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Dennis Hayes' claim that university commitment to both research and teaching is a myth will strike most academics as bizarre ("Intellectual fibre, not nuggets", THES , February 28). Universities have always disseminated knowledge and were established for that very purpose.

Cardinal Newman, whose The Idea of a University is often held up as an ideal aspiration for higher education, considered a university to be "a place of teaching universal knowledge", and that it should be "a school of knowledge of every kind, consisting of teachers and learners from every quarter". To this day, even our oldest universities articulate their aims for excellence in teaching and research, and emphasise the close inter-relationship between teaching, scholarship and research.

David Weitzman
Cardiff