The debate about student stipends in the middle of an election campaign is skewed. What should be at issue is not the provision of stipends to undergraduates but, rather, the uses to which these are put. Should stipends be used to buy foot creams and games on campus rather than books and research tools?

To means-test students’ families is old hat. It would disadvantage those from families on PAYE salaries. But the expenditure of public monies should be prioritised in accordance with educational objectives.

What about postgraduate students who pay to further their studies and who receive no stipends? As the elected representative on senate of institutes and centres at our University, I strongly feel that these very welcome institutions, affording new spaces for more specialised research and teaching, should be better supported.

A rethink as to what stipends are actually for, and how these are spent, might help to channel more funding to such institutes and centres. Institutes should not be reduced to begging some bank or other for a sponsorship if only to publicise and divulge the original research findings of their own paying postgraduate students because of pitiful budgets.

For example, the University-supported Institute of Maltese Studies, which I have been directing for the last few years, has contributed some €100,000 in postgraduate fees for Master’s and Ph.D. degrees but there is precious little one can do with an annual budget of €3,000. This is barely enough to cover basic expenses such as photocopy paper, toners, lecture fees to casual lecturers and so on.

The 1988 Education Act, which supposedly ‘refounded’ the University, badly needs looking at to ensure that the time-honoured qualities of academic excellence and academic leadership are not subjected to bureaucratic- administrative power hierarchies, wherein, for example, full-rank professors are not entitled to elect their own deans or to as much as be members of their own faculty boards, to say nothing of the fortress colony presumption that, for a professor or lecturer to visit a European or other country as a guest to give a public lecture or attend a conference, s/he still supposedly requires the signatures of three ‘superiors’ in the administrative hierarchy.

To encourage and underpin research, the University could set up a School of Graduate Studies and consider creating research professorships, as exist in other universities, for those whose career track records demonstrably show a sustained commitment to original and valuable research potential in the humanities no less than in the sciences.