THE UCU lecturers’ union complains that the University of Edinburgh, in bringing in student surveys of teaching performance, is introducing “a damaging marketisation of higher education with students seen as customers” (University lecturers ‘judged’ by student questionnaires”, The Herald, March 29).

As it was only founded in 1582, University of Edinburgh staff presumably do not remember the system of funding originally used in older universities. Modelled on the examples of Bologna and Paris, students in the older universities not only rated their teachers, they also hired them and paid them.

The first university to introduce a central fund to pay teachers was the University of Paris in 1229. Students were required to contribute two sous a week but they still had considerable say in the hiring and firing of teachers.

Students commonly went to university at that time aged 13 or 14, so the teachers at the University of Edinburgh today should be grateful that they are being rated by more mature students.

I can recall, as an undergraduate, being asked, with others, to rate our teachers and some of the comments: “Superb communicator but difficult to take notes”; “Good in small seminars, but stutters painfully in lectures”; “Sound methodical stuff, just what we need”; “Turns up late, ill prepared, and thinks this funny”; and “Sets long reading lists as if hers was the only course we were taking”.

Whether caustic or complimentary, these comments were used within the department to improve teaching and were no bad thing.

Russell Vallance,

4, West Douglas Drive,

Helensburgh.

STUDENT surveys of lecturing competence at the University of Edinburgh are something of a hornet’s nest. In the dim distant past when I was lecturing there, our department latterly already so surveyed students.

As for my own assessments, they ranged from I couldn’t lecture for toffee to I was the best lecturer ever; and so opinions roughly cancelled out in pairs. It was thus judged largely an exercise in futility from which no sensible or valuable conclusions could be drawn.

I fear the decision makers at the university may be confusing popularity with competence. Manufactured popularity with students is something of an easily winnable, backwards race towards mediocrity and lowering standards for both the university and its student body.

Surely it is better to aspire to the more valuable if more challenging race towards the goal of competent teaching by lecturer and indeed devoted learning by student (the other side of the same coin) and leave popularity aside.

For myself as student I always found that I got a good deal more benefit from a less-than-well-presented course of lectures than a smoothly polished one. There is the benefit to be derived by the student from the challenge of coming to grips with a subject despite minor, but not insurmountable, obstacles to understanding. Lectures are but one of many routes to understanding. Was that just me?

Darrell Desbrow,

Overholm,

Dalbeattie,

Kirkcudbrightshire.