Letter: Funding debate

Professor Anthony Cohen, a former university principal, interestingly calls for leadership from Scotland's current principals in a radical and imaginative programme of change in the "collective interest", which would see "Scotland's university system" reorganised "to deliver its diverse functions" in a spirit of "genuine and thoroughgoing co-operation" (Analysis, 18 November).

The purpose, in the aftermath of the potentially devastating cuts in higher education funding, would be to ensure that Lord Browne's "grotesquely utilitarian view of higher education … unimaginable in Scotland" can be responded to with answers to the undoubted funding crisis that would be "uniquely Scottish".

But where is the evidence Scotland's principals share the strength of his views about Browne, or that they are prepared to depart from the neo-liberal ideology of institutional competitiveness in a knowledge marketplace that, over the last generation, has underlain the restructuring of universities away from collegial governance to top-down managerialism (based on a grotesque widening of salary differentials within the sector).

And is the "Scottish solution" to student contributions to higher education funding that the principals' collective voice Universities Scotland advocates not, unless accompanied by such an ideological break, essentially a substantial step in Browne's direction?

Until we have a forum within which these questions can be democratically examined and discussed on the basis of real evidence, including the views of the teaching, research and related staff who actually deliver the widely-acknowledged excellence in "the Scottish university system", it is hard to see the type of innovation Prof Cohen calls for as a practical (or potentially progressive) proposition.

Terry Brotherstone

(Former president

University & College Union Scotland)

Dundas Street

Edinburgh