Letters: The case for legalising cannabis

Paying the price

Sir: Lionel Shriver’s piece about university standards rang true to me (‘University is supposed to be hard’, 15 October). When I, then working for a distinctly moth-eaten British university, visited a very famous private college in Massachusetts in 1985, I expressed my envy of his luxurious surroundings to a professor of English. His reply was: ‘Don’t envy us. You have something we don’t have. It’s called standards.’ He went on to say that he had just been warned about his behaviour as he had given a ‘very generous’ B minus for an essay by an ‘idle, insolent, profoundly ignorant pig of a student’, who complained about the low grade to his father – a complaint that was then passed on to the university president and, in turn, to the head of department. British universities were not then dependent on fees paid by students or their parents. I have no doubt that the fact that they now are is responsible for the enormous increase in the number of first-class degrees and the change to upper second as the most common degree class. A classic case of ‘he who pays the piper…’.

Robert Walls

Camberley, Surrey

In praise of Gen Z

Sir: While Lionel Shriver’s criticism of NYU for dismissing Dr Maitland Jones for teaching a too-demanding course in organic chemistry is probably just, I would like to rebut Ms Shriver’s implied criticism of the current generation of ‘Gen Z’ students. As an emeritus professor, I taught quantum mechanics and mathematical methods through the lockdowns and was amazed at the resilience and work ethic of the students. Undergraduate years are about so much more than academic study, and in being banished to their homes and kept apart by ‘social distancing’ they lost everything beyond study. But study they did, and we should be proud of them.