Letters: How to save the NHS

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Sir: David Butterfield’s 21 years of experience of higher education (‘Decline and fall’, 26 October) chimes with my 35. But the decline in the rigour of university education which he so deftly describes has not been entirely self-willed. Successive governments have championed a consumerist understanding of higher education. Students have become consumers and academics have become service providers.

The reduction in the intellectual demands of undergraduate courses and grade inflation are due to the annual National Student Survey. Universities are in thrall to this and make ever greater efforts ‘to enhance the student experience’. This includes pandering to the desire of most students to have fewer essays, slimmer reading lists, few exams and higher grades. The fact that so many academics prefer not to teach is due to the Research Assessment Exercise, which hugely incentivises research over teaching. The obsession with applicants’ school backgrounds and the discrimination against those from private schools are due to the ‘access and participation plans’ foisted on universities by the Office for Students. I strongly doubt whether this experiment in consumerisation and social engineering will produce a fairer society, but it is certainly not producing better university education.

Dr Peter Wilson

Associate professor in International Relations, LSE

Classics example

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Sir: There is much to agree with in David Butterfield’s ‘J’accuse’. As the mother of three current or former Oxford or Cambridge students, I have some accusations of my own.

Classics at Oxford has been thoroughly dumbed down. Instead of reading complete texts in the original language, there is an option to read extracts only, in an English translation. This changes the degree from Classics to Classical Studies, and means that a degree that was reputed for its rigour if not its relevance can now boast of neither.