RAE cash cliques

The Times Higher 's letters page has been strangely silent on the news that "about one in six" members of research assessment exercise sub-panels will be from just three universities ("Big three boast most RAE judges", May 13) and that "most members are from traditional redbrick universities".

Your editorial (May 13) politely referred to the issues that surround the RAE but skirted the outrageous consequence that, in effect, the favoured institutions will be in a position to control both ends of the supply chain for research funding. Is this not a little worrying? Might it not serve to foster chosen cliques within those institutions and permit second and third-rate research to flourish at the expense of first-rate work elsewhere? Shall the mediocre inherit the earth? And would the demise of the RAE in favour of a system based solely on bidding to the research councils remedy this problem? Will the same institutions not ensure they are masters of this domain also?

Those of us working in the (no less "traditional") enterprise and applied research-oriented universities, meanwhile, can only anticipate a few handouts from the rich men's table or perhaps a future as a humbler component of some version of the Wisconsin model. (We might even accept this with good grace if there were parity of esteem and access to funding for our forms of excellence.)

I write as an estates administrator of very little brain but 40 years' involvement in the sector. Yet little seems to have changed since 1981 when many of our institutions were devastated by cutbacks doled out according to criteria devised behind closed doors.

In fact, it is the way everything is done by the back door in higher education in this country that is so depressing.

Ian Purver
Salford University