Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - a small bite, driven by personal testimony, out of the enormous cherry that is the fate of Scottish universities under the Coalition's squeeze on Holyrood's budgets. Mapping the acute discomfort that arises from comparing my own 80's university experience, in all its freewheeling nature, with the anxiety and constraints of contemporary students. All comments, as usual, welcome.
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My four years at Glasgow University in the 80's - most of those years still crystal-clear in my head - forged who I am. And if I even briefly dwell on the economic and social conditions of that education, I can understand every iota of current student anger.
It wasn't unprecedented in my Coatbridge family for children to go to University - I had two mercurial aunts who were languages and business studies teachers - but there was enough pride to go round amongst my relatives when I finally made it. I got two A's in the Highers I loved - English and History - and two C's in the Highers that my generalist mentor at St. Ambrose, Mr. Dempsey, compelled me to do (Physics and Maths).
But those eight points levered me over the seven I needed to do English Lit and Language at Glasgow. No worries about tuition fees or graduate taxes - the reading lists felt like enough daily struggle - and there was even some strings-free grant money to get me from week to week.
From 1981 to 1985, doing two years of the classic broad-based Scottish degree, and then specialising in English for two years till Honours, I had a compete intellectual ball. Yes, there were hormonal surges, identity crises (once involving a Socrates-style beard), occasional indulgences and a towering romance (generating a life-long friend and two children). Everything you'd expect from the playbook of the then-seminal sit-com The Young Ones.
But there was also a tumultuous journey through ideas, and the assembling of some basic mental tools of analysis and deep study, which couldn't have set me up better for my subsequent quarter-century of a career. For me, being at Glasgow was a magic combination: a measure of lifestyle openness - with time and space to set up Popular Culture Societies, or cut ones teeth as a pundit in the student newspaper, or cut out of lectures if you felt the need to - combined with a bounty of intellectual resources.
And this resource wasn't just the tower of Babel that was the University Library, where I experienced the web-search before it was invented, simply by drifting through the periodical stacks and letting my interests reign. It was also the one-on-one tutoring, and regular seminars, where you faced personalities and thought-styles that both challenged and supported you, allowed you intellectual ambition but not without rigour or research.
I could name many names, but I'd want to quote in particular Philip Hobsbaum and Diane MacDonnell in literary theory, or John Caughie in film and tv studies. Although I've always had a glib talent in punditry, they instilled in me a lifelong passion to understand the bigger conceptual frameworks that make sense of cultural and technological change.
And the thing is, they taught me. Not for them a sequestered pursuit of research ratings via specialised publication, with the grubby business of dealing with formative students held at arms length, or given to post-grads. I remember being close to the flywheel of these minds, not quite understanding all the sparks that flew off, but inspired enough to build my own engine. As I move through my current media-and-ideas career, I meet many people who, if you chance to mention an academic or teacher that's been important to them, will literally glow at the memory.
I can't say that I loved the many exams of my university experience - the current fashion for continuous assessment or substantial project work would have certainly suited me better. But I can honestly say that the eclecticism and mental agility that was the result of running around the intellectual playground of Glasgow University in the 80's, helped me out in those final crunch moments in the Bute examination hall: and in similar circumstances of deadline or constraint, they've helped me ever since. That experience of being a free and well-resourced intellect has been a reactor-core of career fuel for me. I'd wish it on anyone.
So the current upheavals in university education funding and structure, in the light of my own fulsome experience, pain me greatly. We all await the "distinctively Scottish" solution to a university funding crisis that a cruelly constrained SNP government has to stitch together, under the yoke of this appallingly destructive Westminster Coalition. (One legacy of my Glasgow University years was a conviction about independence which has not dimmed since - and this directly relates to the priority that an autonomous Scottish budget would make about core funding for universities).
At the very least, there has to be a distinction made against the kind of crass consumerism and utilitarianism that the Browne report is about to impose on English higher education - where all courses will be subject to "student consumer demands", and those that don't clearly deliver "marketplace advantage" will wither on the vine. Stefan Collini's recent article in the LRB does the most elegant demolition job on Browne. But he concludes with a statement which should ring all the way round Scotland as well:
What is at stake is whether universities in the future are to be thought of as having a public cultural role partly sustained by public support, or whether we move further towards redefining them in terms of a purely economistic calculation of value and a wholly individualist conception of ‘consumer satisfaction’.
We have to defend the 'universal' (or at Scots would say, generalist) core of the university experience - that time and space for making connections and constructions, comparisons and critiques, existing at some safe distance from a market-democratic world. Is this world the most perfect occupational landscape itself - institutionally, economically and environmentally - that it can make such constraining demands on the nature of the university? I hardly think so.
Under the limits of devolved environment, there may be tactical retreats to be made about certain details of student and university funding in Scotland. But these have to be regarded as temporary, not permanent - and particularly to the extent that they impose a dispiriting financial ceiling on the imaginations and ambitions of Scottish students, walking into a world which demands their full capacities and energies.
I received exactly that kind of transformative experience from my 80's years up on the hill in the West End of Glasgow. It feels completely unjust, when the challenges of the age are exponentially much greater than mine, to deprive current Scottish students of that moment of free development - which was always the great offer of Scottish education. Let students channel their anger well: from this member of an earlier, luckier generation, they have my full support.