Readers' reactions

Last week in The THES... Justine Stephens argued that students were right to occupy the DFEE over tuition fees

Paul Mackney General secretary Natfhe

Goldsmiths College Students Union is to be congratulated for the imaginative way in which it has continued to confront those who have either never known, or forgotten what it is, to live in debt with the policy

contradictions of a government

commitment to widening participation and the introduction of tuition fees.

Patrick Brady Geraldine Thorpe Senior lecturers London Guildhall University

Baroness Blackstone cannot rate very highly the intelligence of the Goldsmiths students when she told them that the

government's tuition fee system was

"socialist" and represented a redistribution of wealth. Our understanding of socialism is that education is free at the point of consumption and that the appropriate mechanism, already available, for the redistribution of wealth is progressive taxation.