LETTERS
We dons do care From Professor Henry Mayr-Harting Sir: The authors of your article 'It's time to scrap the Millennium Don' (12 February) invite contributions to the discussion. I'd like to say two things.
First, I know hundreds of dons, but very few — in Oxford or elsewhere — who are at all as the authors describe the typical don to be in respect of undergraduates. Indeed, what strikes me about the academic profes- sion as a whole at present, and certainly in Oxford which I know best, is that, despite the batterings from the government and the financial pressures on universities which favour research, it devotes itself to under- graduates, not for Brownie points but out of a still generally intact sense of vocation.
Second, written all over the article, along- side the valid striving for originality, is the dismissal of any idea of intellectual disci- pline, and the duty of a tutor to try to incul- cate it. Over decades as an undergraduate tutor I have always found the weekly essay to be an incomparable instrument for marrying originality and imagination to discipline. And I know that many former undergraduates, now effective in various walks of life, think the same. Sneer at the weekly essay, sneer at those who say you have to grasp the intellec- tual rules as if of a game, and you are sneer- ing at the discipline which alone enabled Mozart to master the composition of coun- terpoint and Andrew Wiles to establish the solution to Fermat's Theorem.
Henry Mayr-Harting
Christ Church, Oxford
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