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Good morning. I sit on the governing body of a northern university so am more than a little interested in the reported news that new rules are to be drawn up by Downing street to force universities to ban all extremist preachers from their campuses. Now actually I believe that most British universities do a very good job in educating their students, but in institutions dedicated to the exploration of ideas it’s difficult to control what people say or think. Of course we’ve been here before. Throughout the seventies I was a university chaplain at a new university in the south of England whose campus life was being torn apart by groups purveying different varieties of radical Marxism and extreme Christian religious sects were also busy trying to recruit vulnerable students into their number. One mother attacked me fiercely for letting her daughter be influenced by such a Christian sect. The fact that I had no influence whatsoever over that sect or her daughter was of no comfort to her. The fact that young people, wherever they might be, can be susceptible to being brain washed by extreme ideologies is no new phenomenon. In 1974 a 19 year old rich American heiress Patty Hurst was kidnapped by a violent left wing revolutionary group. Within no time she was identifying with her abductors' cause, making propaganda announcements for them, and taking part in illegal activities including violent bank raids. And this susceptibility isn’t confined to one age group or ideology. In 1978 James Jones, the leader of an extreme Christian cult persuaded over 900 of his followers, men women and children, to commit mass suicide when their activities came under investigation, whilst on the political front, and more recently, in Norway in July 2011, a right wing activist Anders Breivik killed 77 young people in a mass shooting. If these groups were abhorrent, extreme examples of Christianity or right or left wing political ideologies, today in the news the focus is more on extreme Islamist groups, but the allure is the same, if you pound vulnerable young people hard enough with an ideology having a clear uncomplicated message which makes sense of their otherwise complicated lives, if you recruit them into an elite organisation which makes them feel special, then you’re offering a package which many will buy, for a time at least, and today the emotional pitch is made, more often than not, on the internet through attractive role models. How are we to respond to all of this. I believe that St Benedict in the sixth century has some relevant advice whether we strive to build the good university or the good nation. He instructed his followers to create communities where the strong have something to aim for and the vulnerable have nothing to run from. That’s should still be our aim. First broadcast: 5 March 2015