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Scottish Affairs, No. 52, Summer 2005

Have Scottish Academic Values Been Eroded?

Lindsay Paterson and Ross Bond

Introduction

Debates about Scotland's place in the Union have always been accompanied by controversies over the distinctiveness and autonomy of the Scottish universities. Since at least the late-nineteenth century, allegations that the universities have lost their traditional character have accompanied political campaigns for their greater accountability to Scottish political processes (Paterson 1998). The most recent intensive discussions of these sorts date from the 1960s, when the most radical of the campaigners for home rule sought to repatriate the universities from the allegedly alien control of the University Grants Committee, then responsible for institutions throughout the UK. Senior university staff in Scotland successfully resisted this pressure by persuading the Labour government to remove responsibility for their funding and planning from the powers of the proposed Scottish assembly, but the issue returned in the 1980s when the policies of the Conservative government were widely believed in Scotland to be harming the Scottish universities, through their restrictions of public funding and through the UGC's lack of sympathy for the very concept of a university education that was broad-based. The claims of lost Scottishness were exacerbated by the growing proportions of undergraduate students from England who were entering Edinburgh and St Andrews universities. Then and in the 1970s, it was claimed further that, because many academics at Scottish universities had come from outside Scotland, and paid more attention to research than to teaching or to engagement with the local civil society, the very character of these institutions could not survive. It was alleged that these migrants, having mostly passed through the socially segmented English education system rather than the somewhat more meritocratic Scottish one, would be inclined by their own social origins to oppose the key tenets of Scottish educational democracy. So insistent had the resulting controversies become that, when the Conservatives decided in 1992 to merge the university sector with the sector of colleges and central institutions, they brought the universities under a Scottish funding agency rather than transfer these other institutions to any agency based outside Scotland (Scott 1994). The unified system was then ready for transfer to the Scottish Parliament in 1999, since when the debate about Scottishness has tended to be mainly about the question of student funding and widening access.

Much of the controversy in the past four decades has been conducted in the language of crude rhetoric rather than on the basis of evidence or of clear definitions of concepts. Nevertheless, there is a serious background, and the text to which it relates is George Davie's The Democratic Intellect of 1961. It is cast as a critique of the reforms which the Scottish universities underwent as a consequence of the 1889 Universities (Scotland) Act. He alleged that the changes introduced by the Executive Commission set up under the Act restricted access, narrowed the curriculum, and began the inexorable process of replacing a public and national university system with a fragmented assortment of private institutions influenced at most weakly by indigenous traditions. The questions raised by the debate are also undoubtedly of profound importance for any national culture. The character of a nation has been powerfully influenced by the values which dominate its universities for at least a century, insofar as they have shaped the professionals who have led and managed the welfare state. These values acquire an even more direct influence when one-half of young people now proceed to some kind of higher education by the age of 21.

Here we consider just one aspect of these debates: we examine whether it is indeed plausible to claim that academic migrants to Scotland might have changed the character of the institutions which they chose to join. There is no doubt that such migration has been substantial. From the surveys which we use here (and as are described in more detail below), in the year 2001, 46% of staff in Scottish higher education institutions had received their own first degree outwith Scotland, much the same level of inward migration as four decades earlier, 53% in 1964. These were simply the latest outcomes of a much older process, as R. D. Anderson has noted: by the 1880s, around one third of professors recruited to the Scottish universities came from outside the country, and this fluctuated at about that level until the eve of the second world war (Anderson 1987, p. 39). There is also no doubt that the expansion of the universities which took place in the 1950s and 1960s drew in large numbers of staff from outside: the number of academics in Scottish universities rose three-fold between 1950 and 1970 (UGC, 1952, Table 8; DES, 1973, Table 35), and, except in a few fields such as medicine where Scotland had always been numerically strong, the relative lack of attention to research in the Scottish universities to that date was bound to entail recruiting staff from elsewhere. The question which we look at here is whether it is reasonable to believe that this inflow of people, by their views and the influence they exerted, might have changed the values which dominated the Scottish universities.

Data and Methods

The analysis is based on a comparison of two surveys of academics separated by four decades, in 1964 and 2001. We use them to compare the views and characteristics of academics in Scotland and England, and, within Scotland, between migrants and those educated in Scotland.

The 2001 survey was carried out in the spring of that year, by post. The sample consisted of academics working in higher education institutions in Scotland and England, in roughly equal numbers (to allow reliable comparison). The questionnaire covered views about the purposes of higher education, about accountability, and about general political matters, and also topics of a demographic nature. The overall response rate to the full questionnaire was 55% (achieved samples of 342 in England and 372 in Scotland); a further, shorter questionnaire raised this for some of the questions to 63% (achieved samples of 394 in England and 421 in Scotland); weights are used to allow for the sampling mechanism and to compensate to some extent for differential non-response. Full details of the sampling, of the representativeness of the achieved sample, and of the questions asked of respondents are in a technical note available at the web address noted in the Acknowledgements, and described briefly also by Paterson (2003). Comparison with data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency showed that the sample was broadly representative of academics except that it under-represented contract researchers, probably in particular those who were on temporary contracts (see the technical note). So the sample is best thought of as describing academics in established positions.

The 1964 survey was carried out by A. H. Halsey and M. A. Trow (1971, pp. 508-10). It was based mainly on sending a postal questionnaire to the one-in-five sample of university teachers who were first surveyed for the Robbins committee on higher education in 1962. Halsey and Trow contacted them in spring 1964, and achieved a 49% response rate; they show (p. 509) that their achieved sample was broadly representative of the population of university teachers. The Scottish institutions in the survey were St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh Universities and the Royal College of Science and Technology (the main precursor of Strathclyde University). Halsey and Trow also supplemented this with special surveys of all staff at one new English university (in spring 1965) and three English colleges of advanced technology that became universities by the end of the decade (late 1964). The inclusion of the new university and the colleges, covered with a higher sampling fraction than the wider survey, means that the sample as a whole is best thought of as showing the state of university education after the post-Robbins expansion, rather than strictly in 1964; nevertheless, for convenience, we refer to it as the 1964 survey. The inclusion of the colleges also brings into the sample a group of English institutions that broadly corresponded to the Royal College in Glasgow. Nevertheless, excluding the new university and the colleges from the analysis changed only small details of the results reported in the tables below, and did not alter any of the conclusions reached. The sample contained 1554 respondents in England and 249 in Scotland.[1]

Because the 2001 survey was not designed primarily for this comparison over time (but rather for investigating questions of national identity), some of the scope for measuring change is limited: for example, the only information in the 1964 survey that allows us to measure migration is the record of where respondents gained their most recent first degree.[2] The available information does allow us, however, to compare three groups that are defined in nearly the same way in each survey:

(1) Academics at Scottish higher education institutions who gained their first degree from a Scottish institution. For convenience we refer to this group as the 'Scots-educated'.

(2) Academics at Scottish higher education institutions who gained their first degree outside Scotland. We refer to these as the academic 'migrants'.

(3) Academics at English higher education institutions.

In the 2001 survey, moreover, we can do the comparisons both for all institutions and for those institutions which appeared in the 1964 survey as well; this latter comparison might give us a more valid assessment of change, because many of the universities in 2001 were not universities or about to become universities at the time of the earlier survey. We repeated the comparisons restricting groups (2) and (3) to people who gained their first degree specifically at an English institution (64% of (2) and 73% of (3)), on the grounds that accusations of eroded traditions have often been more precisely about an alleged Anglicisation; comments on this are made in the few places where the results differed from those shown in the tables. For 2001, we could also look separately at people in group (1) who received most of their secondary schooling in Scotland (77% of this group; the proportions in the other two groups were very small, 4% and 3% respectively); this made no difference to the patterns we discuss, and so we do not comment on it further.[3]

Thus if the allegations of an erosion of Scottish traditions resulting from academic migration are sustainable, then we would expect:

(a) that in 1964 the views and practices of those educated in Scotland would be more 'democratic' than the migrants' views and practices: for example, they would engage in a greater amount of public service, or favour in greater proportions wide access to university. This difference would have been eroded over time, so that, by the next generation of academics (in 2001), there would have been convergence on the kinds of view typically held by migrants in 1964.

If this erosion were due to the social characteristics of the migrants, then we would expect further:

(b) that the Scots-educated in 1964 would have more 'democratic' characteristics than the migrants - for example, have their origins in a wider range of social groups.

More specifically, any erosion of Scottish traditions could be described as 'anglicisation' if:

(c) in 1964 the characteristics and views of the migrants were closer to those of people at English institutions than to the Scots-educated, since most of the migration came from England. In 2001, there would be no such differences, either between migrants and the Scots-educated, or between either of these groups and academics in England.

Changes could be plausibly attributed to the agency of the migrants if, finally,

(d) the migrants were disproportionately in positions of power, through which they could influence the values of whole institutions or whole disciplines.

Results

The results are shown in a series of tables which mostly have the same broad structure as is exemplified in Table 1: the three horizontal segments correspond to the three groups defined above, and the columns correspond to years, with a distinction in 2001 between all institutions and those which also appeared in the 1964 survey.

Demographic characteristics

Table 1 shows that the 1964 universities were places of substantial amounts of upward social mobility - people who moved into professional academic careers from lower middle class or working class origins. There was no difference in that year between Scotland and England, or, within Scotland, between the Scots-educated group and the migrants. The 2001 survey, by contrast, shows a great deal more recruitment from professional classes. Even if we allow that there might be some ambiguity about the boundary between 'professional and managerial' and 'clerical' (because the allocation to classes was made by respondents, not by expert coders using specific job titles), the fall in upward mobility remains clear from the proportions whose fathers had worked in manual occupations. Part of this may have been due to the growth in the size of the professional classes which supplied the largest group of undergraduate students throughout this period: between the censuses of 1921 and 1961, the proportion of the Scottish population of working age who were in professional or managerial socio-economic groups was around 8-9%, whereas between the census of 1971 and the Labour Force Survey of spring 2000 the proportion rose from 13% to 23% (McCrone 1992, p. 139; Paterson et al 2004, p. 85). There was thus approximately a tripling in the relative size of the professional and managerial groups between the period when the academics of 1964 would have been undergraduate students and the period when the youngest academics in 2001 would have been so. The tripling in Table 1 of the proportion of Scots-educated from professional and managerial backgrounds may well simply reflect the growth of these groups in the general population. The same is less likely to be true of the migrants and of those in England, among whom the proportion from such backgounds rose four-fold, even though the growth in the size of the professional and managerial classes in England and Wales was much the same as in Scotland: these social groups made up about 9% of the working-age population of England and Wales from the 1920s to the 1950s, and around 26% by 2000 (McCrone 1992, p. 79; Labour Force Survey of March-May 2000).

Table 1
Social class origins of academics in Scotland and England, 1964 and 2001

Table shows percentages in columns, weighted in 2001; sample sizes unweighted. Omits people who did not answer or responded 'don't know'.

{1} In 2001, 'all' is whole sample, and '1964 institutions' is those institutions in the 2001 sample which also appeared in the 1964 sample.

{2} The father's class categories shown are as asked in 2001; for 1964, they are condensed from 'professional' (category 1 above), 'intermediate' (category 2), 'skilled', 'partly skilled', 'unskilled' (category 3), and these in turn had been coded from an open-ended item in the questionnaire. Balance of percentages is 'armed forces'.

{3} In 1964, the respondent's 'most recent first degree'; in 2001, the respondent's 'first degree'.

The consequence is that, unlike in 1964, there is some difference between the three groups in 2001: around one third of the Scots-educated were in this sense of working-class origins, whereas among the migrants and in England only around one fifth were of such origins. Since Anderson (1987, p. 48) reported around one fifth of newly recruited professors in the first four decades of the twentieth century as having origins outside the professional and business classes, it may be that the immediate post-war decades represented an interlude in which recruitment to academic professions was more diverse than previously or later, the post-war expansion allowing more working-class people to enter academic work before the expansion of professional employment came to dominate to an unprecedented extent recruitment to university undergraduate courses. Anderson's data relate only to professors, who (in both Scotland and in England outside Oxford and Cambridge) constituted only about one third of academic staff in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and only one fifth in the following two (Halsey and Trow 1971, pp. 151-3). Professors were too few in our samples (see Table 6 below ) to analyse their origins reliably for the three groups separately, but, in each of the two surveys as a whole, the social origins of professors were very similar to those of academics in general.

A related aspect of social origins is the secondary schools which academics attended, details of which are shown in Table 2 . In 1964, academics came overwhelmingly from the academic courses of the selective schools, whether publicly managed or independent. Even in 2001, the majority still had come from such origins, but large minorities now were from comprehensive schools. This was especially true among the Scots-educated (39% from comprehensives), and so here, too, a gap between them and the migrants had opened up which had not been present in 1964. There had probably also been a growth in the proportion who had attended a school outside the UK. Although restricting the migrant and English groups to people who received their first degree in England reduced the proportion with overseas schooling to a level close to that among the Scots-educated (2% among the migrants and 4% in England), the proportions who had attended comprehensive schools remained much lower than among the Scots-educated, at 22% among the migrants and 23% among those in England. Further restricting to people aged under 45 - who would have attended secondary school after the extension of comprehensive education nationally - gave 63% from comprehensive schools among the Scots-educated, 42% among the migrants, and 42% in England. However we measure this, then, we conclude that comprehensive secondary schools were more important as a route into academic careers for those educated in Scotland in 2001 than for either their counterparts educated outside Scotland or for their predecessors in 1964 educated in Scotland.

Table 2
Type of secondary school attended by academics in Scotland and England, 1964 and 2001

Table shows percentages in columns, weighted in 2001; sample sizes unweighted. Omits people who did not answer or responded 'don’t know'.

{1} In 2001, 'all' is whole sample, and '1964 institutions' is those institutions in the 2001 sample which also appeared in the 1964 sample.

{2} In 1964, the respondent's 'most recent first degree'; in 2001, the respondent's 'first degree'.

{3} The categories 'comprehensive' and 'overseas' were not offered in 1964, and so would have been included in 'other'.

Table 3 shows information on gender: in each group, there was a large rise between 1964 and 2001 in the proportion who were female. There was, again, a gap between the Scots-educated and migrant staff in 2001 which did not exist in 1964: a lower proportion of migrants were female than in either of the other two groups. Table 4 shows a familiar pattern of an ageing academic workforce: in 1964, in each group, around two fifths were aged under 35, whereas in 2001 that proportion had fallen to around one fifth. The migrants in 2001 were somewhat younger on average than the Scots-educated: for example, 59% aged 45 or younger compared to 46%.

Table 3
Proportion of academics in Scotland and England who were female, 1964 and 2001

Table shows percentage female, weighted in 2001; sample sizes unweighted. Omits people who did not answer or responded 'don't know'.

{1} In 2001, 'all' is whole sample, and '1964 institutions' is those institutions in the 2001 sample which also appeared in the 1964 sample.

{2} In 1964, the respondent's 'most recent first degree'; in 2001, the respondent's 'first degree'.

Table 4
Age of academics in Scotland and England, 1964 and 2001

Table shows percentages in columns, weighted in 2001; sample sizes unweighted. Omits people who did not answer or responded 'don't know.

{1} In 2001, 'all' is whole sample, and '1964 institutions' is those institutions in the 2001 sample which also appeared in the 1964 sample.

{2} The age categories shown are as asked in 2001; in 1964, the boundaries were one year lower (eg '24 or under').

{3} In 1964, the respondent's 'most recent first degree'; in 2001, the respondent's 'first degree'.

In summary of these demographic characteristics, we can say that several differences had emerged in 2001 which did not exist in 1964: in terms of schooling, class origins and to some extent age, the migrants in 2001 more resembled the staff of English institutions than they did the Scots-educated. In gender composition, the migrants had become less like the Scots-educated than in 1964, but also less like the staff in England. These trends do not support points (b) or (c) set out above: there has been quite the opposite of convergence.

Academic characteristic

Table 5 shows the broad disciplines in which academics worked. The Scots-educated group were distinctive in 1964 in one respect: a far greater proportion of them than in the other two groups worked in medicine, reflecting the inherited strength of the Scottish medical schools. This remained true of comparison with the migrants in 2001, but not of comparison with academics in England. The other main change over time is in respect of arts and social sciences. In 1964, a disproportionately low proportion of the Scots-educated worked in these areas, perhaps reflecting the relative weakness of these disciplines in the first half of the century: in 1950, for example, 54% of full-time students in Scotland were in social studies or arts, compared to 65% in England (UGC 1952, Table 4). This position had been transformed by 2001, in which broadly the same proportions of Scots-educated and migrants worked in these two areas, and migrants now worked disproportionately in pure science. The migrants of 1964 would in large numbers have been the teachers of the Scots-educated in 2001, and so we can say that these migrants helped to create the indigenous class of intellectual leaders who have contributed significantly to debates about Scottish culture, identity and society over the past couple of decades.

Table 5
Subject area of academics in Scotland and England, 1964 and 2001

Table shows percentages in columns, weighted in 2001; sample sizes unweighted. Omits people in other categories (6% of total in 2001, not given in 1964), did not answer or responded 'don't know'.

{1} In 2001, 'all' is whole sample, and '1964 institutions' is those institutions in the 2001 sample which also appeared in the 1964 sample.

{2} In 1964, the respondent's 'most recent first degree'; in 2001, the respondent's 'first degree'.

In these respects, there is some evidence of an influential role for migrants in these key disciplines for social debate. There is also some evidence that migrants at both dates did indeed disproportionately occupy the most senior academic posts, as Table 6 shows: the proportion of migrants who were professors was greater than the proportions among Scots-educated at both dates.

Table 6
Rank of academics in Scotland and England, 1964 and 2001

Table shows percentages in columns, weighted in 2001; sample sizes unweighted. Balance of percentages is other categories. Omits people who did not answer or responded 'don't know'.

{1} In 2001, 'all' is whole sample, and '1964 institutions' is those institutions in the 2001 sample which also appeared in the 1964 sample.

{2} In 1964, the respondent's 'most recent first degree'; in 2001, the respondent's 'first degree'.

Academic work

However, the academic work which these different groups of people did was not much different, as Table 7 indicates broadly. The proportion doing more research than teaching was the same in all three groups, and (in similar universities) the same in both years. There is thus no evidence that the migrants imported a different set of academic values. Migrants were, however, more likely to have substantial experience outwith the UK than the Scots-educated (Table 8 ), an advantage that persists even when we confine attention to those with an English first degree (32% among the migrants and 23% among those in England).

Table 7
Proportion reporting doing more research than teaching {1}, among academics in Scotland and England, 1964 and 2001

Table shows percentages in columns, weighted in 2001; sample sizes unweighted. Omits people who did not answer or responded 'don't know'.

{1}In 1964, 'more research' groups together 'very heavy' interest in research and 'leaning towards' research. In 2001, 'more research' is where the proportion of time spent on research is greater than the proportion spent on teaching. Thus balance of percentages is people who report doing at least as much teaching as research.

{2} In 2001, 'all' is whole sample, and '1964 institutions' is those institutions in the 2001 sample which also appeared in the 1964 sample.

{3} In 1964, the respondent's 'most recent first degree'; in 2001, the respondent's 'first degree'.

Table 8
Substantial academic work outwith UK by academics in Scotland and England, 1964 and 2001

Table shows percentage having held an appointment outwith UK, or had any period of leave of absence for a term or more outwith UK, weighted in 2001; sample sizes unweighted. Omits people who did not answer or responded 'don't know'.

{1} In 2001, 'all' is whole sample, and '1964 institutions' is those institutions in the 2001 sample which also appeared in the 1964 sample.

{2} In 1964, the respondent's 'most recent first degree'; in 2001, the respondent's 'first degree'.

But the migrants did not acquire this international experience at the expense of public service, as Table 9 shows. In all three groups in 1964, around one third had served in some way on a public body. The definition of this variable was not the same in 2001, although, because it is based on a specified list of activities (as explained in the footnote to the table), it will probably have tended if anything to depress the proportion recorded as engaging in any public activity; thus the apparent rise in all three groups is probably real. There is still no evidence of any lesser tendency by the migrants than by the Scots-educated to undertake such work. (Public service by academics is analysed in more detail by Bond and Paterson (forthcoming). [4])

Table 9
Public service {1} by academics in Scotland and England, 1964 and 2001

Table shows percentage serving, weighted in 2001; sample sizes unweighted. Omits people who did not answer or responded 'don't know'.

{1} In 1964, 'any public activities outside your university duties that take up an appreciable amount of time'. In 2001, serving as consultant to government department, to international agency, to private-sector business or to other non-governmental organisation, sat on governing body of any non-academic organisation, or sat on board of private-sector company.

{2} In 2001, 'all' is whole sample, and '1964 institutions' is those institutions in the 2001 sample which also appeared in the 1964 sample.

{3} In 1964, the respondent's 'most recent first degree'; in 2001, the respondent's 'first degree'.

Thus if the migrants brought anything distinctive to Scottish higher education it was perhaps wider international contacts. They were not responsible for shifting attention to research from teaching, and they did not erode any inclination among academics to give public service.

Political views

Table 10 sums up broad political ideology, and Table 11 shows to which political party academics felt closest. The change in definition of ideology between the two surveys should make us cautious in drawing any strong conclusions about change in any absolute sense. However, it seems clear, first, that, far from the migrants having introduced conservative views inimical to Scottish democracy, the ideological contrast was precisely the reverse: in 1964, a lower proportion of the Scots-educated were on the left politically than among the migrants or among academics in England. These generally conservative political views among the Scots-educated may well have been as important a source of opposition to a Scottish assembly in the 1970s as any suspicion among migrants: hostility to academic home rule was unlikely to have been simply an import.

Table 10
Political ideology{1} of academics in Scotland and England, 1964 and 2001

Table shows percentages in columns, weighted in 2001; sample sizes unweighted. Omits people who did not answer or responded 'don't know'.

{1} In 1964, 'left' groups 'far left' and 'moderate left', and analogously for 'right'. In 2001, the categories are derived from two 11-point scales, respectively measuring agreement with 'government should put up taxes a lot and spend more on health and social services', and 'government should make much greater efforts to make people's incomes more equal'. Giving scores of 1 through to 11 on each, and adding the two, gave a 21-point scale; 'left' is then the first 7 points of this, 'centre' the next 7, and 'right' the final 7.

{2} In 2001, 'all' is whole sample, and '1964 institutions' is those institutions in the 2001 sample which also appeared in the 1964 sample.

{3} In 1964, the respondent's 'most recent first degree'; in 2001, the respondent's 'first degree'.

That distinctiveness had vanished by 2001, and the three groups were very similar to each other. Moreover, the convergence had probably been towards the left of the political spectrum, a point confirmed by the party support shown in Table 11. In 1964, the Scots-educated were very disproportionately inclined to support the Conservatives. In 2001, that tendency had vanished, although the Scots-educated were now much more likely to support the SNP than were the migrants. The same survey also found that the Scots-educated and the migrants supported the Scottish Parliament by large majorities as the best way of making policy for Scotland: 88% among the Scots-educated and 79% among the migrants (see also Paterson 2003).

Table 11
Political party{1} generally supported by academics in Scotland and England, 1964 and 2001

Table shows percentages in columns, weighted in 2001; sample sizes unweighted. Omits people who did not answer or responded 'don't know'.

{1} A dash in a cell means that that option was not offered in the questionnaire in that year or in that country.

{2} In 2001, 'all' is whole sample, and '1964 institutions' is those institutions in the 2001 sample which also appeared in the 1964 sample.

{3} In 1964, the respondent's 'most recent first degree'; in 2001, the respondent's 'first degree'.

Attitudes to academic work

Tables 12 and 13 show attitudes to various aspects of academic work. It was not possible to achieve even approximate comparability of measures here for the two surveys, and so attention has to be simply on comparison among the three groups in each year. In 1964 (Table 12), there was little difference in views about prospective expansion, and so certainly no evidence that there was an indigenous Scots tradition of open access that might have been eroded by less democratic views among incomers: all groups supported modest expansion. There was no difference, either, in tendencies to place disciplinary loyalty above all else: only about one third of each group held that view. Each group, also, believed that there was a tendency to place too much emphasis on publishing the results of research, and not enough on teaching. Again, therefore, there was no evidence that migrants might have been eroding Scottish views of the importance of teaching.

Table 12
Attitudes to academic life among academics in Scotland and England, 1964

Table shows percentages in columns. Omits people who did not answer or responded 'don't know'.

{1} The respondent's 'most recent first degree'.

Table 13
Attitudes to widening access to higher education and to disciplinary loyalty among academics in Scotland and England, 2001, all institutions

Table shows percentages in columns, weighted; sample sizes unweighted. Omits people who did not answer or responded 'don't know'.

{1} The respondent's first degree.

In 2001 (Table 13), the main pattern is again one of similarity among the groups.[5] However, where there is difference on the four questions about widening access, it lies more sharply between academics in England and migrants than between migrants and the Scots-educated: the migrants are at least as enthusiastic about widening access as the Scots-educated. (This point is analysed in more detail, for a wider range of measures, by Paterson and Bond (2005) and by Paterson (2003).) The 2001 version of the disciplinary loyalty question also produced similar patterns in each group.

Once more, therefore, there is no evidence that the migrants in 1964 brought a set of academic attitudes that differed fundamentally from those of people who were products of the Scottish universities in the first half of the century. On the whole, that remained true four decades later, and indeed there was some evidence that some new distinctive attitudes, shared by migrants and the Scots-educated, may by then have been emerging.

Conclusions

We can summarise the evidence under the headings of the controversial claims (a) to (d) at the end of the Data and Methods section. Briefly, these were:

(a) that in 1964 the Scots-educated views and practices would be more 'democratic' than the migrants' views, and that this difference would have been eroded over time;

(b) that the Scots-educated in 1964 would have more 'democratic' characteristics than the migrants;

(c) that in 1964 the characteristics and views of the migrants would be closer to those of people at English institutions than to the Scots-educated, and that, in 2001, there would be no such differences;

(d) that the migrants would be disproportionately in positions of influence.

In 1964 the Scots-educated staff of Scottish universities were not very distinctive in their social origins or academic and social values: in nearly all respects, they resembled the migrants quite closely. They valued teaching equally, were equally likely to have engaged in public service, and were all in favour of modest expansion of the universities. Where they differed it was partly because of the wider international contacts of the migrants, partly because of the strength of the Scottish medical schools, but most notably, in fact, in their political views: the Scots-educated were actually less politically radical than the migrants. So those academics who had passed through the Scottish universities in the first half of the century were not, either sociologically or ideologically, more 'democratic'. Thus the first part of point (a) and also point (b) are not sustained.

Where there was convergence over the next four decades it was on what could broadly be called democratic values: all groups, but especially the Scots-educated, were more radical politically than their predecessors, and all favoured diverse action to encourage wide access to universities. The convergence predicted under the second part of point (a) was not of this sort, except insofar as, in 1964, the migrants were more attuned than the Scots-educated to the democratic values that have been claimed to be traditionally Scottish. The migrants in 2001 were not any less democratic in this sense. The Scottish universities gradually dropped their opposition to a Scottish parliament partly because of political tensions with the Conservative government in the 1980s (Duffy 1990). It would hardly be surprising, then, if some academics in England who were hostile to Conservative policy came to believe that moving to Scotland offered, in the long term, the prospect of working in a system that would be more congenial to their values. It is equally likely to be at least partly true that some academics who migrated to Scotland from England without being aware of moving to a different political system may have, over time, come to adapt themselves to it. Only longitudinal data that followed individuals could allow us to decide between these alternative interpretations. What can be said, however, is that academic migrants were little different in this respect to migrants from England to Scotland more generally: that group tends to be closer in its political and social values to native Scots than to people who remained in England (Dickson 1994, pp. 123-7; Watson 2003, pp. 113-6).

Despite this eventual coincidence of views between the Scots-educated and the migrants, there was also, nevertheless, some divergence in social origin: the Scots-educated in 2001 were more likely than the new migrants to have been upwardly socially mobile, and to have received their secondary education in comprehensive schools. That sociological democratising contradicts (c): academics in 2001 who had themselves been educated in the Scottish system (nearly all in the period since 1964) showed more of the demographic characteristics that were allegedly part of the Scottish tradition than their teachers did. If a tradition was eroded here, it was moving in quite the opposite direction from that which has usually been claimed, towards democracy and away from hierarchy. It may also be relevant that, as we noted in the introduction, academic migration to Scotland was no greater, and probably less, in 2001 than in 1964 (46% as opposed to 53%). There is no basis in the evidence for claiming that graduates of the new Scottish university tradition of the post-Robbins period were displaced from their inheritance by colonising incomers.

This happened - point (d) - despite the migrants being more likely to be in senior academic positions than the Scots-educated, in both 1964 and 2001. The migrants may have exercised particularly disproportionate influence in the social sciences and arts, but these are precisely the disciplines in which the social and cultural study of Scotland has grown. More generally, the Scottish higher education system which developed between the two dates that we have been discussing helped to shape a large part of the leadership class of the new Scotland: for example, Scottish higher education institutions educated 69% of MSPs, or 91% of those with any higher education (compiled from the Scottish Parliament web site, April 2005), and 63% of senior civil servants in the Scottish Executive (Keating 2005, p. 102). If the Scotland of today is distinctive in its political and cultural leadership, then that owes a great deal to incoming university teachers of the 1960s and later. Despite coming from more affluent social origins, having more international experience, and being more likely to occupy powerful positions, the migrants, if anything, have bolstered rather than eroded academic values that have been claimed to be traditionally Scottish.

Of course, migration of staff was not the only route by which Scottish traditions could have been eroded, and policy changes probably have been much more influential, whether those accompanying expansion, with its attendant erosion of prevailing practices, or those associated with the relative contraction of resources from the early 1980s onwards. Likewise, none of the evidence here casts any light on what may or may not have happened following the late-nineteenth-century reforms: if Scottish traditions had already been destroyed by the middle of the twentieth century, then the resemblance of Scots-educated and migrants in 1964 which we have reported would hardly be surprising. Nevertheless, it is to this more recent period, as we noted at the beginning, that much of the controversy about eroded distinctiveness has been addressed. Our conclusions show that there was little that was distinctive to erode, that if anything distinctiveness became stronger, and that both Scots-educated and migrants in 2001 adhered to some central elements of the putative democratic tradition.

Thus, far from having abandoned its higher education system in the last four decades, Scotland has started to discover it anew. It gained its own funding mechanism in the early 1990s and its own political control after 1999. Out of that is emerging a set of policies that are in notable respects different from those being pursued in England - a more equitable system of student funding, the encouraging of research through networks rather than concentrating it in a few institutions, and the educating of a much higher proportion of students in further education colleges than in England. That is well known. Our evidence shows further that the emerging idea of the democratic university can also be found among staff. That is a new idea, perhaps inspired by an old tradition, but not reducible to it; and it is shared by natives and migrants alike.

Acknowledgements

The 2001 survey was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, as part of its 'Nations and Regions' research programme (http://www.institute-of-governance.org/forum/Leverhulme/TOC.html). The conduct of the survey was greatly helped by the Leverhulme project administrator, Margaret MacPherson, and it was carried out by the Survey Team at Edinburgh University. The 'Survey of University Teachers, 1964' was obtained from the Economic and Social Data Service at the Essex University, UKDA study number 194.

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Notes

1. Halsey conducted two further surveys of British academics, in 1976 and 1989, but unfortunately the data from these are not available from the Economic and Social Data Service. (return to text)

2. In the 1964 survey, respondents were asked details about their 'most recent first degree', the normal academic terminology for what is sometimes also called the 'undergraduate degree'. Although 13% of them reported having more than one first degree, no information was recorded on these other degrees. In 2001 the questionnaire asked simply about respondents' 'first degree'. The purpose of both questions was to provide a broad measure of the discipline in which the respondent gained their initial training. (return to text)

3. In the tables below, we compare these three groups (and their changes over time) by means of simple percentages: for example, in Table 1 (p. 32) we show the percentage distribution of social origins. Where we mention a difference in distribution between two of the groups, it was statistically significant at the 5% level in a chi-squared test: this could be