President’s Report
UCU Scotland
Airth Castle, April 2008
Terry Brotherstone

This Congress is our second, but our first as a fully-fledged new union. When last we met, we were already UCU Scotland but still in a transitional year. We  to put it a heraldic way  were in progress from AUT Scotland couchant via UCU Scotland emergent to, I hope, UCU Scotland rampant. So this is a moment to restate that as academic and related staff in Scotland’s universities we have a great deal to be rampant about. It is also an opportunity to pay tribute to those AUT Scotland lay officers who served almost an extra full year, in 2006-07, to ensure, together with our full-timer professionals, the transition to the new went smoothly. 

UCU Scotland now represents a relatively smaller proportion of the membership of UCU but our dual status as both semi-autonomous (devolved, you might say) and also part of UCU is part of our strength. Our position is currently symbolised by the fact that Alastair Hunter, one of those officers who had to thole elongation, is now both our immediate past president and UCU President Apparent for 2009-10. 

Yesterday he was able to express our solidarity at the Keele University UCU rally against job-cuts and programme closures, and to indicate, on our behalf, that we see Keele’s fight as part of our fight. Academic freedom  which includes academics’ freedom from arbitrary management and intellectually unjustifiable programme closures  is a cross-border issue and will remain so whatever constitutional arrangements prevail in the UK beyond 2010.

Equally the struggle against the creeping privatisation of our universities unites us throughout UCU. I congratulate our own union colleagues at Glasgow Caledonian  but also those in EIS and the other campus unions  on their successful demonstration on Tuesday against the secret deal between their management and the predatory private service company INTO. They are launching a fight that must be stepped up, through vigilance and local action wherever necessary, bringing together Newcastle, Essex, Oxford Brookes  everywhere INTO won’t voluntarily stay out  so that scrutiny of this and other such enterprises informs a perhaps belated UK-wide anti-privatisation campaign. It’s good to be able to begin with these locally-inspired, energetically organised and enthusiastically supported campaigns of resistance to what is happening to our university system. 

The fact that we are still a new union also gives this year’s Scottish congress a particular practical, as well as symbolic, significance.  There are important issues concerning our place in the UK-wide debates about UCU’s structures and organisational strategies, and our place in national wage-bargaining. These will be the subject of a closed session later today. The General Secretary and National President yesterday ventured north past Hadrian’s Wall and as far as Antonine’s, to contribute to these discussions particularly, but alas have been called back to London on urgent business. But welcome to Tom Hickey who is here and will assist this afternoon.

So we’re now a fully-fledged union with all the teething troubles that brings. And the fact that we don’t represent colleagues in FE and even all those in HE means that we need, in UCU Scotland, to think all the more consciously about what our newness means in practice. 

But there has also been another change in our circumstances since the spring of 2007, which makes this meeting special. Even before Fiona Hyslop spoke yesterday, you may have noticed that we  as Scottish citizens, or citizens of Scotland  are now in phase two of a National Conversation, a Scottish ‘National Conversation’. At the March 26 session of this Conversation First Minister Salmond himself made it clear that my presence there on your behalf made me a ‘leader of civic Scotland’, and I was scolded by the Cabinet Secretary yesterday for appearing to make light of this. Fair enough, since her very presence here showed that the Government is very anxious to be seen to take our opinions seriously.
Some, however, may regard the National Conversation as quite limited. It is not really about many of the things that I think currently preoccupy that section of Scotland’s citizenry we represent. 

It offers little opportunity for them to seek reassurance about the state of the world financial system and the effect of its crisis on the security of their jobs, the likelihood of the renewal of their fixed-term contracts, the availability of resource seriously to address the gender pay gap and other aspects of the equalities agenda (should university managements suddenly and miraculously find the will to prioritise doing so), and  I declare a particular interest here  their pensions. 

In so far as it addresses the state of the world we live in, it seems to be based on the idea that ‘globalisation’ is a natural and beneficial process taking care of these big things for us while we, as an emergent ‘small nation’, can concentrate on debating how best to benefit from a newly discovered, post-imperial understanding of the beauties of smallness. 

This, I think, reverses the terms of debate from the 1980s, when the seeds of effective constitutional change were sown because the conventional political process was failing to deliver to Scotland socio-economic policies that commanded consent. Then the alien policies complained of arose from Mrs Thatcher’s pioneering mission to promote the capitalist globalisation (let’s give it its real name) now held to be delivering the wider arc of stability beneath which more local arcs of prosperity can be created. Perhaps the terms of reference of the National Conversation should be more critical and wide-ranging.

My main point, however, is to suggest that we, as UCU Scotland, should engage, but in a rather specific way, with the National Conversation. Its declared theme, of course, is ‘independence’. I’m pretty sure that most of our members do not at the moment support that, and am doubtful whether, even by 2010, a majority will want to go beyond some form of the devolution settlement we supported in the years before the referendum of 1997.  Nevertheless I think we have a particular interest in, a particular opportunity to be, and a particular responsibility for, contributing to the debate.
 
There is a strong argument that without its distinctive education system, with the universities at its pinnacle, and the way that system survived the pressures of unionist homogenisation through the 18th, 19th and most of the 20th centuries, Scotland would have neither the devolution settlement, nor the practical possibility of discussing independence, today. The Scottish Office began primarily from the Scotch Education Department in the early years of state education. Administering a separate system was a key driver in its growth during the 20th century as the age of welfarism emphasised other important policy responsibilities too.

When the gravy train of the British Empire disappeared, the certainties of state welfarism were undermined, and Mrs Thatcher  in a very un-Scottish way  declared the end of ‘society’, the institutions were at hand to offer a pragmatic alternative to a ‘British’ government that seemed to be hovering on the edge of destroying the social contract north of the border. No revolution was needed simply to make the by-then powerful Scottish Office answerable to elected representatives in Edinburgh rather than Westminster. 

But how to define the distinctive social values that might give more profound justification to the change?

The only notion I’m aware of that has aspired to theoretical seriousness as an approach to the values of the modern ‘Scottish nation’ is that of the ‘democratic intellect’. This idea, founded in a phrase of the 1930s Tory politician, Walter Elliot, informed the philosopher-historian George Elder Davie’s history of Scotland’s universities in the 1960s. Davie’s work, significantly, was referred to in the Robbins report  the last in-depth, intellectually-based public examination of the past, present and future of the UK university system  when it sought to identify the role of Scotland’s universities in the major expansion of the British university system that was then seen as crucial to the success of the UK’s social democracy. 

For Davie the ‘democratic intellect’ was the defining principle of the tradition that Scottish universities should be upholding as the trustees of Scottish society. It is summarised the Edinburgh historian, Robert Anderson: 
… the idea of the universities as a national system, organically linked with schools, and open to all rather than based on social class; wide social recruitment, drawing on this egalitarian thinking; and a broad and unspecialized curriculum, emphasizing a general philosophical approach and allied with ‘metaphysical’ traits of the Scottish mind derived from the Calvinist inheritance. Much of this is based on an implicit contrast with England, and [is] part of an argument about the ‘anglicization’ of the university curriculum as a result of nineteenth-century reform.

Now that 19th-century reform, Anderson points out, was largely the product, not of the anti-Scottish ideology of an anglicising fifth column, but of the professionalisation of the public services and of the demand for the widening of middle-class employment opportunities in 19th-century society. And, as Anderson also says the democratic intellect was at least partially ‘based on sentimental assumptions, notably about the classlessness of Scottish society, which do not stand up to close examination.’

I entirely agree. But we should also recognise that something like the idea of the ‘democratic intellect’ eased the passage of many serious people in the second half of the 20th century to civic, and even political, nationalism  people who, to adapt a famous Tom Nairn witticism, would happily have seen the last manufacturer of Landseer-inspired shortbread tins strangled with the last copy of The Sunday Post. 

If the current National Conversation is to be something more than a contribution to ephemeral political point-scoring between ‘nationalists’ (or ‘separatists’) and ‘unionists’, it should include an interrogation of what the myth of the ‘democratic intellect’ might mean in practical terms in an ‘independent’, or even in a more effectively devolved 21st-century Scotland. And that would put the education system, and higher education in particular  the point in the system where the international reputation of particular institutions has to be a vital part in the ideological equation  at the centre of the Scottish debate. Fiona Hyslop indicated yesterday that is where Scotland’s universities should be. 

But, by universities I don’t mean the Vice-Chancellors. I mean those who make the universities what they are and fight to defend them against the marketisers, privatisers, and cutters. I mean the colleagues we represent. A debate about Scotland’s future that doesn’t include the ideological issues underlying that conflict of outlook could turn out to be fairly insignificant in shaping the future of the greater part of the Scottish people.

I want now to try to relate these thoughts to the more practical aspects of my report. This last year  the year of our new union and of a new Scottish government  has revealed both the importance of our being UCU Scotland, not simply UCU in Scotland; and the renewed importance of UCU Scotland’s contradictory relationship with Scotland’s government.

Early on, the new Cabinet Secretary, Fiona Hyslop, showed her willingness to continue, even to enhance, the level of consultation we had enjoyed under the Labour/Liberal-Democrat coalition. We saw the evidence of that in her visit here yesterday.

We in turn were able to welcome the new government’s decision to implement some of our existing policies when they announced the funding support to enable Glasgow University to retain its presence at Crichton College, and decided that asylum seekers should be treated as home students in the matter of university fees. We also supported the abolition of the graduate endowment, in pursuit of the aspiration of a genuinely free education system in Scotland  though of course much remains undone on the increasingly critical question of student debt. There were other welcome decisions.

We supported the employers’ body, Universities Scotland (who, incidentally, have so insouciantly taken over the initials US from the military, where they used to mean ‘unserviceable’) in their call for increased public finance, stressing that it is necessary at least to address the predicted funding gap between English and Scottish universities, as top-up fees come into play and the threat remains that a crisis-ridden Westminster government will further embrace marketisation by removing the cap in 2010. I doubt if concerns about that were greatly alleviated by what the Cabinet Secretary said yesterday.

The funding settlement was worse even than expected, though subsequent one-off funding announcements mean there should still be real-terms increases each year. So no nonsense about a need for redundancies, Principals, please!

However we did not leap precipitately on to the Opposition’s platform by comparing the 2007 deal with 2003 and Labour’s manifesto commitment to something better. We argued rather that a Scottish government, with its distinctively Scottish universities, with their place in Scottish civil society going beyond simply their role in delivering effective higher education and research, should be looking to mobilise opinion behind making a qualitative change in how those universities are publicly funded.

What more suitable topic for the National Conversation, what better moment for Scotland’s two-generations-on Robbins review! Instead the Government set up a so-called Future Thinking Taskforce, as a device that looked like an attempt to ward off the potentially politically damaging wrath of the Vice-Chancellors.

One thing, by the way, of which our University leaders can’t be accused of is tact. Their inflation-busting salary increases, sometimes announced at much the same time as they are saying their institutions can’t afford the relatively modest increases we win for academic and related staff, hardly play to the gallery, especially when the question of getting more public money into the system is in the spotlight.

A ‘taskforce’ limited to politicians, civil servants, funding bureaucrats and Vice-Chancellors, as simply a pragmatic device to ensure Government understands why their dual goals of free education and international research excellence will be mutually incompatible unless the funding issue is addressed, seems reasonable. But the idea that the Vice-Chancellors should be seen as the sole voice of ‘the universities’ in planning the longer-term future and that a committee on which none of those who actually do the teaching and research, no trade unions and no student body is represented can determine strategy for higher education for the next twenty years is a democratic, intellectual, and planning absurdity.

And some of the options we’re told the Taskforce has under discussion seem to try to square the circle that takes us from the free education for all those qualified, which the Government wants, round to the marketised model that some Scottish VCs openly advocate. Such an outcome would certainly not correspond with the expectations of those who voted SNP because they thought that, being Scottish, theirs would be a government more committed to a liberal social-democracy than neo-liberal New Labour, even in its more consensus-minded Scottish form.

While we wanted to raise the level of debate rather than to indulge in Opposition Nat-bashing, however, I do want to say that we greatly appreciate the valuable support we’ve had in political circles on the issue of how future HE policy should be determined. Labour MSP Richard Baker’s parliamentary interventions have been especially, to borrow Wendy Alexander’s word, ‘energetic’. I can’t quite claim Richard personally as a former student at Aberdeen, but he nearly was, and I congratulate him on his recent promotion. 

We wait to see what the Taskforce will produce. First, I hope, it will make clear that the universities  with all the international challenges we face  are still very much part of a single Scottish education system and not simply individual corporations competing in a worldwide knowledge market.

Second, there should be a clear indication that the Vice-Chancellors’ commitment to Scotland is not only to pragmatic economic goals  despite some broader humanistic rhetoric, this remains the Government’s main emphasis  but also to those citizens of Scotland who form the academic teams actually doing and facilitating the excellent teaching and research that goes on, and to students who deserve education, not only training for employment.  

Third, perhaps the Taskforce will produce some ideas  but emphatically not decisions  about the longer term future that can be debated. And I want to say here that I hope to see UCU Scotland playing a major role in informing that debate and ensuring that it involves the ideas of our members, other university staff, and independent experts. We should welcome the fact that  thanks to David Bleiman’s intervention at the FE/HE Round Table  a summer seminar will be organised at which we and NUS Scotland will be present. But I don’t think that will be enough. 

Nothing we argue for should be seen as giving an excuse for delay in tackling urgent issues such as student debt and working-class access. But dealing with immediate problems should not be confused with determining the longer-term future. I think we do need a Robbins-type exercise. This should facilitate informed and evidence-based public discussion aimed at enhancing consciousness of what universities in 21st-century Scotland are and should be about; of how they can both serve the cause of knowledge that has no boundaries, and also meet growing social aspirations at home; and  this is important too  of how the erosion of their participative decision-making structures can be reversed, making them better and more democratically managed. 

In the early 1980s when some of us were fighting the first round of Thatcher cuts we used the terms ‘university autonomy’ and ‘academic freedom’ as almost synonymous. Now, the perceived pressures of globalised competition, external bureaucratic assessments and resource-targeting are turning even well-meaning senior mangers (and I don’t think that’s a complete oxymoron) into eroders of academic freedom  if we include in that term, as we must, the freedom to carry out critical research in accordance with intellectual as opposed to business-driven priorities. 

As soon as possible when the taskforce concludes in the summer, I’d like to see UCU Scotland take the lead in setting up a conference on the possible futures for the Scottish universities  and by what process they should be debated and determined  going well beyond the next spending review, which will begin to become a preoccupation late this year. 

I hope that this idea may interest many others, our colleagues in EIS/ULA particularly. I believe that working together on the need to enhance the quality of public debate on tertiary education in Scotland points a way forward to the much closer union collaboration we need to work for in other respects. The joint rally at Glasgow Caledonian was a fine example of what is possible when we concentrate, to use a much-misused phrase, on our ‘shared values’. We have to make our different histories as unions committed to Scotland’s intellectual democracy work in a convergent way to safeguard that democracy’s future.

I hope that, in the course of our debates later, you’ll agree that we should do this. It would not be an out-of-the-blue initiative but would follow from many of the discussions and consultations that your lay officers and full-time officials have been involved in throughout this year. And I want to say here that, while I have always been grateful for the work of our colleagues in UCU Edinburgh office, I have come to appreciate, as your President, just how hard and effectively they work on our behalf.

However sceptical some of us may be about the political process in Edinburgh and Glasgow, I think that, if the culture in Westminster and Whitehall allowed our London-based colleagues the level of accessibility UCU Scotland has here, our influence as a UK union would be greatly enhanced. But making use of this situation is not simple or easy, and the excellent and dedicated team of union officials we have, versed in and sensitive to the particularities of the Scottish situation as well as to UCU’s UK requirements, is a major asset. It should be a key sales-point in our recruitment campaigns north of the border.

My penultimate task, then, is to thank all my colleagues, lay officers and fulltime officials alike for all the work they have put in on our members’ behalf. They have attended, adopted a wise consultative countenance and, when necessary, argued the toss, at meetings with the Cabinet Secretary, MSPs, of (almost) all parties, civil servants and Funding Councillors; with Scottish TUC colleagues; and at political party fringe meetings. I’ve become more familiar with Aviemore recently than at any time since, as an early teenager, I was put off learning to swim for several years by the temperature of Loch Morlich even in high summer.
 
Conferences we’ve attended have covered subjects such as teaching funding, teaching quality, research assessment, the Bologna process, articulation, enhancing university access, lifelong learning and the trade union learning fund.

To my last observation. I’m aware I haven’t touched on many of the key issues that have been preoccupying you as activists. Personal casework, Framework Agreement implementation, local negotiations on equalities, fixed-term contracts and other managerial issues  and on campus inter-union relations. And then there’s car-parking; nursery provision … I could go on.

I’m very glad, however, that I decided this year to ask you all to invite me to your branches and LAs. If you did, thank you for the hospitality. If you didn’t there’s still time … and I’d like to do a similar round next year.

The idea was partly to get to know more colleagues and the vagaries of particular local situations. But it was also to try to enhance consciousness that UCU Scotland’s Executive meetings and Congresses exist in substantial part to discuss the business that directly concerns our members in the branches and the policies they want to see carried out. 

We have to make UCU Scotland a much more consistently participative union than AUTS was. Getting the right organisational structures and plans is important for that. But our members need to see their union as the place they can influence the conditions that affect their lives, and to debate their concerns about the world they work in. 

Universities were once places of meaningful consultation and collegial decision-making. That reflected both a long tradition of quasi-autonomous institutions and the social consensus that dominated in the world outside. Now that collegiality (with all its undoubted frustrations and conservatisms) has too often been replaced by a dystopian managerial vision, in which effective decision-making reflects the neo-liberal convictions of  or perhaps merely an uncritical acceptance that (as Mrs Thatcher asserted) ‘there is no alternative’ by  men and women who see no contradiction in accepting vastly differentiated salaries to devise plans that may render their colleagues surplus to institutional requirements.

Mounting stress levels that I know concern many colleagues are of course in part related to overwork, bullying, and the sense of being constantly judged. But I think too they have a lot to do with a growing sense of powerlessness to influence the direction the institution is taking. Meaningful consultation, it has been said, has been replaced with ‘dismissive superiority’. We want to reverse that trend.

If members’ concerns, expressed in their union, came through more consistently not only to local management but also to UCU Scotland, and from there to the Government, the civil servants and the funding bureaucrats, branch meetings could seem more worthwhile. Union activism might become something to be embraced out of intellectual conviction not only collegial duty, and because the politics of the academy is being related to the wider political world in an organic way, and not only because active and dedicated colleagues with strong political views quite rightly see their union as a place where those views can be argued over.

For myself, although our main business in UCU Scotland must always be domestic and concerned with ‘trade union issues’, I believe we must also look outwards. I’m glad that we are later to debate links with Kosovan colleagues, and that, at the Scottish TUC later this month we have proposed a motion of solidarity with Columbian trade unionists. Although our international work is centred in London, our Scottish voice should be heard, not least by colleagues in less favoured ‘small nations’ than our own.
 
I have stood here too long. But I hope I have given you a little food for thought, or at least a few bones to chew over today and in the coming year.