An alphabet of graduation ceremonies, from Anthropology to Zoology, is under way in Scotland’s 15 universities (16, if we count the English-headquartered OU, which has a branch office in Edinburgh) and its handful of smaller, more specialist, institutions. And there’s a plethora of initials involved. Arts degrees, MA (Hons), will tend to be most frequent, but others received include BScs, MScs, BEds, MEds, DDs, PhDs and, for those who like quaint and quirky medieval Latinisms, the ChB (Chirurgiae Baccalaureus – Bachelor of Surgery). However, it’s been other letters on display on graduation days that have caught most attention recently: UCU, standing for Universities and Colleges Union.
UCU is the result of a 2006 merger of the Association of Universities Teachers and historically more militant National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education. Roughly, UCU members are indignant about changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme. These changes especially affect those who joined the USS after 2011. More generally, increasingly many poorly-paid and precarious tutoring jobs are an issue and a derisory pay increase offered in 2018 has hardly helped. Consequently, UCU members have been involved in intermittent strike action since then, with the current form of protest being a patchy boycott of the marking of final year students’ work. This has led to some students (not only in Edinburgh, but across the UK) being unable to graduate or receiving unclassified degrees or interim awards.
There was a demo in Edinburgh in support of UCU on July 11 and the website of the student newspaper currently shows a banner bearing the legend: “For us, housing crisis and empty degrees, for you [the Principal, Peter Mathieson] a £43K pay rise” unfurled at a ceremony. The one we attended was uneventful, except for a few pro-UCU sashes but art students were reportedly very disruptive when their turn came for a brief encounter with the breeches of John Knox. Strange days. And changed times. On July 13, in its “Past and Present” column, this paper recalled that on that day in 1923 honorary degree recipients in Edinburgh included Winston Churchill: “McEwan Hall could not contain the thousands of relatives and friends of graduates who desired to be present”’. Nobody, it seems, wore sashes or unfurled banners.
Qua parent I was pleased that the graduation of our daughter (of whom we are exceeding proud) passed off uneventfully. Qua academic (and ex-AUT member) I’m torn between sympathy for the UCU’s cause and concern over its nose-cutting-for-the-purpose-of-face-spiting tactics. But the issues here go beyond the immediate.
Malaise in modern universities (not just in Scotland or even the UK) runs far deeper. They have been rendered bleakly utilitarian in method, scope and purpose. Self-serving bureaucrats of the mind dominate. The paradox, however, is that too many lecturers themselves have been complicit in all of this, too concerned with climbing that hill of skulls called a career and too little with giving students a meaningful higher education.
Dr David Limond lectures in history of education in Trinity College, University of Dublin.