While I applaud the efforts of Professor Steven Aird and his colleagues ('NSU professor loses job in dispute over grades,' May 4), they must face the facts. Education has changed dramatically in the last decade alone. Students today are different.

Our institutions must adapt or risk extinction. Now, more than ever before, professors must be teachers, not merely judges.

'Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire,' said the poet William Butler Yeats. Schools need to be in the business of lighting more fires in the minds of the students.

That is the true issue at stake, not the dumbing-down of academic standards or what education used to be years ago.