Sir – In the lead story Pressure is mounting on Brookes (June 4), we are once again treated to an award-winning piece of Alice in Wonderland reasoning by the university’s deputy vice-chancellor Rex Knight.
To sketch the bare bones: over a short span, Brookes increases its intake massively (one of your correspondents in the same issue supplies the incontrovertible figures), swamps residential areas by billeting its students in multi-occupancy houses, and refuses to do anything to curtail their car ownership.
Mr Knight then claims precedence for the university’s plans over local people’s objections on the grounds of sheer weight of numbers, citing ‘the needs of thousands of Brookes students and staff’. QED: circular logic if ever I saw it.
In the same breath, Mr Knight belittles the concerns of a ‘small group of residents’ who have, apparently, ‘come out of the woodwork’. Revealing choice of metaphor: the last person to denigrate his opponents as vermin was Dr Joseph Goebbels.
Peter Lewis, Oxford
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