This week home secretary Theresa May made headlines when she accused UK universities of ‘complacency’ on extremism.

‘I don't think they have been sufficiently willing to recognise what can be happening on their campuses and the radicalisation that can take place,’ May argued, as she announced a process that will see funds cut to, among others, some Islamic student groups.

Obligingly for the home secretary, the Daily Mail published a list of 40 English universities where there could be a ‘particular risk’ of radicalisation on campus.

Elsewhere, many in the press and public life cited former UCL student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, accused of trying to blow up a transatlantic flight.

At one level, it is a nice treat for a cabinet minister to have a pop at universities, full as they can seem to be of academics writing papers proving that government policies are not working.

Many governments have been annoyed by universities.

After all, they are institutions run with public funds, performing public functions, but that have independent governance and independent foundation, and whose members have an independent voice.

Think of Oxford’s infamous 1985 decision to turn down its own alumnus Margaret Thatcher for an honorary doctorate.

Most attention has focused on the practicalities of snooping, and on freedom of expression.

But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that May and her colleagues are focused on using terror and extremism as levers to, at most, control universities more directly, and, at the very least, keep them in their place.

To take the latter point first, it is harder for members of a law faculty to criticise proposed legislation curbing civil liberties effectively, if the government can counter that the faculty is harboring tomorrow’s terrorists.

It is an earlier statement, from prime minister David Cameron, that leads me to think the government is interested in enhanced control over UK universities.

‘We must stop these groups from reaching people in publicly funded institutions – like universities,’ he said in February.

The impression that this is about control is added to by the very low standard for what constitutes ‘what can be happening’ on campuses.

To make the list of 20 institutions named by professor Anthony Glees in his 2005 report When Students Turn to Terror, for example, it was sufficient for extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir to have handed out some leaflets – though the leafleters did not actually need to be members of the university.

Of course, the government is not going to make all universities and their students agree with it.

But there is now an identifiable thread running through government policy, and it is this: the sort of rights that are entrenched, in ways that frustrate the executive’s freedom to direct public policy at will, are being progressively removed.

The obligations of councils to provide services, and the matters one might take legal action against public bodies or the NHS for, are prominent on this list.

Government has ambitions to shape the purpose and focus of higher education – we have seen that in threats to funding for social science courses.

But trying to direct that shape and purpose through self-governing institutions is difficult.

Universities, the groups that represent them, and their legal advisers, should watch out for a series of obligations being placed on universities in return for ‘public funding’, failure to comply with which would be a breach that carries sanctions.

A duty to monitor and manage extremism and ‘radicalisation’ may or may not be the first of these ‘obligations’, but given the link made here between a duty, public funds, and extreme ideology, the creation of that duty is looking very usable right now