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In your story "Joining forces and market repositioning" (4 December), you report that Queen Margaret University "has been considering merging with Napier University in a bid to tackle its ?20 million debt ...".

Rubbish. We have most definitely not considered a merger with Napier. In your appetite for the mildly sensational, you also misreported the important strategic story of the development of a systemic collaboration among the Scottish post-1992 universities. The objective of this is absolutely not, as you suggest, to enable us to "compete with the ancient universities". Rather, it is to overcome the deficiencies of the Scottish funding methodology in order to enable the post-1992 universities to fulfil our distinctive missions properly.

Anthony P. Cohen, Principal and vice-chancellor, Queen Margaret University.