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.
