The commercial culture of UK education is changing academic life for the worse. I know from my own experience that many of the problems Graham Crowley (AM315) identifies so lucidly apply to design as well as fine arts, to postgraduate as well as undergraduate education, and to research as well as teaching. The fact that school teachers have been striking appears as no coincidence: the troubles are fundamental to changing attitudes towards teaching and learning throughout the system. The Research Assessment Exercise is one obvious sign of the problem. It is effectively a tax that favours those doing easily comprehensible research, and works against the radical innovation that basic research can bring. Practice-based researchers in design and arts are among the hardest hit. Their ways of learning, and of communicating their learning to colleagues, are almost inevitably distorted and misunderstood by the means used to assess them. If the current system continues, the result will be to lose the unique contribution that practice-based research can bring, and to reduce arts and design researchers to poor versions of their more acceptable peers in science and engineering. Fortunately, the system is changing. Unfortunately, it is most likely to change for the worse.

Meanwhile, financial pressures force educational standards to drop. I am lucky enough to work for an institution that prizes radical academic enquiry. Still, in decisions about the curricula and aspirations of postgraduate courses, principle and ambition have to give way to concern for competitiveness among cash-strapped students. A striking example is the steady erosion throughout the country of Masters courses from three years, to two, to one year. Who can pretend that we can make such efficiency savings in the facilitation of personal growth? We are spending the hard-won reputation of British education for a quick buck today.

I applaud Crowley's bravery in speaking out now, and in reminding us of the idealism that should characterise education. Let us hope it starts a more general discussion of the values - and not just monetary ones - that we want our educational system to embody.

William Gaver, Professor of Design, Goldsmiths, University of London, from the letters page, Art Monthly, May 2008.

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