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Is there no way of making jokes without bringing pedants out of the woodwork (Letters, 17 January)? The University of Sussex was known as "Brighton" for 20 years before Sir David Watson's outfit took the name on account of that agreeable town's place in the literature on illicit weekends and the alleged motives of teachers and colleagues who went to work there.

As to Keith Flett's question, when David Triesman was getting suspended for student activism at Essex, I was running from the Tactical Patrol Force on Sixth Avenue. I don't do barricades - the disparity in firepower between the citizenry and their rulers is too great; the massacre of protesting students in Mexico City in October 1968 taught anyone who cared to learn the difference between teasing the president of Columbia University and provoking armies with a taste for murder.