Peter Scott (Universities are not border guards, 1 May) inadvertently highlights another problem arising from the imposition of ill-considered government diktats: local variation in interpreting and applying them. In contrast to his case, I have been permitted to examine a doctoral thesis without exhibiting a passport or birth certificate since the university concerned ruled that this activity was not subject to “right to work” requirements (unlike, it seems, everything else). Both institutions cannot be correct in their interpretations. Another question for the new home secretary to consider? Or should his predecessor-but-one and her successor already have worked this one out rather than leaving it to burden his overloaded in-tray?
Professor David Hook
Bristol
• A decade ago a now deceased senior Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development colleague was quizzed at the US border about the detailed content of what he would say to an OECD-US government-sponsored seminar. He chose not to visit the US again while this practice persisted. Those of long memory will recall living under the Stasi’s eye in East Germany. If not, revisit Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Corruption of community is not restricted to higher (or lower) education. Nor is it what David David Cameron had in mind as the “big society”.
Professor Chris Duke
Centre for European Studies, RMIT University, Australia
• I remember the first time I was asked for my passport to justify eligibility to be paid as an external examiner. Living and working in Wales but doing this examination in my former domicile of south-west England, I thought it was a massive wind-up re Wales’ border. It took a little while to be truly convinced of the absurdity of the whole thing.
Keith Halfacree
Swansea
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