The Colonisation of Scotland’s Universities

The Colonisation of Scotland’s Universities

Alf Baird

Alasdair Gray’s essay on the subject of Scotland’s colonisation led to much debate when it was published in 2012. Gray’s focus concerned the arts in Scotland, but he alluded to other areas of Scottish life that are likewise influenced by the phenomenon he described, including the higher education sector. The latter is the focus here.

As with arts institutions, it is relatively straightforward to identify individuals coming from other nations and taking senior management positions within the higher education sphere in Scotland. Of the nineteen universities in Scotland (yes, nineteen!), only four have a Scots Principal. At Vice-Principal level the outcome appears broadly similar. Scots therefore account for around a quarter of top leadership posts within Scotland’s universities.

Gray stated that by the 1970’s the list of Scots doing well in the south was already over-balanced by English, the latter taking the highest positions in Scottish electricity, water supply, property development, universities, local civil services and art galleries. I don’t know if he was right or wrong about that, for the 1970’s, but certainly today the diminishing role of senior Scots academics within Scotland’s universities is clearly evident.

Neal Ascherson, writing some thirty years ago, similarly cautioned that the whole plethora of scientific and other bodies in Scotland are dominated to a ‘phenomenal extent’ by what he termed ‘non-Scots’. Ascherson claimed this served to alienate many Scottish intellectuals who lacked opportunities in their own land; we might include Alasdair Gray in that, and many other Scots intellectuals not given the academic opportunities and status they deserve. 

An important aspect with respect to Scotland’s universities relates to the inevitable constraints which prevailing recruitment practice places on future development opportunities for the ever-diminishing number of Scots academics. The fact that Scotland’s university sector is for the most part led and managed by academics from outwith Scotland raises a number of questions, not least why has this happened and what are the implications?

Why has it happened?

Senior positions within Scotland’s universities are advertised in the Times Higher Education Supplement and other metropolitan press. This means that vacancies are brought to the attention of academics throughout the UK and indeed further afield. In the case of university principal/vice-principal positions, selection panels at Scottish universities tend to appoint a candidate who is already a principal or vice-principal of another university. As there are over one hundred universities in the rest of the UK and thousands globally, this means the potential market from which to choose university leaders is far greater outside Scotland than it is within Scotland. 

So, the likelihood of a Scottish university choosing a principal or vice-principal and other senior academics from outside Scotland is extremely high, much as the evidence confirms. There is, in addition, a kind of ‘musical chairs’ being played out in Scotland, with ‘top academics’ once they come to Scotland thereafter moving from one university to another with a fair degree of regularity. In any event this perhaps affords a degree of confirmation for Gray’s suggestion that ‘‘… colonists were invited here and employed by Scots without confidence in their own land and people”.

With relatively few of Scotland’s universities today led by Scots, what if that soon becomes none? If Scots did so much to invent this and that and the next thing, how come we are no longer rated competent enough to lead and manage our own universities?  Many people, not least Scots themselves, indulge in proclaiming Scotland’s universities to be ‘world class’, but what if Scots are no longer running any of them? 

Such an outcome is perhaps synonymous with the message from the former ‘Better Together’ crowd  that, according to Jim Sillars, was busy “trashing the ability of Scots, and sowing the myth of our inadequacy”. Or, is it simply something Scots should accept: that academics coming from outside Scotland, mostly from England, are better suited to running Scotland’s universities? I think most Scots would agree that it would indeed be a sorry state of affairs if Scots were no longer leading and running any of Scotland’s universities, yet this is not far off the reality today.

One explanation why there are so few Scots running our universities is that there are nowadays fewer home-grown Scots academics at senior level to choose from. The practice whereby our universities have mostly recruited academics from outside Scotland over recent decades has obviously had the effect of limiting the number of Scots academics coming through the system. At dean and heads of department/ research institute levels, a similar outcome prevails to that at the top level in that most of these management posts are likewise nowadays filled by academics from outside Scotland. 

In some departments/institutes within Scotland’s universities today it can be a challenge to find any senior Scots academic at professorial level. My own analysis of the sector found that in some of Scotland ancient universities, Scots make up only around 10 per cent of the academic staff, which means some 90 per cent of staff have been recruited from outside Scotland. And, with proportionately similar limited numbers of Scots permitted to undertake doctoral research study relative to the large numbers of post-graduate students coming from other countries to study here, the future does not look good for Scots academics. The latter issue is of particular importance because, if there are relatively few Scots undertaking doctoral research, this means the number of Scots progressing through into senior academic positions in future will be even less than the already ridiculously low level today. 

What does seem apparent here is that there are no monitoring far less any controls at Scottish Government or Scottish Funding Council level over such events and trends. University departments and research institutes in Scotland, unlike in a number of other countries, are free to recruit staff from wherever they please and there is no requirement to ensure (any) minimum number of Scots academics are employed, far less ensuring that they might be nurtured and developed. As more senior academics are recruited from outwith Scotland, there is also a tendency for academics further down the chain, such as researchers and doctoral students of appointed senior academics, to follow the same path into Scotland. And so the proportion of Scots academics inevitably becomes further reduced as the make-up of departments and research institutes has altered over time.

What are the implications?

Most academics coming to Scotland become, to use Gray’s term, settlers, and stay for a long time, often permanently. Others will perhaps be what he calls ‘colonials’, and move on after a number of years to further their career in their home country or elsewhere. Irrespective of this, what seems more important is the continuing trend towards less Scots academics being nurtured within Scotland’s universities, with few Scots filling senior positions, and a restricted number of Scots academics permitted to come through at post-doctoral level compared with academics from outside Scotland. Scots academics are already a minority in most teaching departments and research centres within Scotland’s universities. This cannot be right, and such an outcome would be politically unacceptable in most other countries which rightly prioritise opportunities for their own people and would not allow such institutional barriers to be put in the way of their development.

Amongst other things, bringing in substantial numbers of academic staff from outside Scotland to lead, manage and operate Scotland’s universities on behalf of Scots risks a cultural mismatch. Academics coming here may be aware of how a university is run, and expert in their particular field, but they will tend not to be so knowledgeable about their host people, their history, culture and languages, their values, or their needs and priorities. We might relate this to Gray’s reference to the appointment of a director of Creative Scotland, who ‘admitted to knowing nothing of Scottish culture, but said he was willing to learn’. In essence, the large numbers of academics invited to run Scotland’s universities may be competent in their own area, but they will tend to know relatively little about Scotland, its economy, society, people, history, or its culture or languages, never mind the deep-rooted challenges our country faces and what we urgently need to do to deal with this.

National allegiance is another important matter. The leaders and senior academics appointed to run our universities can be expected to heavily influence the strategies of Scotland’s learning institutions, strategies which have major implications for Scotland and its people. For example, we have seen our universities prioritising the establishment of campuses and teaching programmes in numerous countries abroad. That ‘internationalisation’ is common to many UK and American universities as they seek to ‘compete in global markets’. Attracting and educating ever increasing numbers of full fee-paying students from the rest of the UK and further afield seems to be another key objective of our universities and such students now make up the majority of students enrolled in our institutions, with Scots students now a minority. There is also evidence from Audit Scotland that Scottish domiciled students face increasing difficulty getting access to courses, especially in Scotland’s elite universities. Intense pressure placed on urban housing capacity through ever-rising demand for student accommodation and the effect this has in raising rental costs is another feature of the push to internationalise our universities.

Scots might reasonably ask, is this really what Scottish universities (which are, after all, registered charities, not businesses, and in receipt of significant public funding) should be about, especially when the majority of Scots remain unable to access higher education, our society faces major challenges, and the Scottish economy has real long-term difficulties? Whilst so much remains to be done in Scotland and to improve opportunities for Scotland’s people, our universities are focusing their efforts mostly on those from other nations; meantime, Scots remain excluded from access to study and from academic employment opportunities, leading to under-development of the nation and its people.

With much of the research at Scotland’s universities nowadays undertaken by academics from countries outside Scotland, they might be forgiven for not bringing with them a personal priority or interest to research matters of importance to Scotland. Hence, much of what passes for research in Scotland today is often of little relevance to Scotland or its people. An example is the very limited academic research being undertaken, never mind funded, on the most important issue facing our people – the urgent need for national liberation. The absence of a large informed student movement in support of independence is another feature. In this abnormal environment, I know from personal experience that suggestions like placing the word ‘Scottish’ in front of the name of a university research centre or institute, something Scotland’s universities used to be proud to do, can be met with antipathy, or even claims of ‘parochialism’. 

The current strategies of our universities are clearly not working for Scotland’s people, for our society or our economy. Scotland’s present situation illustrates this in terms of the continued under-development of our people, crumbling infrastructure, failing public services, growing child poverty, health problems, fuel poverty, widening inequality, and a zero-growth economy. Existing research and teaching at Scotland’s universities may often be described as ‘world class’, but it has clearly not provided the solutions we need to overcome Scotland’s continuing, deep-rooted problems, most of which are as a consequence of a lack of sovereignty and control over our land and our institutions. 

Nobody would deny people from outside Scotland the right to take up influential positions here when they are offered them. But if this is done most or all of the time, as is the case in Scotland’s universities, the end result will inevitably be what we see today; few Scots academics at senior level, and also at other levels in Scotland’s universities, and strategies that do not place Scotland’s economy, society and our people (the latter being ‘our biggest asset’, according to the late Ian Hamilton) as a central priority.

It is therefore difficult to disagree with Alasdair Gray (and Neil Ascherson before him) when the evidence is so glaring: like many of our institutions, to a large extent Scots do not control ‘our’ universities which are for the most part managed and operated by people from outside Scotland, and primarily for the benefit of students from other countries. Holyrood legislation may consider issues such as funding and widening access, but this has no real impact on how our institutions are run, by whom, or what they actually deliver. 

Our universities may claim to be ‘world class’, and provide an open, delightful, lucrative posting for senior academics from elsewhere, but they are clearly not working in Scotland’s best interests and that needs to be remedied. 

MY COMMENTS

My thanks to Alf for yet another detailed examination that highlights another vital part of our nation that suffers from colonial control and therefore does not contribute to the rebuilding of Scotland in the vital way it should. Instead operating under the direct control of non Scots and with an agenda concentrating on benefiting others rather than Scotland. This article is part of a series of articles examining how colonial control of our country is widespread and completely constrains our ability to act as a sovereign nation to our severe detriment.

I am, as always

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