Burning Issue: Are Scottish universities being sold short in their funding settlement?</

Published on Monday 22 September 2008 22:48

YES ANTON MUSCATELLI Convener, Universities Scotland, and principal of Heriot-Watt University

EVERYTHING has changed. The credit crunch, falling house prices, rising inflation, sudden job losses and debt worries have flipped the perception of our economic position in a remarkably short space of time. Political parties of all colours have economic strategies based on financial service, construction and retail growth, assumptions that are already starting to look like relics from another age. And the way public funding was to be allocated may soon look inadequate.

To many people, what they have heard about funding difficulties faced by universities in Scotland, might sound like pleading poverty.

Universities have to face a winter of costs rising much faster than the funding we have, but universities have never tried to make a case for funding based on our financial difficulties.

It is the responsibility of universities to decouple their own financial issues from the massively important case they have to make about their contribution to Scotland's immediate future.

A national strategy based on supporting the booming parts of our existing economy must now answer the question of how we transform and adapt to a new kind of economy.

The budget the Scottish Government will allocate this year was devised in a different economic world.

The countries which emerge fastest from recession are those with the highest proportion of cutting-edge skills and universities will fail Scotland as much as ourselves if we don't explain this clearly. This must be the last budget which does not make top-level skills and top-level innovation the number-one economic priority.

NO

FIONA HYSLOP, Cabinet secretary for education and lifelong learning

THE Scottish Government recognises the important role which our universities have to play in helping to deliver a smarter, fairer Scotland.

That's one of the reasons why we set up the Joint Future Thinking Taskforce and why, despite Westminster imposing the tightest financial settlement since devolution, we are investing a higher proportion of our spending in Scotland's universities than the previous administration – a 2.9 per cent real terms increase across the spending review period.

In addition, universities have also received additional funding totalling 70 million since the spending review was published.

However, we need to look not just at what is being invested but what it will deliver.

Universities know that the demands and expectations from students and business are changing, and also that pressures on public resources are changing. Universities cannot remain in isolation of these changes.

Through the new relationship between the Scottish Government and the universities and the new funding regime set out by the taskforce, we will work to ensure that publicly funded activity is well aligned with our aim of higher levels of sustainable economic growth. With universities receiving investment of more than 1 billion a year from the Scottish Government, it is not unrealistic to expect them to show what they are doing to create a more successful country. By demonstrating that they are delivering outcomes relevant to our aims of higher levels of sustainable economic growth for all, they will strengthen their future case for increasing levels of public investment.