Letters: The case for legalising cannabis

Paying the price

Sir: Lionel Shriver’s piece about university standards rang true to me (‘University is supposed to be hard’, 15 October). When I, then working for a distinctly moth-eaten British university, visited a very famous private college in Massachusetts in 1985, I expressed my envy of his luxurious surroundings to a professor of English. His reply was: ‘Don’t envy us. You have something we don’t have. It’s called standards.’ He went on to say that he had just been warned about his behaviour as he had given a ‘very generous’ B minus for an essay by an ‘idle, insolent, profoundly ignorant pig of a student’, who complained about the low grade to his father – a complaint that was then passed on to the university president and, in turn, to the head of department. British universities were not then dependent on fees paid by students or their parents. I have no doubt that the fact that they now are is responsible for the enormous increase in the number of first-class degrees and the change to upper second as the most common degree class.