Send your letters to editor of the Reporter, Vanessa Bridge. Email the.reporter@leeds.ac.uk or send by internal post to press office, 12.67 E C Stoner building

QUALITY - NOT "QUALITY" (From Friedy Luther, Dentistry) I write to support wholeheartedly the letter “Quality or Assurance” in Reporter 502.

Universities achieve the "world-class" status to which our new Vice-Chancellor aspires only through the ability of its academic staff to deliver outstanding research and teaching. It is worth reminding oneself how such status is assessed: it is by externally measurable outcomes such as the number of Nobel Prizes, graduate employment prospects, or external peer review. Internal "quality" audits of process only have relevance in gaining this status to the extent that they enhance these outcomes; however, the immediate and long-term impact of internal (QMEU) process audits is to divert resources away from the primary activity of the University, and the academic staff who are told to commit their time to these audits are entitled to ask for evidence that these audits actually enhance externally assessed quality criteria. If QAA (through QMEU) require some degree of internal audit, then it should be appropriate - tailored by and specific to individual subjects - as is indeed reluctantly allowed according to QAA’s own report (http://www.qaa.ac.uk/revreps/instrev/Leeds04/main.htm 26-28), funded and managed so as to minimise the impact on the primary function of the University and its staff. Have independent subject specific, cost / benefit analyses of the audit process been conducted and when are we as “consumers” to feedback into the audit spiral?

Uniformity of all things across all subjects makes it easier for these bodies to undertake audit but the assumption that this uniformity improves “quality” remains highly questionable. Alison Richard (VC, Cambridge, 2004): “…Will we ever conform to a routine hierarchical structure? I pray not, because Cambridge will no longer be a great university the day that happens.”


DERIVATION OFF THE RAILS (from Lee Davidson, Linguistics and Phonetics) Penny Robinson's letter deploring the spreading use of words such as attendee in university communications prompted me to turn to the Oxford English Dictionary for information about this interesting topic in English morphology. As usual the rich haul of discoveries in the OED opens up lots of new questions. I imagine that she was objecting to those -ee words in which an ideally regular relationship between an -er form and an -ee form seems to have broken down. She would not object to pairs such as lessor/lessee, which reflect the origin of such word pairs in Anglo-French legal usage, or even a more modern pair such as employer/employee. However in the cases she cites this relationship looks as though it has been breached. The role of the person designated by the word seems closer to the agentive properties of the -er form than to the more passive or recipient properties of 'normal' -ee forms. The OED entry on the suffix -ee shows that this ideal relationship probably broke down at quite an early date.

The word bargee is dated at 1666, but seems to be doubly offensive as it is derived from a noun rather than a verb and the suffix is 'wrong'. Perhaps there is a transatlantic conspiracy. Two of the three words Penny mentions (attendee and standee) are specifically identified as US forms, and the first quotation given for escapee is from Walt Whitman in 1875 (so it did not seem to upset one major writer). There is evidence that attender was used in Britain in the 18th Century, but seems to have been less successful as a word than it might have been (though we use expressions such as good/bad attender).

Even a now dead sense of attendant has been used to fill the gap. Maybe attendee is the third attempt to provide a word meaning roughly 'someone who attends an occasion'. If you try to extract from the OED all the -ee suffix words which are nouns you get a list of 329 words. Some of these are not part of the word-set this correspondence is concerned with ( e.g. the other -ee suffix in coatee, bootee), but many are. As often happens, one is amazed by the number of probably nonce forms which have been invented, used once and then trapped by the OED readers. To pull some from the list there is a nice trio flingee, flirtee and floggee, followed immediately by gaggee. Many of these seem to have served as humorous words. I fond one current US language website whose compiler takes great pleasure in pointing out how funny some of these words were and encourages readers to use them more often. Perhaps US attitudes are in general more sympathetic towards this suffix.

To sum up, Penny presents evidence that a word derivation device in English has gone slightly off the rails in a few cases. This is not uncommon in such processes. English has a rich array of suffixes, often looted from elsewhere, but the rules for their application are no easier to make foolproof than in any other area of the grammar. There seem to be relatively few cases of the type she objects to, and I have not found evidence that they are being created fast. The accidents of history (see the OED entry on refugee as an example) have provided us with a set of words, some of which have become commonly used, which generally have a recipient meaning, but not always.


UNUSUAL PEOPLE WANTED! (from Karen Priestley, East Asian Studies)It's unusual to invite a stranger from another country to your home for a day or a weekend, or to share your Christmas festivities with, say, a Chinese person who may not know what Christmas is. It's not usual to answer lots of questions about British customs, nor to be given insights into other parts of the world while teaching, say, an Indian person to make mince pies. It's pretty rare to contribute to international goodwill and understanding just by opening up your home to an adult international student on a short break from studies at a UK college. If you are unusual enough to be interested in this idea, HOST would love to hear from you. As a volunteer HOST myself, I can highly recommend it. Please see www.hostuk.org, or call Eric and Marie Songhurst on 0113 260 7270 email e.m.songhurst@lineone.net


A SLOPE FOR SCOPE (from Steve Howarth, Healthcare) In January next year I will be trekking up the highest free standing volcano in the world in aid of the charity Scope (www.scope.org.uk), who work with people with cerebral palsy. I’m hoping to raise £2,750 individually to contribute to Scope’s goal of £350,000 from the whole expedition. The trek is for seven days - five up and two down – scaling Mount Kilimanjaro’s Uhuru peak, which, at a height of 19,340ft, is Africa’s highest point. The trek takes us through a range of geographical features, from tropical rainforest on the lower slopes to permanent glacier at the summit.

If anyone would be interested in making a donation, please contact me on 0113 3431322 or email j.s.howarth@leeds.ac.uk

For an itinery of the trip, see www.scope.org.uk/downloads/adventures/kili_it5.pdf

For more information about Scope, see www.scope.org.uk


CORRECTION
In the article about Dr Carmel Toomes (Reporter 502) we wrongly credited her as leader of Leeds vision research group. The group leader is Professor Chris Inglehearn. Apologies to both.