Sir – It is a disgrace that Oxford University’s Wellington Square administrators are scaring students into opposing the necessary mitigation at their Castle Mill blocks (Report, January 22) with talk of the cost of reducing the height of the buildings coming from graduate scholarship budgets.

We know that £30m is a fictitious amount  — the University has not even done detailed costings which is incidentally why the city council has demanded that they do. More importantly, most scholarships are college endowed and cannot be touched by the central administration. Of course, students will be worried if they live in the buildings — that is understandable. However, there is no reason the work could not be phased in slowly to minimise cost and disruption.

Moreover, to call mitigation measures ‘a scandalous waste of money’ misses entirely the point. What is scandalous is that Oxford University built these blocks in the first place without an Environmental Impact Assessment and proper public consultation that would have stopped them causing the damage to the city’s protected Port Meadow landscape as it has, and stopped them putting their students in this invidious situation. Mistakes have to be paid for.

At the moment, the price the University is paying for Wellington Square’s action in this matter is serious damage to our long-term reputation. The University’s role as proud guardians of heritage and learning will be tainted by behaving like philistines, who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.

Dr Jan-Georg Deutsch, Osney Island