The bureaucratic university. (Letters).

SIR: Professor Cristaudo's complaints (May 2002) concerning the inanities of administrators in universities are surprising only because they are so late. Similar moans about the status of all intellectually reputable subjects taught in universities have been the norm for decades.

It must have been twenty years ago that I pointed out that the Dawkins "reforms" constituted a fundamental attack on the idea of a university. There were at that time three distinct models of what a university was. The traditional one had it as an umbrella organisation for the academics who had satisfied other academics that something merited thought. That the research of the academic and the education of the students was an integrated activity followed from the nature of the academic purpose: studying hard and complicated subjects, preferably in company. In this model, those academics whose creativity had dried up would, out of an urge to be still useful in a minor role, take on the administrative chores.

The other two models were management models with the assumption (plainly false) that the workers were to be told what to do by managers who knew the ultimate objectives which the workers did not; and a union-bosses-versus-serfs conception, a model favoured by those who wanted positions in the union and were prepared to spout a 1930s cloth-cap rhetoric to get it. Both models were equally inapposite. They were being wished on us by people who simply had no experience of real universities, or had and didn't like them.

I urged my fellow academics to take the issue seriously twenty years ago and discovered that few did. The majority were either too pusillanimous to challenge authority or too obtuse to foresee the inevitable. In consequence the institutions have suffered as was predictable. I know because I predicted it.

Looked at objectively, academics have got what they deserved. Were they the critical analytic thinkers they claim to be, they would not have gone to the slaughter as they have done. Salaries are low, academic standards have slipped, academic freedom is negligible, academics are ...