August 29, 1997

Correction to KPI Letter, Folio June 13

In my letter to the editor entitled, Internal KPIs: Street drug of the University, there was an error for which I am responsible. I said that the British government's system of KPIs costs approximately 10 million pounds a year to administer. The information I subsequently received from CAUT is as follows.
  1. Cost to administer KPIs in England alone is "... in the order of 11 million pounds or a little more."
  2. For Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, "... the direct administrative costs are probably in the order of 8.5 million pounds."
  3. For indirect costs, the [British] Association of University Teachers "... made an informal estimate that these run about 20K pounds" for each of 1100 departments in the UK, for a total cost of about 22 million pounds.
  4. As to the cost of restructuring universities and departments, for example, "... Athe cost of inventing new journals (in which to publish the "research" produced under pressure of the UK's KPI system) ... are estimated at running between 8 and 18 million pounds."
The total cost is thus in the order of 50-60 million pounds.

I regret reporting a figure that pertains only to the estimate of direct costs of KPIs in England.

Reuben Kaufman

Friday the 13th hardly biblical

While reading your interesting little article on Friday the 13th, I was astounded to see that, "In fact, Friday the 13th has a nasty biblical history: it's supposedly the day Eve tempted Adam with the apple; the day Christ was crucified; the day the ark set sail; the day the confusion of tongues struck the Tower of Babel." This list of facts in a publication put out by a university! Friday the 13th of what?

The Christian calendar is considered to have been invented by the monk Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century A.D. The name Friday is adapted from the name of the Norse goddess Frigg (Freyja, Freya, and other spellings), that is, Frigg's day.

The story of the various methods of calculating time and naming of days and months by humans is a long one, but assuredly God did not name his days after gods and goddesses which would be worshipped by human-kind long, long after times of Adam and Noah. If Christ was crucified on the sixth day of the week, it wasn't called Friday and of what month was it the 13th? What are your sources? Not the Bible, I think.

Eve Gardner

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