Are student rights under threat in the UK?

Gemma Tumelty, President of the National Union of Students in the UK, writes in Mortar Board, the education blog of Guardian Unlimited, that students' rights to self-organise in the United Kingdom are negatively affected by the British government's indicriminate use of words like "extremism," "terrorism," and "radicalism." She writes:

"By creating an atmostphere of suspicion around innocent people, whole groups are being isolated. We will make campuses repressive rather than vibrant, polarised rather than plural. And by boxing together people under ill though-out labels we are demonising communities and fuelling the racism and Islamaphobia that our whole society should be rallying against."

Tumelty did not cite any specific plans or policies that put students' rights to self-organise in jeopardy, but seemed rather to be referring to the 'chilly climate' that students, particularly Muslim students, were facing.

This is not merely a European issue, however. FrontPageMagazine, a neo-conservative website based in the USA, has published several inflammatory articles about US Muslim students, with titles like "The Muslim Student Association: A Wahhabi Front;" "Islamic Radicals on Campus;" and "Islamism's Campus Club."