Education: Your views: The Prof must look deeper

Professor David Cannadine's analysis of British universities lays emphasis on a lack of cash, the scramble for it, and suffocating bureaucracy (Education, 'Academia - a case of US and them', 22 April). But he will do well to reflect on the deeper structural problems which exist. These are the destructive fastening of higher education to economic performance.

This development has transformed the culture of universities and has led to the ascendancy of administrative and managerial values over academic values. The most pernicious consequence for academics has been the destruction of collegial relationships and their progressive replacement by contractual relationships between individual academics and their universities, and competitive relationships between academics.