I WAS in the pub the other night and someone was being very sniffy about the doctorate awarded by Exeter University to the children's writer JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books. The books were "only fiction", he said - and worst of all only fiction for kids.

What is it about academics that makes them think all that matters is the amassing of footnotes to dry-as-dust theses with titles such as A Missing Word in Deutero Isaiah or Metonymy and Synechdoche in the Post-structural Analysis of Victorian Metafictions? Well, it is said that the chaps who churn out this stuff have fine minds. Some of them have minds so fine that they've never been contaminated by a single idea.

As for the implication that fiction doesn't require intelligence, tell that to Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot. It was George Eliot who gave us that marvellous send-up of the impotently obsessed academic Casauban in her masterpiece Middlemarch. Casauban marries a woman half his age and takes her to Rome on honeymoon. What does he do with her when he gets her there? He leaves her alone and goes off to the library to compile yet more footnotes and do more research for his never-to-be-finished tome The Key to all Mythologies.

Research is a hifalutin word but it's no substitute for life. I cringe when I read in the papers of some writer who is researching his new novel. You can't research a novel, but only live or imagine the sorts of experiences you're going to make your characters have. Researching a novel - it's like painting by numbers and just about as sterile. You can no more research a novel than you can research life.

Children's fiction is the hardest thing of all to bring off. Youngsters have an unfailing capacity to detect insincerity and mere blather. All the most successful fiction for children is more than slightly risqu, off beat and insubordinate - just like Harry Potter in fact. Kids love Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because it's amusing and imaginative certainly, but also because it shows adults up as less than perfect. They like The Witches for the same reasons. When I was a boy I devoured the Just William books by Richmal Crompton - and my son read them with the same glee 30 years later. William is no angel. He's not exactly a scoundrel. No, he's that naughty, lovable thing: a rascal.

Some writing for children is not so obviously risqu. The Enid Blyton books for example, which have been sneered at for a generation by those educationists who have presided over the decline of literacy in our schools. These are the political types who think children should be brought up on dreary tales about deprivation and euphemisms for poverty such as "social exclusion". But this sort of unimaginative political indoctrination doesn't wash with youngsters. Of course, poverty and deprivation are issues, but if you want to talk about them in a novel then you've got to have the sort of imagination that produced Oliver Twist, Hard Times or Kes.

Some Christian evangelicals have criticised the Harry Potter books for veering too much towards magic and occultism. What would these critics say about Grimm's Fairytales? Haunted forests, witches, ogres, goblins and ghouls on every page. Quite right too, for the world is a haunted place. It is a mystery stranger than any politics and the mystery contains moral problems: suffering, vengeance, betrayal, pain and death - but also love and rescue, forgiveness, restitution and the possibility of fulfilment. It must be so. The fairytale sometimes ends with the words: "And they all lived happily ever after". Yes, but they had to go through hell and high water first.