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You rightly take Michael Gove to task for being besotted by the Russell Group (The week in higher education, 23 July), but you fall into a similar trap in the same issue (¡°They would walk 500 miles¡±, Features). In the league tables that they so closely identify with, some Russell Group universities occupy lower places than universities outside the group (and always have done). The group¡¯s origins were in breakfasts at the Hotel Russell before meetings of the Universities Funding Council to plot a common strategy for universities with medical schools, which met with some success. The group¡¯s subsequent triumph owes more to a very professional and extremely expensive lobbying and advertising campaign than to the intrinsic worth of all its members. But it is a campaign that busy politicians and journalists fall for all too easily.

Norman Gowar
London