Letters
Please send your letters to Ruth Taylor at the.reporter@leeds.ac.uk or send them by post to: The Reporter, Employee communications team, Room 12.72, E C Stoner Building.
All letters will be published at the editor's discretion. Please provide your full name, honorifics, and the name of your department or school. We will not as a rule publish anonymous letters (unless a name is supplied to the editor), 'round robin' letters, letters that have been published elsewhere, or letters that have also been sent to University colleagues for action. Letters may be cut (for space) and we will indicate when this has happened. If writers have asked questions, we will attempt to answer them. We may add an editor's note to correct any factual errors.
MEAT LABELLING
What is the University’s policy on stocking halal and kosher meat?
“Religious slaughter is exempt from the provisions of the Welfare of Animals (Slaughter or Killing) Regulations 1995, which insist that creatures such as cows, goats and chicken be stunned first.” (The Independent, 7 April, 2008, http://tinyurl.com/c8vctg)
There seems to be a conflict between religious choice and animal welfare.
Subway has started offering halal meat alone in certain stores – and I will exercise my right of protest by not shopping there. I would like
to be able to exercise the same choice when shopping at the University.
Can you confirm all meat products are labelled appropriately?
Will Crocombe
(broadly liberal non-racist meat-eater concerned about animal welfare)
Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine
Reply: Thank you for your feedback regarding labelling of meat products sold within University Catering Services.
We aim to provide a wide range of foods to meet the needs of our students. All halal products served in our outlets are identified as such on the labelling or signage displayed at the point of sale. We do not yet sell kosher meat products but are currently in discussions with a kosher retail supplier.
Catering Services will continue to meet all food labelling legislation, and welcomes current Food Standard Agency progress to provide clearer information to consumers.
Ian Addy
Catering operations manager
Residential and Commercial Services
HEAVY READING
My first impression picking up our new 2009 University telephone directory was that it has got thicker! It was a mixed feeling – glad the
University might have got bigger, but could we have saved some paper?
Closer inspection suggests that a better design can not only reduce the number of pages, but also make the directory a lot clearer. Here are a few improvements that I think worth considering:
(1) Remove “- - - - - email:” which does not serve any purpose and in many cases no email address follows;
(2) Some department names can be shortened, e.g. ‘School of Earth and Environment’ could be shortened to ‘Earth & Environment’ (‘School of Computing’ is already shortened to ‘Computing’ in the directory);
(3) Standard University email address is the default and therefore the ‘E’ tag is not needed.
(4) Finally, with the space saved it might be feasible to print first names and not just initials.
Dr Raymond Kwan
School of Computing
Reply: As Dr Kwan points out the 2009 telephone directory is 24 pages longer than the 2008 directory due to the increased number of telephone extensions now in use.
Looking at Dr Kwan’s specific points the ‘- - - email:’ entries are only included for people whose email address does not follow the
standard rules as described in section 14 of the introduction to the directory.
ISS will consult with schools on whether they are happy for a shorter form of their name to appear in the directory. The inclusion of the ‘E’ tag makes little difference to the length of the directory and I believe it does add clarity to the directory.
Whilst the inclusion of a first name might improve the directory’s usability, it would make it significantly longer, and at present the database used to produce the directory does not include first names. I would be interested in readers’ views on whether they would like first names included in the directory if they could be obtained.
I would also like to point out that ISS has changed its policy on the production and distribution of the telephone directory. In previous years ISS printed one directory for each extension, so for the 2008 directory we produced 8,200 directories. Having received feedback that some members of staff no longer require a printed directory, ISS ran an exercise to determine how many directories were required. As a result of this we printed only 5,500 directories in 2009.
If you are happy with the functionality provided by the online directory – http://campusweb.leeds.ac.uk/phone.htm – please let your school know so that we can produce fewer directories next year.
Dr Philip Hobley
Head of information technology
Information Systems Services (ISS)
PLUNDERING THE PLANET
Exactly 21 years ago [14 March, 1988], I said in my inaugural lecture to this esteemed University:
“Our determination to extract...maximum profits, allied to our hyper-exponential population growth, is putting our species on a course which is difficult to distinguish from a desperate scramble up the down-escalator.
“We have started the planet on a course of over-heating... We are destroying the rainforests of the tropics at the rate of a hundred acres a minute, and exterminating 50 species a day in the process. Nobody knows what effects that will have: it’s unlikely that they will be small, and impossible that they will be beneficial.
“We are all engaged one way or another in this destruction of the renewable resources of our planet, and its capital stock of non-renewable resources. We have an economic system which is predicated on the assumption that today’s investors can be paid off tomorrow by consuming some hitherto untouched resource, and hence in the end on an infinitely expanding supply of resources... in a finite world, that just cannot go on forever!
“I am not going to tell you how to save the world: I’m glad I don’t know, because if anybody did... it is a safe bet that few people would be listening, and even fewer trying to do anything.”
[Extract from The University of Leeds Review 31, 121-144, 1988-9.]
Today one might say that the human system, viewed as global ecology rather than as economics, is one hyper Ponzi scheme. If I
was not so terrified, I would be laughing like a drain.
Emeritus Professor John R G Turner
Institute for Integrative and Comparative
Biology
