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There is a conventional wisdom that the Higher Education Funding Council for England uses to justify the gross inequities in funding revealed by Peter Knight's table (THES, January 13).

It claims that the poorly funded universities brought it all on themselves by (perversely) deciding to grow. There is an echo of this in Shekhar Nandy's observation (THES, January ) that "the imposition of a unit of resource by the council could only be at the expense of those who have chosen for sound academic reasons not to grow significantly and, thereby, to maintain their unit funding". What this (perversely) fails to recognise is that there is a group of universities (including the University of Derby) which, for sound academic reasons, chose to grow but did not have an equitable level of unit funding in the first place.

Roger Waterhouse

Vice chancellor

University of Derby