Dear Director,

The Majority Report of the Machinery of Government Committee … contains the principle that students, as well as staff, should determine the general academic policy of the School. This principle is clearly inconsistent with the principle of academic autonomy, according to which the determination of academic policy is exclusively the business of academics of some seniority. The implementation of this latter principle has been achieved – and sustained – in a long historical process. I came from a part of the world where this principle has never been completely implemented and where during the last 30–40 years it has been tragically eroded, first under Nazi and then under Stalinist pressure. As an undergraduate I witnessed the demands of Nazi students at my University to suppress ‘Jewish–liberal–marxist influence’ expressed in the syllabuses. I saw how they, in concord with outside political forces, tried for many years – not without some success – to influence appointments and have teachers sacked who resisted their bandwagon. Later I was a graduate student at Moscow University when resolutions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party determined syllabuses in genetics and sent the dissenters to death. I also remember when students demanded that Einstein's ‘bourgeois relativism’ (i.e. his relativity theory) should not be taught, and that those who taught such courses should confess their crimes in public. There can be little doubt that it was little more than coincidence that the Central Committee stopped this particular campaign against relativity and diverted the students' attention to mathematical logic and mathematical economics where, as we know, they succeeded in thwarting the development of these subjects for many years.