The Soft-Marking Syndrome.(Letter to the editor)

SIR: "The Soft-Marking Syndrome" by Malcolm Saunders (June 2008) is an excellent article. It sums up what most of us have been talking about, once we had left the university (often early)!

Hans-Peter Stoffel, Murray's Bay, New Zealand.

SIR: While Professor Saunders' article on soft marking in universities is not wholly inaccurate, it is hardly a sophisticated analysis of the issues. Causa causae causatis est, if my Latin has more or less survived. To see what has gone wrong, and gone right, with universities in recent times, one needs to look rather more carefully into the mechanisms than he does.

If it is true that managerialism is rampant and frequently extremely silly, and that pressures to pass incompetent and idle students ate increasing (along with numbers of incompetent and idle students in general, although this is something from which my university is mercifully sheltered to some extent), then it should also be said that there are "managers" with a genuine appreciation of the proper objectives of a good university and enough sense to see the desirability of maintaining or even raising standards. Given the collapse of the fundamentals in the schools, we cannot maintain the same level of knowledge as in earlier years, but we can insist that students engage with reason the smaller amount they can tackle, and we can exploit their familiarity with a different world from the one in which we were raised. Or we can try to teach what we have always taught, and bleat when we discover that the intellectual foundations on which it depends are long gone.

Going to earlier, if not first, causes: once the government takes over control of institutions, those institutions inevitably decline. The government has discovered that it cannot run banks or transport systems or power stations; it knows nothing about how they work and simply regards them as cash cows, running them down and destroying the infrastructure from sheer ignorance. Bureaucrats who couldn't run the proverbial fish-and-chip shop cannot reasonably be expected to do anything else. It will, in the fullness of time, become apparent, even to them, that they can't run educational systems either, and for exactly the same reasons.

I have no objection in principle to running a university as a business; it has always been a business. But like any business, it is run better by people who understand what the product is and how it is constructed and delivered. I can't say I care for this particular jargon, but the product has to do with intellectual excitement, the grasp of ideas which have the power to change the world and in most cases already have. And the delivery of the product is to do with communicating the pleasures and other more mundane profits of insight and reflective thought, which is not a whole lot like marketing shirts or bootlaces. The construction of the product is what we call research, and that ...