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I note with interest, and also some dismay, that your straw poll on literary theory ("Has deconstruction had its day in class?", October 7) was conducted among "members of top-rated English departments ranked by the last research assessment exercise". Are we to assume that the rest of us were not worth consulting or not quite bright enough to realise what was at stake? Such practices merely reinforce the elitism that is already so rife in the system. Thought does take place outside the Russell Group, you know.

Stuart Sim
Professor of critical theory,
Sunderland University