Have the universities got it right?(Letters)

SIR: I found myself agreeing with most of what Bob Catley wrote ("The Recuperating Universities", May 2004) but nothing less than bewildered by its obvious omissions. To celebrate the achievements of the universities in the post-Dawkins era is quite legitimate, but to make only brief and passing references to the major problems--I would call them diseases--is almost impossible to understand.

If my university is typical of most in Australia--and from all reports it is--the literacy of most students is somewhere between unsatisfactory and appalling, plagiarism is rampant, the pressure on academic staff to pass students is so great that assessment approaches the farcical, and students' knowledge of how their own society works is so low that I sometimes wonder whether most of my history students spent their childhood and youth in another country.

Over the last fifteen or so years I've probably moved further to the right than Bob Catley, but I'm sure that in 1969, when I began my BA at Flinders, Arts students' writing skills were superior, cheating was rare, academics didn't have sleepless nights fretting about whether they dare fall or downgrade non-performing students, and the radicals of the Vietnam War era at least knew the difference between a government in Canberra and one in Brisbane and could define an electorate (most of mine now couldn't).

I hope Bob Catley continues to write on the universities--but how about warning readers (many of whom must be employers) that a battery of passes and credits on a student's academic record today simply doesn't mean what it did (say) thirty years ago? As Paddy McGuinness and others have often said, the important things to know about a degree these days are where and, above all, when it was conferred.

The radicals of 1969, in retrospect, seem an incredibly naive lot, but some of their values still seem to me quite admirable. In Australian universities today, assessment procedures are designed to maximise EFTSU rather than sort out the bright from the dull, academics are encouraged to pursue research money rather than research, professors (and especially associate professors) can acquire that status without ever having published a single article in a refereed journal, administrivia increasingly lessens the time available for teaching and research, and management routinely humiliate staff vis-a-vis students from fear of students' complaints. Can Bob Catley really say that Australian universities today have "got it right"?

Malcolm Saunders, Rockhampton, Qld.

SIR: Professor Bob Catley fails to address the issue of the changed ...