Letters | 26 January 2017

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. In subjects like engineering and medicine, a great deal of information has to be given didactically. But in subjects like the arts and social sciences there should be time to read and reflect. Indeed, some of the best education takes place in the gaps in the timetable.
Laurence Martin
London WC1

Stonehenge blunder

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Matthew Parris

What if Trump is just bonkers?

Sir: Simon Jenkins’s idea in his characteristically thought-provoking piece on the Stonehenge tunnel (‘Monumental folly’, 21 January) would represent the worst of all worlds. He suggests keeping the current A303 and upgrading it (presumably widening it) to a one-way dual carriageway, with, to the south, another dual carriageway running in the opposite direction. As well as creating extensive disturbance to a very sensitive landscape south of Stonehenge, this would put at risk some very significant archaeology on either side of the existing A303.