Pay as you learn
From Dr Eamonn Butler Sir: Your undergraduate authors (`It's time to scrap the Millennium Don', 12 February) might like to know — for I am sure no don has taught them it — that Oxford was the same muddy reservoir of sloth, ignorance and luxury as long ago as the 1740s.
Adam Smith, an undergraduate at Balliol at the time, complained, `In the university of Oxford, the greater part of the public profes- sors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.'
In The Wealth of Nations he recalled bit- terly that college discipline forced students to attend 'sham lectures', but that 'the disci- pline of colleges and universities is in gen- eral contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more prop- erly the ease, of the masters'.
The reasons have not changed in 260 years either. The dons can relax because their salaries are paid by endowments (or, today, by taxpayers) rather than directly by the students. Smith proposed that students should pay their lecturers as they leave class, in proportion to the value they think they have derived from the teaching. Now that sort of student empowerment would certainly wake up the universities!
Eamonn Butler
Director, Adam Smith Institute, London SW1
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