Letters – 10 January 2019

Civic role vital to winning long-term security

In his leading article “A defining moment” (3 January), John Gill starts with a question: what are universities for? He then suggests with some certainty that one of the first activities to be sacrificed in the face of an impending financial crisis will be place-based civic engagement.

I would argue that one of the key things that universities are for is serving the public good in their communities. The Office for National Statistics’ proposals to incorporate the outstanding student debt into the public finances ends the myth about higher education as solely a private good.

If universities are to compete for a share of a dwindling pot of public funding, they will have to demonstrate how they contribute to the public good. This can be most apparent in the places where they are key anchor institutions, ones through which our representative democracy operates. If universities follow the route that Gill implies is inevitable, that would further seriously undermine the case for ongoing state support and would result in lasting damage to the sector.

John Goddard
Emeritus professor, Newcastle University
Vice-chair, Civic University Commission

Blind acceptance

The news article “Finland trials blind recruitment of academics in drive for equality” (20 December) reports that the country’s leading university is testing the use of anonymised applications for academic roles as part of a nationwide push towards greater equality in hiring practices.

The story cites several experts who warn against relying on such practices. Their reasons for not anonymising applications struck me as mostly new iterations of the argument “we know quality when we see it – it looks just like us, so we need to see it”. However, my experience of semi-anonymised application procedures suggests that the problem is more systemic.

Increasingly, and often for justified reasons of fair practices, essential requirements (often imposed centrally) are used to narrow a field of candidates before a selection committee meets. Anyone not meeting them is discarded. However as these prerequisites have escalated – PhD complete, published research, grant holder and so on – more issues arise. I’ve seen jobs go unfilled because experienced industry candidates do not have PhDs. Many attractive candidates are excluded: older candidates whose early careers did not include grant application support; candidates who have worked overseas and thus have no research excellence framework publications; candidates with disabilities and/or chronic illness, for whom everything costs more or takes more time; and candidates from non-traditional backgrounds who cannot afford to spend years as casuals. The result is a reinforcement of “merit-based discrimination”, in which “merit” = unequal opportunities.

Before we impose anonymity, we need to take a long, hard look at our criteria so as to avoid a rerun of the St George’s medical school crisis (1986), in which a computer was unwittingly programmed with the prejudices of the staff before making “blind” acceptances.

Farah Mendlesohn
Stoke-on-Trent

Fees posed puzzle

The interesting history of the tuition fees debate outlined by John Morgan in his analysis “Victory for the fees protesters at last?” (News, 3 January) is further illuminated by a revealing interview that Sir Vince Cable gave to the Institute for Government in 2015.

Cable said: “For things like university finance, one of the reasons I think we got into so much trouble over tuition fees was the mind-boggling complexity of the subject. And it’s a bit like the Schleswig-Holstein question: somebody was dead who understood it and David Willetts I think sort of understood it and I gradually understood it but by then we’d already made the key decisions which were probably wrong. So I think the complexity and massive nature of the material we were dealing with came as a surprise.”

Tom Ward
Deputy vice-chancellor, student education
University of Leeds 

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