Peter MacMahon: Far from using their intellect to shape the future, universities are shackled by fear

Published on Tuesday 7 September 2010 20:44

What ever happened to academic freedom? It is a tenet of higher eduction which university staff maintain is fundamental to their intellectual integrity. They must be able to think the unthinkable, to frame thesis and antithesis unshackled by vested interest, to probe and challenge conventional wisdom.

This principle academics would defend with their lives and they are right to value it highly. Some of the greatest advances in scholarship have come from an academic daring to confront the accepted conventions of the day. A pity, then, that university leaders in Scotland are not applying such admirable values when it comes to the future of their own institutions.

We are at a defining moment for Scotland's higher education. UK government spending cuts, which will be passed on to Holyrood, are coming. They cannot be avoided. And for reasons outlined in this space last week – groups like the police or health workers shout louder and exert more influence on politicians – the universities are in a weak position.

Yet they seem to believe that if they just keep quiet in public, play the "small p" political game, schmooze the civil servants, ministers and would-be ministers, all will be well.

This attitude may be a legacy of the former Universities Scotland convener, Sir Muir Russell, once the most senior civil servant at the Scottish Government, who knew every inch of carpet laid on the corridors of power. It may have worked a few years ago, but it won't now.

In the context of the spending cuts, the crucial question for universities is funding. With a decline in government support and a difficult environment for raising money from the private sector, an increase in the amount students contribute is the most likely source of extra revenue.

Given that, one would have expected the finest brains in Scotland to be bursting forth with ideas. A graduate tax? Well here is the strong argument for that. Increased tuition fees? Here is the compelling case. Scholarships for the less well-off? How about this for a plan? If only…

Ask any university for its official views and you get a answer so bland it is meaningless. And yet in private, senior university figures are debating these issues with an urgency reinforced by a fear that they will be left in the academic slow lane.

They fear – and it is fear – that colleagues south of the Border are exploiting the tuition fees they already have and, despite divisions in the Westminster coalition, are preparing to exploit the recommendations on student funding in the forthcoming report by Lord Browne of

Madingley.

Yet those fears are not publicly articulated. There is only one conclusion: the timidity of university leaders makes a mockery of their professed attachment to academic freedom.