Monastic fantasy

BEFORE waxing lyrical about universities providing an "essential haven or home for cultural workers" (THES, December 6), Valentine Cunningham should consider the growing number of redundant academics and lecturers on temporary contracts who get neither the money nor the intellectual succour he enjoys.

Outside Oxford, the university environment is becoming increasingly hostile to those who put vocation before personal profit, and in spite of his whingeing about the harsh winds blowing through academia, it is a sign of Cunningham's out-of-touch sentimentality that he thinks the problem can be written off as a choice between knowledge and wealth.

The real legacy of Thatcherism is in massively extending the gap between those who may choose and those who can not, and all Cunningham is saying is that he is sitting pretty in the first of these categories.

The idea of an intellectual commonwealth centred on the university is rapidly becoming a myth, and it is up to us to strike against the culture of lowered expectations and short-term profit, not whitewash it with personal fantasies of monastic forbearance.

Anthony Mellors

Ryelands Way, Durham