A simple way of understanding differentiation of function in a healthy organisation is to say that management is responsible for what doesn’t happen, while staff should take the credit for what does. In this way oversight is distinguished from the operational doing through which the purpose of an organisation is delivered. When the idea of efficiency is abstracted from purpose (“Universities could take lessons in efficiency”, Letters, May 20), roles get blurred. External metrics supersede moral imperative as organisational drivers.

In the modern university, such external metrics have taken the form of scoring for teaching and research that has enabled a new and costly cast of managers to deliver on targets.

This rehearses the same setting and gaming of targets that, through “shareholder value” dogma, has disfigured the contemporary corporate world and a generation earlier, through the “plan”, brought Soviet communism to its knees.

Not quite the end of history Francis Fukuyama envisaged but a telos that Aristotle recognised in his parable of the Delphic knife.

William Dixon
London SE18, UK

David Wilson
Walton on Naze, Essex, UK