Jill Stephenson and Andrew Hook
You would not guess this from the polemic by Alf Baird (14 February), whose view is that having a ‘Scotland agenda’ is the primary purpose of a Scottish university. He does his best to blame Scottish universities for failing to mitigate a host of ills, including child poverty and fuel poverty. And why are they culpable? Because they admit large numbers of non-Scottish students and employ staff who are not Scottish. In short, he does his best to take the ‘univers’ out of university.
It may well be that there is now a greater variety of nationalities represented on the staffs of Scottish universities than was the case in, say, the 1960s. That is largely a result of the freedom of movement permitted within the European Union as well as of trends in globalisation. But there is nothing new about universities being cosmopolitan institutions. Talented immigrants have long found a niche in British university life. For example, the medical science of pharmacology received much of its vitality in the 1930s and 1940s, and beyond, from an influx of emigré scientists from Nazi Germany, some of whom, such as Marthe Vogt, Hans Kosterlitz, Hugh Blashko and Edith Bulbring, became its leading lights at British universities, including Scottish universities.
Baird’s main gripe is that the principals of Scottish universities are mostly non-Scots. It does, of course, all depend on how you define ‘Scot’: by birth? By residence? By parentage? By education? Baird regards Strathclyde University as an honourable exception, but he appears to ignore the fact that Anton Muscatelli, although born in Italy, had his school and university education in Glasgow and rose through the ranks of academic staff at Glasgow University, leaving to become principal of Heriot-Watt University before returning in 2009 as principal of the University of Glasgow. That is surely a model career pattern, in Baird’s terms.
Nigel Seaton, principal of Abertay University, may not be echt Scottish, but his undergraduate degree is from Edinburgh University, where he also served on the academic staff, latterly as a vice-principal. Steve Chapman, principal of Heriot-Watt University, was born in Newcastle (oh dear!) but rose through the ranks from lecturer to professor to vice-principal at the University of Edinburgh. These are all people who, if perhaps not strictly Scots, have committed themselves to a professional life in Scotland. For that, they are denigrated as ‘settlers’.
A university is a community of scholars. Advancing knowledge and inducting the young into its mysteries are what it is about. It is not some narrow national(ist) training college that excludes members of other nationalities from its opportunities and restricts its vision to its closest surroundings. It seems that we have to accept a manipulation of entrance requirements in the name of social engineering.
Alf Baird would have us undertake further social engineering and restrict senior posts in Scottish universities to Scots. Whatever happened to the principle of appointing the best-qualified candidate to a job – unless, of course, you think that being Scottish is the best qualification for being appointed to a chair of physics or French or fine art?
Jill Stephenson is former professor of modern German history at the University of Edinburgh
Andrew Hook writes:
In his recent article (14 February) arguing that our universities are failing because of the lack of a ‘Scotland agenda’, Alf Baird suggests that his personal history (‘a lad from the schemes’) gives him special insight into what he sees as the mistakes being made.
Let me offer a piece of personal history in refutation of the central thrust of his argument. In 1961 I joined the English literature department in Edinburgh University as an assistant lecturer. The head of department was Professor John Butt, an Englishman. The department was a large one, but very quickly I recognised that three young lecturers were the driving force behind its lively intellectual life. They were Mark Kinkead-Weekes, a South African, Ian Gregor, an Englishman from Newcastle, and Andrew Rutherford, a Scot from Helmsdale.
None of these former colleagues are alive today, but I have no doubt there is a generation of former students out there who would bear witness to how exciting and stimulating study in that English department actually was. That is why I was saddened to read Professor Baird’s prescription. Had the policy he advocates been in place at the time, all but one of those I’ve mentioned would have been excluded from the positions they occupied. To my mind the department – and its students – would have gained nothing, and lost immeasurably, by their absence.
One question I do wish to raise is this. Is Professor Baird’s central premise correct? Is it true that our universities are being increasingly run at all levels by non-Scots? The one solid piece of evidence we are offered is that out of 15 Scottish universities only four have Scottish principals. In the rest of this lengthy article we find only repeated assertions about the disappearing Scots. But repetition does not amount to proof. We are told that there are ‘fewer Scots in senior positions’, and that ‘fewer Scots academics’ are ‘being nurtured within Scottish universities’. ‘Fewer’ than at what point in the past is not made clear. Then we learn that ‘Scots academics are already (or fast becoming) a minority in many teaching departments’. Again actual evidence of such a development is surely needed.
Andrew Hook is a former professor of English literature at Glasgow University
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