Andrew Hook
Crisis? What crisis?

Newsnight Scotland recently regaled us with an interview so remarkable that even the unflappable Gordon Brewer seemed taken aback by what he was hearing. The subject was the future funding of the Scottish universities.
     The Scottish Higher Education Funding Council – the body responsible for the allocation of Treasury funding to all higher educational institutions in Scotland – has just issued a statement warning that the current economic downturn will have an impact on the university sector. Future financial prospects are uncertain and so levels of funding may well be affected. All this of course in the context of Lord Mandelson, the Westminster minister responsible for the universities, insisting that the English universities will certainly be facing reductions in the level of support available from central government. According to some vice-chancellors the promised cuts will threaten an 800-year-old heritage of university education in England. Nonsense says Mandelson. Such talk is no more than rhetorical exaggeration. The reality is that the universities have to take their fair share of the necessary fall in public sector spending.
     Newsnight Scotland wanted to know how the Scottish universities were responding to the warnings from their own funding council. To find out, it turned to Alistair Sim, the recently-apppointed director of Universities Scotland. Mr Sim surprised me – and as I say I suspect Gordon Brewer as well – by playing the notorious Jim Callaghan card: Crisis? What crisis? The Scottish universities, we were told, are fine and dandy. There is no problem over funding. If there are future reductions in income, well they will be dealt with successfully just as they were in the past. So there is nothing to worry about.
     It was left to the interviewer to raise the crucial issue of university fees.  What if a new government decides to raise the £3,000 cap on fees in the English universities – or even removes the cap altogether – meaning that the stream of fee income in major universities could rise dramatically? Successive Scottish governments have of course said no to fees for Scottish students. But given the coming reduction in the Scottish budget how will the money be found to ensure that the Scottish universities will remain able to compete in terms of financial resources with their English rivals? (This is the issue that must be keeping all the Scottish principals awake at night.) But even on this issue Mr Sim remained as blandly optimistic as before. Any future problems will be dealt with. No need to worry. Well my former colleagues tell me that worried is exactly what they are. 
     All the problems of the Thatcher cuts of the 1980s are looming once again: a freeze on new appointments, no replacements for retiring faculty, compulsory redundancies, the closure of some departments, an educationally disastrous decline in staff-student ratios. And most damaging and morale-sapping of all – the eventual loss of standing as even the best Scottish universities become too poor to compete at an international level. Before he speaks on Newsnight again, Mr Sim would do well to listen to the professors and lecturers who are the reason he has a job. I suspect that Gordon Brewer will have already pencilled him in for a return appearance in the not too distant future

Andrew Hook is a former professor of English literature at
Glasgow University