Sir: I have read with mounting disgust and repugnance your
sorry apology for a leading article on the front page of your March 17 issue entitled ' Fewer means better.' Whoever wrote it must have obtained his facts from a Christmas cracker or from that wellknown socialist newspaper, the Sunday Express.
It is true indeed that the National Union of Students has a general secretary, an annual conference, with delegates and indeed has a regrettable tendency to pass pompous resolutions. But so what? The Conservative and Unionist Party also has a general secretary, an annual conference, with delegates, and a tendency to pass pompous resolutions but no one with the exception of the Morning Star, objective as ever, has the guts to call that a trade union.
The most odious feature of this article is your sneering and patronising attiteude towards the student grants campaign. With exquisite good taste you remark that perhaps " the present level of student grants is insufficient to maintain the students in the matter to which they feel entitled " and go on to imply that students, all students, live in the lap of luxury, do no serious work, and make no effort whatsoever to obtain a degree. This is not the case. By and large, most students do the work they are asked to and try to hand it in on time. They certainly do not live in luxury. The grants system of this nation is both complicated and unfair. Anomalies abound. For instance the undergraduate with no visible means of support or with poor parents, receives the full grant of £465 per annum, which is insufficient to cover the full cost of food, clothing, lodging, books and so on, let alone "gramophone records." If, as seems the case, students " are reluctant to buy books," it is because the book allowance is insufficient, not because they are incapable of " greater intellectual effort." And what about the student of music, who has to buy expensive equipment on such a meagre sum, as well as live?
But there are many students who are not qualified to live on the munificent sum of £465 per annum. These consist of the means-tested students who, because they have a small private income, as I have, or who have relatively well-off parents, do not receive the full grant and parents have to contribute to make up the balance; many parents either can't or don't. And, most horrible, pernicious and monstrous anomaly of all, married female students receive a minimum grant of £275 per annum, no matter how well or badly off they are. Has Mrs Thatcher ever tried living in London on £275 a year? It is not easy. Furthermore, as the cost of living has rocketed, so has the sum every parent must contribute to keep his son or daughter from penury. Grants, however, have only been increased slightly since 1962.
One must treat your project of fixing grants according to ability with the contempt it deserves. Ability can certainly not be assessed by examinations, either at ' A' Level standard or indeed within the confines of the University itself. Examinations are extremely inefficient methods with which to assess knowledge, ability or industry; they only assess the ability of a student to pass the exam. Similarly all talk of expelling and withdrawing grants from undergraduate and postgraduate students "whose work drops below the required national level " is absurd, for there is no "required national level " whatever. Shall it be some sort of examination? The prospect of being required to pass examinations on Pain of expulsion could lead, and indeed does lead, to an "exam syndrome" among the students, and this takes the form of mental illness, nervous breakdown, and alcoholism. It is also the practice in Soviet Russia, where alcoholism is widespread, and can be condemned as not only pernicious but socialistic.
Similarly, the mere possession of a university degree does not confer cash benefit on those who receive it. The incidence of student unemployment is scandalously high. In addition, the whole batch of proposals in this dreadful article can only lead to the conversion of
Spectator March 31, 1973 the universities into a degreefactory, turning out graduates whom nobody wants.
TSchool of SlavonicandEuropean Studies, University of SuEgaslert London, Senate House, London WC1
Previous page
