What is a university?
Sir: As a former Russell Group vice chancellor, I think that Toby Young’s appeal for more universities (Status anxiety, 14 January) needs several caveats. First, what is a university? Recently some have been created by stapling together several institutions without any substantial element of research and renaming them as a university. There is even some suggestion that research is inimical to good teaching, because some university researchers with a duty to teach shirk it. But the presence of a weighty research community lends a university an invaluable ambience. In America, many colleges that teach only to the bachelor degree are well regarded without possessing the title of university.
I would also recommend caution in judging the quality of teaching by student surveys. First, I suspect the recent obsession with ‘universities for all’ has led to many enrolling who would be better served by other forms of further education. Second, the ‘value for money’ atmosphere focuses on contact hours.
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