Greater funding key to university success, not a return to past

PROFESSOR John Haldane in his article in yesterday's Scotsman is the latest of several senior academics to join the debate about the purposes of Scotland's universities.

Parts of his argument merit serious attention, but the suggestion that Cardinal Newman and JS Mill (estimable thinkers though they were), or even the great George Davie may now be pertinent starting points is eccentric; the world has changed too much.

The Robbins expansion gave us new universities intended to bring novel approaches to conventional disciplines. The Major government's 1992 legislation doubled the number of UK universities, but withheld the funds needed to build their research capacity and left us with a stratified higher-education system.

Making a rhetorical virtue out of necessity, we describe our system as diverse and diversified, but what this really means is that, as The Scotsman's tables (17 February) showed, some bits are much better funded than others and so the inequalities are perpetuated, while the system as a whole is under-resourced and is precariously dependent on annual allocations of public funds.

While the composition of the university system was changing, so, too, was the range and nature of the subjects on offer. Almost all the professions made a university degree a criterion of entry. Law, accountancy, teaching, social work, the "creative arts" and the health professions from nursing to occupational therapy are now based on university-level education.

Science has become infinitely more complex and specialised, and the very nature of pedagogy has been transformed, moving from a focus on teaching to "student-centred learning".

Technological developments have transformed the generation and delivery of knowledge. The very demographic of higher education has changed – a matter for celebration.

It is merely idle to suppose that we could turn the clock back on this, and it would be retrograde to do so. Rather, we should be investing to build the research capacity for all these subjects and institutions, in order that they can make their contribution to our social, physical and economic wellbeing.

Haldane is correct that public funding stringency should concentrate our minds on the contemporary purposes of universities. Some have called publicly for a comprehensive review of all aspects of university funding and organisation – my own suggestion was to reconvene the Joint Futures Thinking Taskforce for this very purpose.

The Scottish Funding Council (SFC) is voluble about the impending problems, but silent on its own role in their gestation, as steward of a formulaic funding methodology which, over many years, has merely reproduced the status quo. We have somehow to get beyond the reflex self-interests of particular institutions – such as the proposition that funding or even research itself should be restricted to the elect "research-intensive" universities.

We may agree with Haldane that not all research is good or worthwhile, but that is hardly a justification for excluding some universities from their entitlement to research funding.

We need a coherent strategy for the university system as a whole, including its governance, which recognises the imperative need that Scotland's economy, society and culture has of the entire system. And if university leaders need to get beyond their entrenched positions, so, too, do the political parties. Let's have rigorous and radical thinking focused on the 21st century, rather than a lament for the past.

• Anthony P Cohen is honorary professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Edinburgh. He was formerly principal of Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. He writes here in a purely personal capacity.