THE articles on our universities (May 13 and 14) give much food for thought. The contrast between Der Spiegel's view of Britain's universities as the best in Europe (Top marks for the Tories, by Michael Fry) and the poor examination standards you report in some departments at Heriot-Watt University, following a similar scandal at Glasgow Caledonian University, must strike readers as rather odd.
How odd, too, that Der Spiegel, supposedly a liberal journal, should reach conclusions that agree with what the Tories and New Labour have inflicted on our universities: students paying for their education and hence opting for shorter courses that will give an immediate payback, train students for the labour market, and deprive them of a proper humane education. It will also, of course, prevent many young Scots from getting any university education at all.
The sentence Fry quotes from a German educational bureaucrat, ''What costs nothing is worth nothing,'' is the most reactionary statement on education I have ever seen and flies in the face of all Scottish educational experience, once possibly the finest in the world.
The quality of Der Spiegel's analysis can be measured from its judgment that the Oxbridge collegiate system assures quality control. What it assures is #35m more to Oxbridge than to other universities to maintain their wasteful and quite unnecessary one-on-one tutorial system. The ''quality'' was assured long before by the narrow hothouse cramming for Oxbridge in the sixth forms of English public and grammar schools.
Michael Fry should trust his colleagues at Strathclyde University rather than Der Spiegel: Scotland's universities are being driven into disastrous straits by the imposition on them of the utilitarian confusion of English educational ''thinking''.
Evidence of this theoretical weakness is provided by the idea that there should be ''templates or core control requirements for what is taught on degree courses''. Only the jargon-spouting bureaucrats who dominate our universities could have thought that one up.
As someone who was an external examiner through the 1970s and 80s both in Scotland and England I agree with Susan Bassnet of Warwick University that external examiners are anything but a ''cosy little club''. We worked very hard and very punctiliously, often devoting much time and argument to the work of a single student. The whole notion of a ''national'' curriculum for university course is utter idiocy.
In some ways saddest of all is the installation of Tony Slattery as rector of St Andrews University. I have nothing against Mr Slattery, but the tradition of rector - unknown in England - goes back eight centuries to Bologna and was an essential part of the consensual method of running universities that began there.
Between its foundation in the twelfth century and the Reformation the University of Paris had 18 Scottish rectors. It is an ancient, serious, democratic tradition, not a joke. Mr Slattery's election shows how completely anglicised St Andrews is.
Andrew Lockhart Walker,
7 Lovers' Loan, Dollar. May 14.
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