This is regarding the article "How the Loss of Trust Led to the Breakdown of Collegiality" by Jeremy Richards (Bulletin, March 2001). While I agree with most parts of this article, I take issue with the statement: "By all reports this system worked quite well, and many of the world's greatest minds were fostered in the classical European universities and colleges of the last millennium." Statements like this show a Eurocentric bias and very conveniently dismiss the role and contributions of ancient civilizations that predate European civilization. It may come as news to some that there was a world before the establishment of European civilization, with major and profound contributions in many areas including mathematics and astronomy coming from Indian and Chinese civilizations. These contributions came from equally great, if not greater, minds and to ignore them is to ignore history. Even in the last millennium, some of the great scientists like Sir J.C. Bose and Nobel Prize winner C.V. Raman came from non-European universities, as did the literary giant Tagore.

Dilip K. Banerji
Computing & Information Science, University of Guelph