Behind the cloud

It was disturbing to learn our colleges and universities are living "under a black cloud", submerged in "a wave of scandals", while I have been blissfully unaware of any such "cloud" or "wave" ("Black cloud hangs over the US", THES, May 26).

The story identified four colleges as the locus of this "wave", none of which I had heard of, despite my best efforts to remain alert to the whole spectrum of American colleges - all 3,700 of them. The four are all small private colleges, Century College in Minnesota, a "technical and community college", Alma College in Michigan, Hastings College in Nebraska and Wesley College in Delaware, the last three all with denominational links. The "scandals" in all of them are pretty small beer: one president resigned after making sexually and ethnically "insensitive" remarks, one for "odd behavior" that put off his senior assistants and two for borrowing too much from speeches made by other college presidents without appropriate attribution. The story ends with the claim that "the cases are the latest in a 12-month roll of disasters surrounding university heads in the US".

For anxious friends in the UK some words of reassurance. There was no "continuing roll of disasters" afflicting American higher education last year; in fact it was a pretty good year for most universities and colleges. I do not think that the resignations of a handful of college presidents (out of 3,700) qualify as "disasters".

There is a genuinely interesting story hiding behind this "Black cloud over America". It is: how do these hundreds of small modest private colleges survive in the US without hardly any governmental support? What motivates the students and their parents to pay the considerable tuition costs that maintain these colleges? What functions do they serve, for their students, their regions and the country? And how do they, and all the rest of us, survive without the help and guidance of the higher education funding councils, the RAE and the QAA? But that story, however informative, is not likely to uncover any black clouds, waves of scandals, or continuing rolls of disasters.

Martin Trow. Professor of public policy, University of California, Berkeley, California