Anthony Cohen: Higher learning needs new direction

The public spending crisis and the publication of the Browne report on funding for the English universities pose huge challenges for the Scottish university system.

Principals here are justifiably anxious about reductions in their own universities' income and their ability to compete with their peers elsewhere in the UK and internationally. The Scottish Government is trying to conceive a scheme for some kind of income-related graduate contribution which does not look too much like a fee. We must hope that they will succeed. Our universities are absolutely crucial for Scotland's future: there is no part of the economy or the social infrastructure which does not depend heavily on the output of universities, whether in the form of graduates or of knowledge and expertise generated through research.

But in asking "How can universities replace the income to individual institutions which they will lose through the expected reduction in public funding?" they are perhaps posing the wrong question. The premise is that the organisational status quo in the university system might be continued by other financial means. But is the continuation of the status quo really desirable? Scotland's universities arguably punch above their weight and achieve excellence in spite of dysfunctional funding, regulatory and organisational systems and a confusion of purposes. Underfunding is a permanent condition. Moreover, the Scottish system is irremediably stratified, with the "new" universities having been virtually excluded from research funding since the 1992 legislation which changed their status, and which means that they cannot generate their full potential value for Scotland's benefit, an anomaly of the formulaic funding system which the Scottish Funding Council has always ignored. It is already the case that other industrialised economies are investing much more heavily in their universities; and, as we know, the UK languishes in the lower reaches of the OECD league for investment in research and development as a proportion of GDP. The competition is beginning to tell: in this year's Times Higher Education ranking of the world's top universities, only Edinburgh, of all the Scottish universities, retained its place in the top 100, a crucial performance indicator for the international student recruitment on which we depend and in which our effective participation is anyway made ever-more difficult by the UK Borders Agency.

In the face of all these adverse circumstances, we have continued to stick resolutely to an anachronistic system for distributing public funds which is based on sometimes predatory competition among institutions, and on the logic of "to those that hath shall be given more". Principals and governing bodies seem disinclined to think along any strategic lines other than those of inter-institutional competition. Even the visionary initiative to create research-pooling consortia for physics, chemistry and other disciplines was diminished by the participants' insistence, endorsed by the Funding Council, that the consortia should be disaggregated for the purposes of the Research Assessment Exercise. Competition again. And now we hear arguments for an even more competitive student market; while in England the clear implication of the Browne report is to let competition rip. This short-sighted and destructive economics pays insufficient regard to the vital contribution which must be made internationally, nationally and locally by all of our universities, and in which we are hobbled by our instinct for gratuitous competition and the devil take the hindmost. Competition, a chimera in a very imperfect market, seems to have squeezed out all other ideas. But is there a plausible alternative for Scotland?

The knee-jerk reaction to Scotland's higher education funding difficulties is to say that there are just too many universities. I strongly disagree; but there are too many universities which are wedded to the ethos of privileging their institutional interests over the collective good. There are innumerable instances of collaboration within the sector, but they are all ad hoc, and therefore expensive to establish, laborious to maintain, and limited in their ambition. The problem is exacerbated by the obligation now placed on universities to fulfil a plethora of responsibilities, not all of them mutually compatible, but all required for income and benchmarking purposes.

Where once their business was simply the generation and transmission of thought and knowledge, now it must extend to widening participation; engineering social mobility; knowledge transfer/exchange/translation (whatever the current jargon may be); commercialisation; articulation with the colleges; lifelong learning; "skills"; and so on and on. All these are important objectives, but it makes little sense for all universities - or, indeed, any university - to try to do all of them. We need to step back to ask "What are universities for?" in addition to the fundamental and indivisible activities of research and teaching. Having done so, on the basis of their reflections, universities should regroup into consortia of like-minded institutions for the purpose of systemic collaboration. Let me be clear: I am not calling for mergers.

Other than those instances in which art colleges or colleges of education amalgamate with multidisclipinary universities, experience suggests university mergers should be avoided as very expensive, very protracted means of taking value out of the system. Mergers are negative, wasteful and destructive.

What I have in mind is that universities should retain their legal autonomy, but make systemic collaboration routine. Our universities regularly use technology to deliver degree courses to partners on the other side of the world, so why not to the other side of Scotland? Why should we not make it absolutely routine that students who register for a Master's degree at the University of X should be able also to take courses for their degree, actually or virtually, at the Universities of Y and Z? In that way, we could maximise student choice and provision without incurring concomitant costs.

Why not routinely share very expensive and highly specialised lecturers and rarely used teaching facilities? Why not compensate for our relative lack of scale and critical mass by forming joint graduate schools and schools of research which, quite apart from their obvious and inherent academic virtues, would enable us to compete so much more effectively in the international student marketplace? Why not collaborate to share specialised and very expensive back office functions in which all universities presently struggle, not least to find expert staff? I don't mean the routine responsibilities which have to be kept local, but some strategic management, specialised health and safety, international recruitment, even development fundraising. It is now commonly the case in universities great and small that their old departmental structures have given way to multi-disciplinary schools, with enormous academic dividends. Collaboration across institutions must surely produce comparable benefits by allying the differing specialist expertise of participating institutions.

All of this is easy to say - I have been saying it for most of the last twenty years - but much more difficult to accomplish. Ideally, we would have done it in a time of plenty. But that is not our present condition. How many Scottish universities are sufficiently robust financially to withstand a cut of even a quarter of the figure to be applied to our English peers, other than in seriously depleted and stripped-back form?

The impending mayhem in England presents Scotland with a real opportunity to further develop a truly distinctive system, based on academic quality and cultural tradition, while simultaneously serving our local hinterlands and our global ambitions. Let's also recognise that the expansion of the university system now means that no region is complete without a university. We know universities catalyse local economic, social and cultural activity.Do we have the confidence and the imagination to think radically and differently about how to sustain a flourishing system in this time of adversity?

• Anthony P. Cohen is a former Principal of Queen Margaret University. This article is written in a personal capacity.