a Mosque around the corner.  No, it’s the responsibility of the University who makes an effort at attracting overseas students – many of whom are Islamic – to provide that basic service.  Otherwise, all this talk of multi-culturalism and cultural diversity and embracing the other, is just a pile of rhetoric and bullshit.

Now I know the campus has set up 8 rooms.  And I can just about imagine how tiny they are – not able to cope with the influx of students.  I also know there’s an interfaith room – but those things are rubbish, and don’t cater for the different faiths at the University.  For example, an orthodox Jew wouldn’t be seen dead in an interfaith room* because (a) it may have Christian inconography and (b) there’s no ability to segregate men from women.  So those rooms are basically useless (and I speak from experience as someone who studied both at Monash and RMIT).

So for fucks sake RMIT build the Muslim prayer room like you promised.  You want that overseas money.  You wanna show how great a place you are for learning and study.  You want to pride yourself on all that cultural diversity that’s walking around the halls of your campus, then shut the fuck up and do what you promised.  Because all this bullshit of saying that the responsibility falls on religious communities shows a complete lack of understanding of the people studying at your Uni.

So there!

*I should say that praying at Monash was never a problem during my Uni days.  Jews pray three times a day – morning, afternoon and evening.  And in most cases you can do the afternoon bit a bit later in the day.  You also don’t necessarily need to pray in a room.  And while it’s better to pray with ten men, it isn’t a necessity either.

ETA:  This blog post provides more background on the issue.