Letters – 8 November 2018

Where do we draw the line on reparations?

Robert Dingwall is right to identify the multiple hypocrisies that underpin the demand that universities engage in “reparative justice” (“We need a serious debate on slavery reparations”, Opinion, 1 November).

At present, that demand centres on benefits alleged to have been derived from the slave trade. But why stop there? Why not investigate the ultimate origin of every benefaction from which any university has ever benefited, and then make reparations accordingly?

Geoffrey Alderman
Professor of politics
University of Buckingham

Market logic

The story “University deficits increase as students flock to elites” (News, 1 November) reports deepening multimillion-pound deficits at a number of English universities and warnings about the “sustainability” of institutions.

If, for UK higher education as a whole, tuition fee income has plateaued (given stagnant fees and home student numbers, in addition to increasing global competition for international students), then extra revenue can only come at other institutions’ expense.

This is what we are seeing: since the demise of student number controls, the more elite institutions are recruiting students who might have gone elsewhere. This makes the less elite institutions financially weaker and “forces” the growing institutions to invest in buildings (which requires financing), while buildings are now underused at the shrinking institutions.

To cope with the additional students, the elite institutions recruit teaching-only staff on similar conditions to the staff being laid off at the shrinking institutions. The cost of staff relative to other expenses and income must shrink to afford the interest payments on the financing.

The result is that more money is being spent on interest, to teach the same number of students by fewer staff who are employed under worsening conditions. The likely outcome for students overall is a lower-quality education in nicer buildings.

DMZZ
Via timeshighereducation.com

Local matters

You report that “Leading Asian universities fall back in arts and humanities” (News, 1 November), but is there any evidence that they are “falling back” in quality of scholarship as opposed to, say, ceasing to care about topics that excite the editors of Anglocentric Western journals?

It is far harder to get published if your main research interests are highly local and do not feature on the “list of gatekeeper topics that sell journals”.

Brido
Via timeshighereducation.com

Rethink references

As careers and higher education manager in a large sixth-form college, more than 1,000 of whose students make Ucas applications every year, I feel it is time that UK universities and Ucas reviewed the benefits of teacher and tutor references.

When teachers are overburdened with teaching, marking and assessment duties, to expect them to write subject and personal references for every student they teach is unnecessarily onerous. Ucas wants “an informed and academic assessment of an applicant’s suitability for further study” and calls for no fewer than eight criteria to be addressed. For teachers and tutors, addressing these points and making the references personal and relevant is a senseless waste of valuable teaching and planning time.

A better system would be more akin to the one the Sutton Trust uses when students apply to its summer school: it asks for confirmation that the student has done, and is doing, the qualifications they’ve stated, and it provides three lines where a tutor can draw attention to any widening participation criteria or mitigating circumstances that might affect a candidate’s prior or future achievement.

When universities are so keen to get students on board that unconditional offers are making an unwelcome appearance, surely a 4,000-character reference that nobody reads is an anachronism and needs to be overhauled?

Shoonagh Hubble
Barton Peveril Sixth Form College
Eastleigh, Hampshire

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