Laudator Temporis Acti

Geoffrey Khan et al., "Edward Ullendorff 1920-2011," Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy 12 (2013) 405-432 (at 411):

One of his fellow pupils at the Gymnasium recalled how as a schoolboy Edward was exacting of the highest standards and would correct even his teachers, in the form of short notes, if he felt that something they had said was inaccurate. This desire for exactitude and precision was characteristic of Edward throughout his life.

Id. (at 426):

He was also a regular reader of (and contributor to) The Times Literary Supplement, often correcting misprints and solecisms in the margin. Edward was always very sensitive to wrong spelling and sloppy grammar.

Id. (at 428):

Just as his mentor, Polotsky, had been very exacting, so did Edward expect high standards from his students. He would expect, for example, undergraduates studying Amharic with him to learn Italian 'when [they] had a spare weekend', a necessary skill for an 'éthiopisant', however young. Not only that, he would say that Italian, as a major vehicle of European civilisation, was a language any educated person should know.

Id. (at 429):

Edward often expressed concern at the bureacratic direction in which universities were moving, including league tables, research assessment exercises, teaching quality evaluations, peer reviews, etc. For Edward, a university's primary (and perhaps only) duties were to pass on knowledge by classroom teaching, to practise scholarship at a high level and to foster unhurried and painstaking research of the highest quality.

David L. Appleyard, "Obituary: Edward Ullendorff, 1920-2011," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 74.3 (2011) 463-468 (at 466):

It has to be said that, in the years that followed his retirement Ullendorff often expressed concern at the direction in which universities were moving. Much of the university world of today outwardly bears little resemblance to the quiet and studied scholarly calm that was typical during so much of his career. There were no league tables, no research assessment exercises, no teaching quality assessments, and certainly no sense of career focused urgency about students. When discussing these developments with him in later years, the perplexity he would express was sometimes sharpened by the comment, "[academics] should have stood up and not let it happen". For Ullendorff, a university's first objective was research and the fostering of research by others — unhurried and painstaking, first-class and autonomous research; he often expressed admiration for his former teacher, H.J. Polotsky, that he had published so little during such a long academic career because after writing an article he would not submit it for publication for some considerable time, weighing over and rethinking each word and turn of phrase and letting the article mature like a great wine.