Jewish students are turning their backs on British universities. Who can blame them?

Universities up and down the land are clambering to recruit students in time for the start of the new academic year. International students – those from outside the EU – are the most lucrative market, not least because there are no legal restrictions on the fees that they can be charged; top universities, such as Oxford, can charge as much as £23,000 a year for some courses. But there are also sound academic reasons why we should recruit internationally. We want our campuses – which are places of education as well as training – to be centres of social, religious and ethnic diversity. We also want, of course, to recruit the best students. Yet the signs are that the sector is failing in its mission to make campuses as cosmopolitan as possible. And students from Israel, in particular, appear to be increasingly turning away from British universities.