Rankings rankle 2

Your article "Hardbacks and hard drives win some hard cash" (May 21) ignores one of your tables in which Cambridge University and most other Russell Group institutions are consistently bottom - the percentage of permanent staff. While it is top of the RAE table, Cambridge has the lowest percentage (25.8 per cent) of staff on permanent contracts. This is not simply due to the large number of postdocs either - at least 30 per cent of staff on a "teaching and research" contract must be on temporary contracts.

Isn't it time for some of Cambridge's success to "trickle down"?

Nick Savage
Honorary secretary
Cambridge Association of University Teachers