This week, The Herald is collaborating with Scottish Affairs - Scotland’s longest running journal on contemporary political and social issues - published by Edinburgh University Press. Each day, academics from across Scotland's universities will be giving their thoughts on Scotland's university crisis: the battle for survival. From finances to management, what is going on behind the scenes at our institutions? What is needed to secure their futures?

Here, Sebastian Monteux and Jane Fenton introduce our week-long collaboration. Our articles are a shortened version of full academic papers, all of which can be found at Scottish Affairs.

Scottish universities occupy a curious position today. Internationally, they are admired and highly ranked, with a concentration of world-class institutions that few countries can match. At home, they serve as major employers and civic institutions, shaping Scotland’s economic, intellectual, and cultural life. They are also underpinned by a strong political commitment to widening access and free tuition for Scottish students, a model often celebrated as egalitarian, even as questions remain about how fully that ideal is realised in practice.

Yet beneath this admirable surface lies a growing sense of strain. The sector faces profound financial challenges that threaten its stability and its capacity to sustain excellence. The University of Dundee’s widely publicised difficulties are symptomatic of deeper structural problems. At the heart of the crisis lies the funding model that underpins the Scottish Government’s commitment to free tuition. While socially progressive in principle, it leaves universities without sufficient baseline income and dependent on premium-fee international students, a market increasingly volatile in a post-pandemic, geopolitically uncertain world.

Against this backdrop, questions of purpose come sharply into focus. What are universities for? How can they reconcile their historic civic missions with the demands of financial survival, global competition, and the growing expectation that they deliver social, emotional, and economic outcomes simultaneously? The massification of higher education, long regarded as a democratic achievement, has also intensified these pressures, stretching resources, altering student demographics, and raising difficult questions about quality, academic standards, and the meaning of a university education.

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Alongside these issues lie others that speak to the intellectual and moral core of the academy: how can academic freedom be sustained in a climate where speech is increasingly regulated, and where universities often appear to take institutional positions on contested political and moral questions? What happens to academic debate when emotional comfort or ideological conformity begins to crowd out intellectual challenge and pluralism? What does increasing corporatisation and marketisation mean for the traditional truth-seeking mission of the university?

This special issue of Scottish Affairs arises from the urgency of these questions. It brings together seven papers, each written by authors with diverse knowledge and experience of higher education, to explore the challenges and possibilities facing Scottish universities today. Collectively, they map a sector at a crossroads: one that has long enjoyed international esteem yet now faces mounting pressures that threaten its vitality. These include economic, managerial, and cultural forces, alongside growing risks to academic freedom, institutional purpose, and a narrowing intellectual culture in which fewer viewpoints feel able to be expressed.

The issue opens with a wide-ranging critique by Walter Humes, whose reflections on corporatisation and governance set the tone for the debates that follow. Drawing on 50 years of experience across multiple institutions, the author argues that universities have been weakened by corporatisation and diminishing democratic governance. While Scotland’s leading universities continue to perform strongly on international metrics, he poses a stark question: have universities lost their way?

Scottish universities face crisis of purpose and funding

'At the heart of the crisis lies the funding model that underpins the Scottish Government’s commitment to free tuition' (Image: PA)

The paper by Simon Fanshawe (current Rector of the University of Edinburgh but writing in a personal capacity) addresses the contested terrain of academic freedom in Scotland’s universities. Academic freedom, the paper contends, is not limitless, but its constraints must be minimal, transparent, and rigorously defended as intrinsic to the knowledge-producing and truth-seeking purpose of the university.

Jonathan Hearn and Gail McLeod examine how marketisation and emotional governance intersect in contemporary universities. Their paper explores the tension between intellectual resilience and a safety culture that has grown increasingly risk-averse, where concern for students’ feelings around difficult topics is shaped by broader cultural and consumer pressures.

Sebastian Monteux and Linda Murdoch extend the focus on emotional safety and examine how the language of wellbeing and inclusion has become embedded in the governance of Scottish higher education. They argue that when care becomes a matter of compliance, universities may prioritise emotional comfort at the expense of intellectual challenge. True wellbeing, they conclude, requires engagement with difficulty rather than protection from it.

The fifth contribution, by Robin McAlpine, offers a more provocative intervention. He argues that the current crisis in higher education can be traced directly to managerial reforms that have subordinated scholarship to bureaucratic control. His proposed solutions are strikingly simple: abolish performance indicators, restore self-governing university courts, redirect funds from buildings to knowledge, and pass a “Universities Rescue Act.”

Mark Smith and Paul Gilfillan draw on the work of Scottish-born philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre to raise the question of purpose in contemporary universities. They suggest that managerial and market logics have obscured higher education’s role in cultivating shared reasoning and moral inquiry and call for renewed attention to universities as moral as well as intellectual communities.

Neil Thin’s concluding paper takes a more affirmative approach to academic freedom, centred on what he calls ‘sociable curiosity’, a shared, outward-looking form of academic inquiry. He argues that academic freedom should be valued not only as a right to be protected, but as a positive force that nurtures curiosity, openness, and collegiality. The collection ends, appropriately, with a hopeful vision for the future of Scotland’s universities.

'Questions of purpose come sharply into focus. What are universities for?' (Image: Newsquest Media Group)

Across these diverse contributions, several themes recur: the fragility of academic freedom, the rise of emotional governance and managerial culture, the loss and possible recovery of moral and social purpose, and the unresolved tension between inclusion and intellectual challenge. Taken together, the papers suggest that the future of Scottish higher education will depend on restoring balance among finance and mission, care and critique, and management and scholarship.

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What is particularly striking, however, is that these shared concerns emerged entirely independently. Contributors were invited on the basis of their expertise and experience, but were given complete freedom to decide their focus. Yet as the essays arrived, we were struck by how consistently they identified the same underlying patterns: the dissonance between managerial and collegial forms of governance; the intrusion of business models into academic life; the rise of therapeutic and emotional frameworks of governance; the encroachment of consumerist cultures; the erosion of purpose; and the tendency of university leadership to accommodate rather than challenge these shifts. That such resonances appeared without coordination suggests these are not isolated grievances but symptoms of a deeper, systemic malaise within the sector, one that demands honest scrutiny and debate.

One area we had hoped to cover in this special issue was the state of teacher training and its influence on what ultimately arrives in university. Universities do not exist in isolation; they are nourished by students emerging from schools. Concerns about declining academic standards, the erosion of knowledge-based curricula, and shifts away from rigorous disciplinary teaching inevitably shape the character of university learning. What happens in schools today will determine the intellectual foundations of higher education tomorrow. Despite our efforts, we were unable to find a contributor on this theme, and we recognise this as an important gap that warrants future attention.

Scotland’s universities remain among the most admired in the world. But admiration alone will not secure their future. That future depends on open, honest, and sometimes uncomfortable debate, precisely the kind of conversation this special issue seeks to advance. The contributions gathered here represent a range of perspectives, and there will undoubtedly be others. What matters is that these discussions take place civilly, thoughtfully, and in the spirit of the Scottish Enlightenment, where reasoned disagreement was regarded not as a threat, but as the lifeblood of a free and flourishing intellectual culture.

Sebastian Monteux is Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing at Abertay University. Jane Fenton is an Emeritus Professor of Social Work Education at the University of Dundee.

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