Sir, - Preparations for the next research assessment exercise in universities in Northern Ireland are wasting huge amounts of time owing to the diversion of effort from the serious business of teaching and study into form-filling and paper-pushing. In consequence there has been a threat to standards, and the only beneficiaries have been managerial aggrandisers and their academic acolytes.
The exercise is devised by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and its bureaucratic panels. Higher education, however, is now an undertaking in which responsibility for payments has been transferred to Northern Ireland. Since there is no obligation to continue with the misconceived RAE, I beg Mr Martin McGuinness to order its cancellation forthwith. - Yours, etc., George Huxley,
Trinity College, Dublin 2.