It's a truism that post-industrial nations like ours live by their wits – but that doesn't make it any less true. Whatever Scotland's constitutional destiny, the practical reality is that the education of its people will largely determine their quality of their lives. There really is no alternative to the hard graft of learning, now that heavy industry is long gone, and the false gods of Scottish banking, like Fred Goodwin, have been torn down and trampled into the dust.
Fortunately, Scotland has a unique advantage for a small nation of five million in having at least five world class universities – more in the 'QS top 200 even than much larger countries France – and one of the best educated workforces in the world. Yes, most of them take their qualifications south because of the lack of job opportunities here - but that's another question. Scottish higher education is an industry in its own right, drawing ever greater numbers of international students to study and benefit from our comparative advantage in the learning business.
But there is much more to this than just crude economics. Scotland's universities have never been regarded as mere education factories – they have a distinct egalitarian, or equalitarian tradition, summed up in that much-misunderstood phrase, the “democratic intellect”. There has been much debate about what George Elder Davies, who coined that phrase in the sixties, really meant. But Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski, Principal of Robert Gordon University, in his report published yesterday, has finally discerned its settled meaning. Scotland's universities should seen as engines of social and cultural improvement - not just for the benefit of the individual, but for society as a whole. In this, the Scottish universities are markedly different to those elite universities, in America and south of the border, that increasingly regard learning as a commodity to be bought and sold, and students as consumers of a product sold at a price determined by the market.
