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Julian Newman accuses me of being unable to ¡°distinguish between the justice of a cause and the criminality of resorting to violence in the course of that protest¡± (Letters, ¡°Just cause, unjust method¡±, 4 April).

It is a pity that he did not take the care to read the salient sentence in my feature - ¡°It goes without saying that I am not defending acts of violence by students or anyone else¡± - or to look at the blog that I wrote the morning after the student demonstration of 10 November 2010. I will quote it for his benefit: ¡°we cannot take the moral high ground in an argument about the value of education and then make our point by putting a boot through a plate glass window. To paraphrase Michael Servetus, to break a window does not defend an idea, it just breaks a window. One wins arguments by having better arguments, not by throwing fire extinguishers from roofs.¡±

The point of the article ¡°Courage and convictions¡± (21 March) was that the heightened charge of violent disorder has been used systematically to prosecute minor, non-violent acts by tuition fees protesters. This is why so many of the prosecutions have failed.

Martin McQuillan
Dean of arts and social sciences
Kingston University, London