Richard Bowring

Two phrases stand out in Marina Warner’s Diary: ‘These REF stars – they don’t earn their keep’ and ‘an ecstasy of obedience’. The first illustrates the terrible damage inflicted on academia by successive assessments run by a funding authority (HEFCE) that changes the rules as it pleases with no thought as to long-term goals. Five years ago it was all ‘research, research and don’t...

Buddhism and Shinto, Richard Lloyd Parry writes, ‘have been pressed into the service of the true faith of Japan: the cult of the ancestors’ (LRB, 6 February). The situation he describes will be familiar to anyone who has read Carmen Blacker’s The Catalpa Bow (1975), a world where the line between the living and the dead is gossamer thin and where the need to pacify spirits who have been denied...

I was forcibly reminded of Iain Pears’s warnings of the coalition’s attempt to ‘extinguish all meaningful independence in higher education’ when I recently learned how Cambridge University, my own institution, plans to maximise its returns in 2013 (Letters, 14 April). There are staff whose whole lives are now devoted to working the system and we are being forced to follow suit. There is, of...

Ross McKibbin rightly castigates Hefce for the absurdity of using ‘impact’ as a measure of research in the humanities (LRB, 25 February). It is right and proper that universities should be accountable for public funds, but the funding mechanism has for many years been exerting undue influence on the kind of research we do. It generates a form of self-censorship, whereby we aim for short-term benefit...

Richard Bowring writes: The comments on Tsushima were made in the context of the ‘modern era’, but nevertheless I take the point. I am a little more uncomfortable, however, when it comes to the possibility of ‘objective historical knowledge’ coming to our aid; and the usefulness of a West/East dichotomy can be very short-lived when one gets into the detail. The study of Japan in Asia quickly...