Meeting of the Parliament 08 March 2016
In all the different stages of the bill, it is important that we recognise that, whatever our views on the merits or demerits of the bill, it is good that we have been debating universities, their governance and their importance to Scotland.
Universities are central not just to our education system, but to our culture and our history, firstly, of course, as institutions in which students study, and they are highly successful in that regard. During the debates around the bill, many colleagues have pointed out that we have five universities in the top 200 in the world, which is more top universities per head than any other country—we should be proud of that.
Students seem to feel that universities in Scotland are doing the right things, too, since student satisfaction surveys show Scottish universities doing better than universities are doing in the rest of the United Kingdom. Our universities seem to be doing a good job in turning out students who are ready and prepared for future life, since students from Scottish universities have higher average starting salaries than those from other universities in the UK. A higher proportion of them also find their way into graduate-level jobs—not all of them do so, but our universities certainly do well in that regard.
Of course, our universities are also centres of excellence with regard to research. In the days of the referendum debates, it was a commonplace observation that we punched well above our weight in accessing UK-wide research resources—around 15 per cent of those resources in some years, which is far more than our population share. Further, we are one of the world’s leading countries when it comes to publishing peer-reviewed research papers.
Finally, universities are a critical and central part of our economy, firstly through their own investment, as they employ more than 38,000 people. We need only walk around the south side of Edinburgh to see just how much the University of Edinburgh is investing in construction around its estate. Secondly, they are important with regard to the work that they do with companies—and the work that they do to start up companies—to try to turn some of that great research work into good business, too. Indeed, Scottish universities account for some 28 per cent of spin-out companies in the UK—again, we punch well above our weight.
Of course, universities are also part of our history and our traditions, including our democratic tradition. It was in the 1960s that George Davie coined the phrase, “the democratic intellect”, but he was talking about the history and traditions of our universities, particularly the ancients, where the link between society and its intellectual leaders was important. Internally, our higher education institutions see themselves very much as communities involving academics, students and other staff.
Perhaps that democratic tradition is best symbolised by the rectors in our ancient universities. The cabinet secretary referred to that, but I am not sure that she picked the best example when she picked Thomas Carlyle, who was, of course, notoriously opposed to democracy in almost any form, and was a precursor of fascism. She might have been better to reach back to the first rector of the University of Edinburgh, who was William Gladstone, a well-known democrat. Nevertheless, the post of rector is an important democratic institution that is unique to Scotland’s universities.
We have supported the principles of this bill throughout its passage, because we believe that we need to revisit and modernise those democratic principles that we have found in our universities. We agreed with the Government that the voluntary code that had been created had not proven to be satisfactory. Although the higher education institutions argued that it was enough, examples such as the one that my colleague, Mark Griffin, referred to earlier—with the University and College Union trying to find out how principals’ pay had been derived and discovering not transparency but a refusal to co-operate and a redaction of the proceedings of remuneration committees—demonstrated that the voluntary code was not enough. We accepted the Government’s view that we had to go further, so we have supported the bill.
However, as I said earlier, it has not always been easy to support the bill, which has not been without its problems. When it first arrived with us, it was full of ministerial powers and discretion, although ministers said that they did not want those powers. That caused two problems: the potential loss of autonomy for the institutions, and the potential reclassification of the universities as public bodies, which would have hurt their finances. It was kind of ironic that, towards the end of consideration of amendments, the cabinet secretary steadfastly fought against Mr McArthur’s reimposition of a modest amount of ministerial discretion when it came to applications for exemptions, because, originally, the bill was little more than that.
In fairness, that has been sorted by, for example, the complete removal of several sections of the bill and the provision of more clarity on the format of the elections that will be required for chair. More consensus in reaching that point would have been nice. Throughout the passage of the bill, the cabinet secretary has depended less on the dialectic of debate and, instead, has dug herself into a series of ditches from which she has defended herself. It has not been an ideal legislative process, although, in our view, it has got us to a bill that encompasses the principles that we said at the beginning that we would support—the election of chairs of court in higher education institutions, and proper and guaranteed representation for students and for staff and their representatives. For that reason, we will support the bill this evening.
18:36