Letters – 28 February 2019

Librarians hold the trump card in learning

I read with disappointment Jeffrey Beall’s tirade against the work of academic librarians in the article “Bloated remainders” (Opinion, 7 February). The rise of the internet means that students more than ever face an overwhelming amount of information. Selecting and finding trustworthy articles for academic assignments takes practice, and the help of a librarian in this process can be crucial. My colleagues and I spend a great deal of time making sure that students know where to come for help.

Rather than having “diminishing workloads” and days spent on social media, we are increasingly involved in a variety of roles. Academic librarians are at the forefront of new technological changes and new ways of delivering library instruction, all of which can feed into the learning and teaching outcomes at higher education institutions.

In the words of the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement: “Students tend to be more engaged with learning on the whole if they engage with library resources, interact with library staff, and spend time using libraries.”

Scott McGregor
Liaison librarian
University of Dundee

Re “Bloated remainders”: what a very appropriate title for this piece in which a retired professional demonstrates why it is such an excellent idea that he should have retired.

Librarianship has always been political – see the discussions over the political narratives inherent in Dewey Decimal Classification – but what Jeffrey Beall objects to is less that it is political and more that it no longer accords with his politics.

Librarianship is thoroughly engaged in ensuring that information on the internet is accessible, curated and framed in ways that – for example – enable people to learn how to avoid dubious research. Librarians are as important intermediaries as they ever were, perhaps more so.

I am glad to see, however, that in retiring, Beall has contributed his own small mite to reducing the costs that he feels are so high.

Farah Mendlesohn
Stoke-on-Trent 

Workload overload

It’s not just academic staff who despair over the use of workload models (“Academic workload models: a tool to exploit staff and cut costs?”, News, 7 February; Letters, 14 February).

Those of us in support roles who strive to support the work of academic colleagues also waste days trying to complete online spreadsheets and assigning points to every conceivable activity.

As with everything, senior management teams want data to tell them something that anyone with any insight could tell them in a minute – some people are easy to work with and competent (more women and junior staff in this category) and some are not (more older male professors here).

A university administrator
Via timeshighereducation.com 

Bamboozled

I am shocked by the poor reporting standards in an item on a German study into whether the order of beer and wine drinking affects whether one will get a hangover (“The week in Higher Education”, News, 14 February).

The researchers used German beer – lager – in their study. If this research is repeated using good British ale, different results may ensue. Having conducted a long-term case study on myself, I can confirm that if I drink beer then wine, I do feel fine; however, that is certainly not the case for wine then beer, which definitely causes a stupendous hangover.

Nigel Hunt
Associate professor, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences
University of Nottingham

Logic’s bald spots

The contribution of Bhadrabahu to the debate on “conditional unconditionals” (Letters, 21 February) is arguably surpassed by that of Timothy Williamson, Wykeham professor of logic at the University of Oxford, who wrote:

“People can be bald or not bald. That classification is vague. People can be definitely bald or definitely not bald, but they can also be neither definitely bald nor definitely not bald. That classification is vague too. People can be definitely definitely bald or definitely definitely not bald or definitely neither definitely bald nor definitely not bald, but they can also be neither definitely definitely bald nor definitely not definitely bald, or neither definitely definitely not bald nor definitely not definitely not bald, or neither definitely neither definitely bald nor definitely not bald nor definitely not neither definitely bald nor definitely not bald. That classification is vague too.”

Williamson has hair.

John Craven
Graduate student, King’s College London
Sometime vice-chancellor, University of Portsmouth 

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