Thank you for publishing Graham Crowley's letter (AM315), with his account of the shoddy education being afforded to British and overseas students in our remaining art schools. As he says, there are still a few good colleges, but there are also some good courses, even in the larger, suspect colleges. How long can they survive though?

I should like to explore some of the background to see how, and possibly why, we have arrived at this situation. Whatever the reasons, it is not due to lack of interest on the part of governments. More likely too much interest and too much interference.

For instance, with the introduction of foundation degrees the government is beginning to bring in two-year degree courses. This is going against the spirit of the Robbins Report on Higher Education (1961-63), which regarded the intensive study and personal teaching in British art schools equivalent to longer, less intensive and more impersonal courses on the Continent. Ours are now getting shorter and less intensive. The National Advisory Council on Art Education, under Sir William Coldstream in 1960, concluded that the teaching of fine art is fundamental to all students, and that a Diploma Club of 40 colleges should be self-validating when the degree equivalent Dip AD courses were established. This decision was immediately changed when the polytechnics were established, and 17 of the art colleges were incorporated into them, against Coldstream's successor Sir John Summerson's Council's advice. Although art courses did not benefit from such amalgamations, design courses may have gained from being in proximity to well-equipped workshops and laboratories. This was the first stage in creating umbrellas for smaller colleges. Eight or more years of discontent in the schools ended in 1968 with the revolutions in Hornsey and Guildford. The main issue then was the plan to further reduce the number of art schools and concentrate those remaining into large conglomerate institutions.

In 1971 two consortia were held at the Institute of Contemporary Art to discuss the nature and content of art and design courses - bearing in mind that Coldstream had concluded that art and design are one subject area - and how courses should be financed. The ICA consortia also discussed how many students should be involved in this sector of higher education.

Although the events of 1968-71 were then generally regarded as a crisis in art and design education, the issues remained largely unresolved. We now have a new set of more severe problems.

Tuition fees have come in; grants have gone; in the main, heads of departments are too busy with the bureaucracy that goes with working in large organisations and with the management of constant change to do any teaching; most of the teaching is done by fractional and part-time tutors (and some of the full-time tutors' work, usually); the part-time tutors are poorly paid, with bad working conditions and their employment is very casualised. There is not enough teaching; classes are too large and so on, just as Graham Crowley says and that is to say nothing about the marketing and commodification of education. Now, students seem to be involved in a competition where there are very few winners and a large number of losers. With university status, the colleges were faced with an obligation to do research in order to maximise their funding, despite the fact that art and design are not sciences. In all respects the situation now is considerably worse than it was in 1968.

Moving on, from colleges of art and design in general, to the University of the Arts London in particular - and possibly putting the government's role in education to one side - of the three interested parties in the university, the students and the staff seem to be united in their dissatisfaction with the management. The fact that the University comes at the bottom of the National Student Satisfaction Survey is a threat to all parties, and makes positive action essential if the London colleges are to survive.

When the mandarins who created Central St Martins, that today forms the core of UAL, from two distinguished and very different colleges, we all wondered whether they knew about the Hegelian Dialectic: you play one extreme off against another, and after many years of mutual hatred, the outcome is a larger version of the worst of the two. In a letter I received from the University of the Arts London's chairman Sir John Tusa, he expanded on his letter to the Observer (February 17, 2008). Interestingly, he explained that if the individual schools had not been part of UAL, Chelsea would not have been able to afford the move to Embankment and CSM to Kings Cross. The existing buildings would have cost millions to refurbish. This statement takes no account of the millions these two moves have already cost, and the £40-50m spent on the London College of Communication, after which it was a larger and worse place to work in. We seem to be looking at ventures in real estate. Is there a long-term plan to create luxury flats in these buildings and move the university to a new greenfield site?

The chairman told me that the past is the past and there is no place in the education system now for small colleges. Unless trusts can be formed to give individual colleges a degree of separation from constant government interference, or some of Britain's excellent, wealthy and almost independent science and technology universities (Imperial College, Oxford, Cambridge etc) should agree to provide an umbrella, there does not seem much prospect of improvement at UAL in the forseeable future. The situation that Graham Crowley has described is devastating for UAL, but much of what he said applies across the board in higher education, and this should be of concern to the nation. Most of my ex-students and my academic friends think that provision in higher education is designed to fail. Is this government policy or merely another result of the application of scientific management? Anyway, the outcome is that many inspiring teachers have either gone to work in America or decided to do something else.