Time to turn back philanthropic clock

We frequently hear, too, about widening access to higher education. There’s less anxiety about what we are widening access to. With all the debate and the rhetoric over "the knowledge economy" or "lifelong learning", we are in danger of obscuring behind a screen of jargon the core characteristics of universities and the key criteria of their success.

Universities have historically had, and still have, a wide range of roles. Supporting the economy is only one of them, and arguably not the most important, except in an indirect sense. The debate in Scotland must not stop at a utilitarian conception of universities. We must insist that society judges us across a set of criteria broader than those defined by a politically determined agenda. If we want to see our universities thrive, we need to look beyond social and economic engineering.

A degree should provide not just vocational skills - indeed, it need not provide any vocational skills. A first objective of universities should be to protect those elements of education that give students the capacity to reason. This can flow from training in the hard sciences or mathematics - or from vocational material such as law or accountancy. But there is also a powerful argument for the continuing relevance of the humanities, such as moral philosophy, history or classics. They, too, teach students to think and to question, to use evidence, to be sceptical. It’s less obvious, and seldom said, that these subjects are also pertinent to a life in business. It’s not an accident that a survey for the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (SHEFC) last year suggested many employers favoured graduates who had taken traditional degrees from our four ancient universities.

The second attribute to cherish is our capacity to prepare students for citizenship. This means exposure to whatever will teach them to make ethical choices and to make informed decisions about the welfare of their own society.

Third, our universities have historically had a competitive strength on issues related to the ordering of society, and we must keep it. Scotland cannot thrive without becoming a technologically sophisticated nation, and universities must pay heed to that. But what we have been best at over the years is thinking and teaching about living in civil society, about ways of managing human affairs.

None of these commitments is new, and they cannot displace our role in meeting the current economic needs of Scotland which preoccupy the state. Yet, government can’t pay for everything. That means universities must be prepared to look after themselves more. I predict that in ten years the dominant model for British universities will be a hermaphrodite one. Most of us - not just the minority of strongest and richest institutions - will be jointly funded by government and the private sector, and government will not be the senior partner. The state will shrink to becoming an important customer, and perhaps not always the most important one.

That will raise important questions of autonomy. I don’t want to address these here, only to urge that we must prepare for a transition away from dependence on the state. In fact, the transition is already well advanced. My university, which got 88 per cent of its funds from the state 20 years ago, now gets more than half from sources other than the SHEFC. All universities are scrambling for students’ fees where these are permissible, for peer-reviewed grants, for contract and consultancy fees from industry, and for philanthropic gifts.

It is in philanthropy that our greatest hope of securing our funding lies. It is philanthropy which has given American universities so clear a competitive edge over our own. The United States is often vilified by citizens of European social democracies as a materialist and uncaring culture. That is at odds with its strong record on philanthropic giving. The US gives more of its GDP to philanthropy and charity each year - about 2 per cent - than any other western democracy. In Britain, the figure is 0.6 per cent. After religious institutions, education received the biggest share of the $241 billion given by Americans in 2002 - about $31.6 billion. Only five United Kingdom universities have endowments of more than 100 million. There are more than 200 in the US. On average, a "top 500" US university has 15 times the endowment of the average "top 100" UK university.

That advantage has been accumulated for two reasons. One is the historical culture of giving; the other is that US universities have taken an activist approach to private fundraising. Part of the reason we lack that culture is that, in the latter half of the 20th century, the idea that the state should pay - for hospitals, schools, the opera, museums and universities - became culturally so ingrained.

As the welfare state developed, the concept that those whom society had made prosperous had a philanthropic obligation to put some - or much - of their wealth back into it got lost. Universities lost sight of that, too, but the time has come to turn back the philanthropic clock.

This is going to require real organisational changes. It requires serious front-end investment in professional staff, and a different concept of university leadership. There is tremendous ground to make up on the US, but it’s encouraging that it is only over the past 20 years that US universities have created their huge endowments.

A further advantage is that, since private donors don’t have to justify funding on the basis of short-term social or political needs, they are not imprisoned by the utilitarian agenda to which I have referred. I can imagine a future in which government funds will continue increasingly to support whatever university activity has a direct impact on economic productivity, while private moneys will fund areas of cultural and intellectual importance where the influence on our economic health is oblique.

All those areas where our universities achieve excellence benefit this nation. The international reputation of our universities was one of our glories. We haven’t got worse - quite the opposite - but the international competition is so much fiercer. We can face that competition only if we maintain a portfolio that is rich both in the useful and the valuable.

We can do that if only we mount an aggressive search for the additional funding which government is not in a position to provide. That is consistent with the greater good of Scotland, and compatible also with our current partnership with government.

This article summarises a paper by Professor Duncan Rice, principal of Aberdeen University. The full version is published by the Policy Institute and is available at www.policyinstitute.info. Prof Rice writes in a personal capacity.