Higher education

I appreciate the Learning page article "Academia on the Whipping Post," Aug. 31, reviewing the book "Imposters in the Temple," which so clearly put that book into the current fashionable bashing of higher education. When commentators write about the use of teaching assistants rather than professors to teach undergraduates, it is easy to forget that those teaching assistants are college graduates, often with masters degrees and advanced doctoral work. It may be that universities could do more to teach the ir newest instructors more about teaching, but the use of teaching assistants to provide more individual and sympathetic instruction is not always a bad thing.

Furthermore, the effort to activate trustees seems like another attempt at making universities into business corporations; higher education is not a business, and students are not widgets. Trying to force higher education into a business mold will benefit neither business or education. Virginia Davis Nordin, Lexington, Ky.

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