Student no confidence vote reveals lack of consent

The key concept at the heart of democracy is consent. It is an important semantic choice – it is not 'approval' which implies agreement with a given decision. Consent indicates that the population on the whole feels like a person in power has the right to be in power, has the right to make the decision and is making the decision roughly in line with what they said they'd do when they were elected.

Many may not have liked George Osborne's austerity programme but most would recognise that the Tories achieve general public consent for such a programme. Making the decisions that were made was legitimate and seen to be legitimate. Self-harming and vindictive but legitimate.

So who has granted consent for the painful transformation of Scotland's university tradition? From where does consent for the mass reorientation of university teaching away from intellectual subjects like arts and humanities towards narrow vocational subjects derive? There were no discussion papers, no parliamentary inquiries, no votes.

We know there is no trade union support. We know there is next to no staff support and that widespread industrial action is ahead of us. And now we know that there is little support among the students.

Students at Glasgow Caledonian University are perceived to be among the least politically active among Scottish universities (fairly or not). Yesterday they overwhelmingly passed a vote of no confidence in the university's leadership.

Who then is the university management leading? Not the staff, not the students. Are they agents of government? Is it government policy to create this harm? Will the SNP or the Scottish Government step forward and take responsibility for what is happening? Who will grant these moves some form of democratic consent?

And once that happens, once someone steps forward and says 'this is my responsibility and I'm accountable for it', how do we hold them to account? How can universities be converted from communities of learners and thinkers that have endured for hundreds of years into vocational training centres staffed largely by early career 'trainers' in under three years?

There has been far too limited a debate about the consent via which Scotland is governed. The universities are a particularly acute example because of their longevity and because in Scotland and globally they were very much a model of consent-based organisations with sometimes fairly elaborate structures of collegiate and democratic governance.

The abandonment of that model in universities happened slowly over the course of about 20 years. But the same trend can be seen in other (if not most) aspects of public policy. When there is focus on quangos and arguments against them, those arguments are mostly administrative and partly about personnel.

On the one hand quangos are seen as inefficient and bloated (which they are), while on the other they are seen as 'cliques', closed off to the general public (which they are). What is not spoken of enough is their anti-democratic role. They both provide an anonymous barrier between politicians and difficult decisions and a 'safe space' for a management class to make 'difficult decisions' out of the glare of public scrutiny.

In other words they are about compartmentalising democracy where certain decisions become democratic in name only but hide behind a democratic shield. With universities the politicians had no hesitation allowing the management class to remove democratic checks and balances but then claims universities are independent bodies in which they cannot interfere.

This is now coming to a head. There is genuinely no consent among staff, students or frankly the public what is being done. This certainly implies that railroading through these reforms is going to become more and more difficult and harder and harder to hide. This is still a democracy and there is still a break point.

Can Scottish Ministers really cope with a mass march on Holyrood accusing them of betrayal of universities and destructive, anti-democratic practices? Would they be willing to expend political capital defending this (as opposed to avoiding spending political capital by hiding behind a quango)? It seems doubtful. There must also be a limit to how many crises this government can weather.