Catherine Haithcock's concern about university priorities in what she interpreted as a preference for flat-screen televisions over smaller class sizes, and monies for outdoor sculpture rather than extended library hours, reflect growing worries about diminished support for teaching. Though administrators will explain these anomalies as functions of different budgetary revenue streams and donor priorities, many faculty share her concerns.

Ms. Haithcock seems to be a student seriously interested in learning, as opposed to taking the easiest courses or just getting by. She's the kind of student, not necessarily identifiable by SAT score, that faculty would love to see in much-increased numbers. One doesn't envision her as a student who can't wait to start tweeting or texting as soon as class is over. She's probably a reader too, another desirable species of learner in short supply nationwide.

Anne Buie's "Professors should address varied learning styles" also reflected an admirable concern with learning, focusing on the implications of learning "styles" for teaching.

Her division of learners into learning styles categories, while standard fare in educational circles, raises some questions.

Are auditory learners, "who never take notes" in a lecture class, very likely to be the ones who make As? This seems doubtful.

If visual learners "write everything down," then why conclude that lecture classes "aren't ideal for visual types?"

As for kinesthetic learners who prefer movement and activity to listening or viewing, how does one accommodate that "style" at a university, where the pace and level of instruction in most worthwhile academic classes, not to mention growing class sizes, don't lend themselves those activities that such learners think they must have?

This raises a broader question. Are persons who claim to learn well only in a certain style not in effect admitting to a handicap more behavioral than innate, one which might negatively affect their careers?

What kind of impression, for example, would a fidgety, inattentive type make at a lengthy business meeting being conducted by the boss? Would they, or taxpayers, be well-served by university classes which inevitably sacrificed intellectual rigor to cater to a style of learning?

In any event, a recent Harvard University conference, the opener for the Harvard Initiative on Learning and Teaching, spoke to this issue while pointing out the shortcomings of the lecture-only approach. Many speakers noted faculty misconceptions about learning, still in vogue at Harvard and elsewhere.

Harvard psychology professor Mahzarin R. Banaji said that the idea of learning styles, in which some students learn best visually, some by hearing, and others kinesthetically, is a "myth."

"There's no evidence, zero, that teaching methods should be matched up with different learning styles. It's intuitively appealing, but not scientifically supported," Banaji said in the Chronicle of Higher Education Feb. 5.

In short, it would seem that the business of learning styles, much like the now thoroughly discredited self-esteem approach to learning, is more about pop psychology and educational faddism than serious learning theory.

While professors should, as Ms. Buie rightly suggests, vary their methods to forestall learner fatigue and improve comprehension, students would do themselves a favor by developing a wider range of learning skills rather than insisting on a preferred style of learning.

There has been no shortage of misguided, and misleading, exhortations about students as customers, reducing the serious business of learning guided by experts in their fields to the level of a commercial transaction.

In the final analysis, the fundamental difference is that, in education, it is student performance (measured in achievement rather than mere effort), rather than customer satisfaction, which counts, both in the short term and in the long run.

Thanks to both writers for their thought-provoking commentary on a subject of concern to us all.

Michael Wade

Professor of History