Terry Brotherstone: Scots universities need renewal and rescue

UNIVERSITIES Scotland is now calling for a review into Scotland's higher education system – something it rejected three years ago when it was called for by the University and College Union Scotland, at a time when a less panic-stricken debate might have been possible.

The report still needed is not the one that Universities Scotland apparently wants – which would focus on how to make graduates pay.

What is needed is something along the lines of a Scottish Robbins Report for the 21st century. Not since Robbins in the 1960s has a document been produced that – in a philosophically reflective and evidence-based way – provided the material for a democratic debate and a social consensus about the critical importance of universities – especially in Scotland today – to a nation's future.

In the 1960s there was an assumption that the honing of critical minds through expanded access to higher education would build a culturally progressive future. Universities were to be primarily state-funded institutions – based on institutional autonomy from the state and private vested interests, with collegial governance and academic freedom (principles now enshrined in a number of Unesco statements).

Today this social consensus – in the changed circumstances of the underfunded creation of a mass higher education system – needs reforging. But instead of stressing the value of universities as autonomous centres of education and research, university managements increasingly adopt business models that too often subordinate intellectual creativity and educational concerns to meeting arbitrary research "targets" or the short-term apparent requirements of the jobs market.

The independent review we need? would objectively examine all these issues and more, and invite democratic debate. No single institution is more important to Scotland's future than its university system. But it needs renewal and rescue from the dominant trends of the last 30 years.

• Terry Brotherstone is former president of the University and College Union Scotland.