What might independence mean for Scotland's universities?

The government in an independent Scotland would be highly supportive of universities but would also want ‘clearer state control’ to pursue economic objectives

This September, Scottish voters could make a historic decision to leave the UK. But what would that mean for higher education north of the border?

For four Scottish universities – St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh – life in an independent Scotland would represent a return to their historical roots, as all were founded well before the union with England. The oldest, the University of St Andrews (founded around 1413), had already stood for almost 300 years before the 1707 Acts of Union: almost as much time as has elapsed since.

But times are obviously very different now, and although the immediate questions for higher education that would arise from a “yes” vote on 18 September have received plenty of attention (see ‘Burning issues: tuition fees and research council funds’ box below), how the Scottish academy would look 10 or 20 years down the line – the blink of an eye for some institutions – has been less discussed.

There is excitement among some scholars north of the border about what universities could achieve in an independent Scotland. Yet fear stalks the debate as well, with advocates for both sides worried that they could be academically blacklisted for speaking out, and some pro-union scholars recounting tales of vicious online attacks for coming out against independence.

One man not afraid to speak out in favour of independence is Willy Maley, professor of Renaissance studies at the University of Glasgow. For him, secession from the UK would offer a chance for Scottish universities to break free of the “corporate ethos” that he believes has wormed its way into higher education.

A “target-driven, management-controlled model has been imposed across the UK”, he says. But independence could bring about a “much more devolved university system where academics have more power”.

In 2012, a committee commissioned by the Scottish government and chaired by Ferdinand von Prondzynski, principal of Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University, set out a series of radical proposals to change Scottish university governance. These included the election of governing body chairs by students and staff; the presence on boards of at least two representatives elected by staff; a requirement for governing bodies, over time, to become at least 40 per cent female; and the freezing of principals’ pay until remuneration processes have been reviewed.

Maley (who, like everyone Times Higher Education spoke to for this article, stresses that he is speaking in a personal capacity) points to these proposals as an indication of the “new ethos” that might prevail in the academy of an independent Scotland. The Scottish education secretary, Michael Russell, tells THE that he is “still committed” to implementing the report in its “full form”, although he acknowledges that he could do so under Scotland’s existing devolved powers (see ‘Responsibility: the current system’ box below).

Russell also believes that Scotland’s new, post-independence constitution should enshrine the Scottish National Party’s policy of free higher education for all students domiciled in Scotland on the grounds that “education is a social and an individual good” that is “central to our view of ourselves [as] a thinking nation”.

Von Prondzynski also hopes that a “yes” vote might spur a cultural shift in Scottish universities, allowing them to diverge further from their English cousins and “become places where intellectual objectives should be foremost”.

“In some ways, England has been a distorting influence on that [objective] of late,” he says, pointing to the decision of many English universities to charge the maximum £9,000 annual tuition fee. Of course, many Scottish universities also opted to charge that maximum to UK students domiciled outside Scotland – in order, von Prondzynski says, to make a “quality statement” to prospective students. He regards this, however, as a “bizarre” symptom of the current culture in universities that an independent Scotland could move away from. “Nobody should be thinking in those terms,” he argues.

But would independence really herald, as Maley puts it, a “process of democratisation from the ground up” in Scottish universities, and a rolling back of the power of managers?

Murray Pittock, Bradley professor of English literature at the University of Glasgow, is one of the leaders of the pro-independence group Academics for Yes, but he is sceptical. The government in an independent Scotland would be highly supportive of universities but would also want “clearer state control” to pursue economic objectives, rather than adopting England’s market-based approach, he says.

“The more that governance is academic-led, the more it tends to look towards internal stakeholders [rather] than external stakeholders,” he points out, meaning that the government – a “loving but invasive” external stakeholder – would be reluctant to hand over power to scholars.

Meanwhile, Richard J. Williams, professor of contemporary visual cultures at the University of Edinburgh, dismisses Maley’s hope that independence would bring in more power for academics as a “complete fantasy”.

He says the fact that his institution has “done extremely well over the past few years” is largely down to a governance reform process that abolished faculties and departments and created much larger colleges and schools that, in his view, put more power in the hands of senior managers. Universities have become so complex and have so much money flowing through them that there is “no way academics are in a position to manage these things”, he adds.

Williams also worries about “the extent to which the Scottish government wants to make things distinctively culturally Scottish over the next 10 to 20 years”. He says that what he understands to be a “serious proposal” was recently submitted by several Scottish universities to a particular research council asking it to fund a two-week training course for all funded PhD students in Scotland on “the values of the Scottish Enlightenment”. Although the proposal didn’t go ahead in the end, Williams found the episode “very troubling”.

He is also sceptical of what he sees as the “inexorable” rise of the use of Gaelic in Scottish universities. Four institutions have drawn up plans to preserve the language, with the University of Aberdeen using bilingual signs on campus and translating parts of its website. But Williams thinks this promotion of the language, which is spoken by just over 1 per cent of the Scottish population according to the 2011 census, is “a way of making a symbolic and public difference [between Scotland and] the rest of the UK” and “has nothing to do with a living language at all”.

But Russell, the education secretary, dismisses such fears of a cultural agenda for Scotland’s universities as “a very silly perspective”, describing the use of Gaelic in Scotland as “a voluntary activity”.

Many “yes” supporters hope that an independent Scotland would become a higher-spending state and pour more money into universities.

Bryan MacGregor, head of the College of Physical Sciences at Aberdeen, argues that the new country “wouldn’t have to devote resources to HS2 [the high-speed rail line to be built in England] or nuclear weapons”, and would give education “a higher priority” because of the “general cultural support” that it commands in Scotland, as evidenced by the decision not to charge tuition fees.