Nicola Sturgeon's memoir Frankly is a less than frank account of her political career though combining it with research on the SNP dating back to her early days as an SNP activist provides insights into her style of leadership and the internal politics of the SNP. Understanding the former SNP leader's tendency to project her own weaknesses onto opponents is key to making sense of this extremely talented campaigner's career but also her failures as a First Minister.
Scottish universities have, in recent decades, been buffeted by a range of new demands, most immediately financial, but also demographic, cultural and technological. Understandably, perhaps, faced with this multiplicity of quotidian pressures, universities have lost sight of any wider sense of purpose. This article seeks to place a conceptual frame around the condition of higher education, prompting engagement with the question of what the purpose of universities in Scotland ought to be or could be. To do so, we turn to the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, a Scottish-born philosopher of world renown. A primary concern for MacIntyre is the fragmentation of moral purpose in societies organised around (neo)liberal principles. He argues that this has led to an inability to reason together around important moral questions. The consequence of this is that moral judgments are viewed as no more than expressions of personal preference, attitude or feeling. MacIntyre addressed the role of university education in the Gifford Lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh in 1988 and in related writing. This article will revisit the salience of his work in light of the current issues facing higher education.
Scottish higher education stands at a crossroads. This special issue explores the forces reshaping the nation's universities: balancing mission against market pressures, care against critique, and collegial traditions against expanding managerial control. Contributors examine the erosion of academic freedom, the rise of emotional and bureaucratic governance, the risks of ideological conformity and the challenge of sustaining scholarly purpose amid massification and consumer-driven expectations. Yet alongside critique, the collection identifies grounds for optimism, including the revitalisation of collegial culture, renewed moral purpose and commitments to sociable curiosity. Taken together, the essays argue that the future of Scottish higher education depends on honest debate, institutional courage and a re-affirmation of universities as places of inquiry, disagreement and public good.
This brief research note scrutinises the claim made in the Edinburgh University Race Review that Dugald Stewart believed David Hume endorsed the enslavement of black Africans because of the latter's belief in the cognitive inferiority of these people. Closer inspection reveals that the evidence for this claim is equivocal, and while Stewart may have made this claim, he was also probably wrong. In this instance, the use of evidence appears to have been careless, and the wider historical context of ideas neglected. It is suggested this may reflect on the quality of the wider review.
A total of 167 men died when the North Sea oil platform Piper Alpha blew up in July 1988. It remains the world's deadliest offshore oil disaster. It was a major regional, national and international news event. The tragedy was felt particularly keenly in Aberdeen, an important hub for the oil and gas industry. This study examines how Piper Alpha was commemorated in regional, Scottish and UK newspapers, after one, five and ten years. It aims to provide new insights into media coverage of this important event and to identify functions of such commemorative reporting. The study finds anniversary journalism was most widespread in regional and Scottish titles, albeit with a greater divergence in approaches by the tenth anniversary. The tabloid Daily Record employed a more emotional, critical style of reporting, in contrast to the broadsheet Press & Journal, which produced most coverage yet was more sympathetic to oil industry perspectives. Despite the scale of the tragedy, the London-based press is found to have almost completely ignored the commemorations. The article includes a proposed new framework for anniversary journalism based on five themes identified in the analysis. These are memorialising, campaigning, covering commemorative events, explaining and using an anniversary as a hook for other stories.
This article responds to criticisms levelled by Professor Jonathan Hearn at the University of Edinburgh's 'Race Review' in this issue. It reflects on historical method, the selection of evidence in service of larger arguments, and scholarly propriety.
This rejoinder responds to Ian Stewart's reply to my research note in this issue of Scottish Affairs. I clarify that the brunt of my criticisms are aimed at the University of Edinburgh Race Review as a whole, not Dr Stewart in particular. Further, the problem of the misrepresentation of David Hume's views on race and slavery still stands, despite Dr Stewart's disagreement with me.
'Scotland's islands' have increasingly been treated by the Scottish Government as a distinct set of places, with their own ministerial remit and, since 2019, their own 'Plan', the first 'strategic objective' of which was 'to address population decline and ensure a healthy balanced population profile'. Over the past forty years, however, Scotland's islands, taken together, have experienced no significant population decline, while their collective age profile is not very different from many other parts of the country. This paper looks below the 'all-island' aggregates, exploring the huge diversity in patterns of change, and examining these in the context of past and recent variations in the three key demographic drivers: fertility, mortality, and, especially, migration. A particular focus is the widespread belief that population decline is above all due to out-migration among older teenagers and young adults. New data from the 2022 census, supplemented by figures provided by National Records of Scotland, show clearly that the key determinant of population trends in individual islands has in recent years most often not been out-migration, but the rates and age profiles of in-movements. Even where islands' populations are in decline, in many cases they have overall net in-migration. The falling populations of these islands are a direct result of there being too few couples at child-bearing ages and/or too many deaths because of their age profiles.
Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a persistent human rights violation that the Scottish Government is seeking to address through the Equally Safe strategy which provides the national approach to eradicating VAWG. Delivering Equally Safe is the Scottish Government's funding programme to support third sector organisations and public bodies contribute to the objectives, priorities and outcomes of the Equally Safe Strategy. Using a publicly available overview of the 121 organisations and services funded through Delivering Equally Safe, this paper examines how the services funded align with the four strategic priorities of Equally Safe 2023: prevention, victim-survivor support, perpetrator accountability, and system-wide coordination. The brief descriptions of funded projects were categorised into six thematic areas: crisis support, legal advocacy and financial support, education and prevention, capacity building and system change, targeted support for specific groups, and perpetrator engagement. Findings show that crisis support dominates provision, while perpetrator engagement is significantly underrepresented, limiting the capacity to disrupt cycles of violence. Services addressing marginalised groups demonstrate partial recognition of intersectionality but are fragmented and largely urban-based. Although capacity-building and prevention initiatives are present, they remain secondary to immediate support services, reflecting a reactive rather than preventive emphasis. Overall, Delivering Equally Safe provides critical victim-survivor support but delivers unevenly across strategic priorities.
The relationship between evidence and policy is never straightforward. Notwithstanding, we should reasonably expect that policy formulation should draw on well-established bodies of knowledge from a range of sources, suitably analysed. In recent years, the Scottish Government appears to have given up on what was previously axiomatic by elevating knowledge from one source, that of 'lived experience', above all others. This has occurred with insufficient academic, professional, or political critique. At one level, this lack of critique is understandable in that questioning someone's personal experience is difficult, precisely because it is personal. This article traces the turn to lived experience as the predominant political driver for social welfare policy in Scotland. It proceeds to examine the troubled National Care Service proposals to illustrate the extent and the consequences of the Scottish Government's preoccupation with lived experience. It will conclude that there is a place for lived experience in policy debates, but that the conceptual flimsiness of the term renders it an inadequate basis for policy formulation or implementation and leaves it open to political misappropriation.
This article explores the concept and practice of 'populism' which has taken on new and virulent forms in the early twenty-first century. With ancient roots in political theory and practice, modern populism is in essence a morality tale, partitioning society and politics into 'people' versus 'elites'. Academic writing on populism, however, takes the people/elites distinction for granted, and fails to provide adequate analysis of populism's social base. Nevertheless, populism as a political and social movement should be taken seriously with its powerful intellectual roots and ability to cut through the complexities of modern politics. Populism has deep roots in the USA currently providing leadership of the 'Reactionary International', particularly in performative terms as articulating the voice of 'the people'. What much writing on populism lacks is systematic analysis of its social base, in particular who is susceptible to its message given the appeal of authoritarian values in modern societies.
This article explores current challenges to academic freedom in universities, arguing that it faces dual threats: external political intrusion and institutional pressures from within. The author critiques how policies intended to promote inclusion, in particular those related to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) and Dignity and Respect, can inadvertently suppress viewpoint diversity and enforce ideological conformity. The article highlights how activism and policy can blur the line between discomfort and harm, conflating disagreement with hostility. The author defends academic freedom as foundational to higher education, essential for the pursuit of knowledge through rigorous debate, and for societal trust in academia. While acknowledging that academic freedom is not absolute, the article calls for its protection through reasoned discourse, scholarly integrity, and institutional neutrality on divisive issues.
This paper explores the rise of a new 'etiquette' in Scottish higher education-a governance-infused code of conduct that fuses a rhetoric of care, inclusion, and wellbeing with the logics of performance management. Rooted in Scotland's publicly funded civic ethos, this etiquette emerges from the interplay of devolved policy priorities, sector-wide performance metrics, and reputational incentives. Through an analysis of Scottish Government initiatives, national funding agreements, accreditation schemes, and institutional strategies, the paper traces how progressive policy commitments are translated into emotional norms and embedded in everyday academic practice. While recognising the sincerity of inclusion and wellbeing agendas, the paper argues that the codification of care as compliance signals a broader transformation: from the epistemic to the affective, from the primacy of thinking to the regulation of feeling. In this shift, dissent risks being redefined as harm, fragility is anticipated, and affective conformity is valorised, narrowing the democratic and intellectual functions of the university. The paper calls for a renewed commitment to pluralism, contestation, and intellectual risk, contending that lasting wellbeing arises not from the avoidance of difficulty but from active engagement with challenge, nuance, and the open exchange of ideas.
This article offers a critical perspective on the current state of Scottish higher education. It is informed not only by conventional forms of evidence (e.g., legislation, official reports and academic analysis) but also by the writer's personal experience of working in different types of Scottish universities over a period of nearly fifty years. It argues that the vital democratic function of higher education has been weakened by a combination of factors: the steady incursion of corporate thinking into institutions that have traditionally been committed to a different value system; a growing divide between senior managers and front-line academic staff; performance management practices that tend to demoralise rather than incentivise; governance arrangements that fail to ensure adequate accountability for financial and strategic decisions. In developing these points, reference is made to the rapid expansion of the sector, the economic challenges this has presented, public criticism of the leaders of some institutions, and debates over academic freedom. Questions about where responsibility lies for the present situation, including whether academics themselves have shown insufficient resistance, are raised. It is acknowledged that, on the metrics that are currently employed, the leading Scottish universities show up well on UK and international comparisons. Much good work continues to be produced by dedicated individuals and teams of researchers. But will this continue if corporate culture remains unchecked?
Policies and discussion of academic freedom tend to be problem-oriented and defensive. They focus on harms, difficulties, and risks more than on the positive values and benefits that give freedom its raison d'& ecirc;tre. Must we see freedom solely in these negative terms, mainly as an eternal struggle against obstructions? Or could we promote and celebrate freedom in more proactive and appreciative ways-spreading stronger awareness of the many intrinsic and instrumental benefits of an academic culture in which curiosity, considerate debate, and open-mindedness flourish? This paper is an invitation to consider more carefully these more aspirational approaches, with particular reference to the development of universities in Scotland. Drawing on both adverse and positive experiences, it highlights the importance of nurturing a campus climate of shared curiosity. Noting that some of the threats to academic freedom come from self-censorship and from silences and avoidances rather than from visible and active threats, and hence are elusive and hard to address, I argue for more explicit and appreciative promotion of academic freedom, and for more careful attention to the kinds of culture in which it flourishes.
Scottish universities have, in recent decades, been buffeted by a range of new demands, most immediately financial, but also demographic, cultural and technological. Understandably, perhaps, faced with this multiplicity of quotidian pressures, universities have lost sight of any wider sense of purpose. This article seeks to place a conceptual frame around the condition of higher education, prompting engagement with the question of what the purpose of universities in Scotland ought to be or could be. To do so, we turn to the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, a Scottish-born philosopher of world renown. A primary concern for MacIntyre is the fragmentation of moral purpose in societies organised around (neo)liberal principles. He argues that this has led to an inability to reason together around important moral questions. The consequence of this is that moral judgments are viewed as no more than expressions of personal preference, attitude or feeling. MacIntyre addressed the role of university education in the Gifford Lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh in 1988 and in related writing. This article will revisit the salience of his work in light of the current issues facing higher education.
This article describes setting up a University of Edinburgh Challenge Course called 'Wicked Problems: Reason and Rhetoric', and some resistance to it. The course aims to help students understand the nature of argument and disagreement, and how to engage in these productively in their university work and beyond. The article then explores the culture of modern universities, seeing them as shaped by processes of neoliberal marketisation, and discursive emotionalisation, rendering students as simultaneously free consumers and psychologically vulnerable persons. We see these as forms of social control that interfere with the culture of universities, as sites of autonomous intellectual development.
