There is always change, the world moves on, clinging to 'how things were done in the past' is not viable forever. Sometimes an old model of how something should work is no longer fit for the modern world and new ways of doing things must be found, even if that can be painful.
That is categorically not what is happening in Scotland's universities. The problems in our august institutions are categorically not the result of insufficient scab labour, are not being caused by over-powerful Senates and do not stem from the misguided view that Celtic history is worth teaching.
Yet those are the remedies being sought. What was attempted at Glasgow Caledonian University this week was pretty shocking and quite unacceptable and must surely bring parliamentary scrutiny. The management team contracted a recruitment agency to get it to effectively form a casualised workforce of low-pay PhD graduates to work (effectively) as strike breakers.
That the recruitment agency concerned did not seem to be aware that this was what they were being asked to do and immediately pulled out of the deal when The National contacted them and explained does nothing to increase confidence in management decisions.
There is no suggestion that a casualised, inexperienced workforce forced onto what amount to zero-hour contracts is in any way good for the university or that this is a positive development for the future of higher education. This would have been utterly unthinkable a few years ago.
Events at Edinburgh University are less extreme but no less concerning. In the traditional model of a university the University Court is the overall 'board of management' but its jurisdiction was limited. It oversaw the running of the university but not of its academic provision. This was always viewed as a specialism which must be guided by specialists.
Oversight of the academic mission of the university was therefore the responsibility of Senate. Court is now made up primarily of appointees from outside the university while Senate is made up of representatives of academic disciplines.
In Edinburgh, the Court is voting to slash academic provision and has explicitly cut out the Senate, even from decisions the Senate is constitutionally entitled to be involved in (claiming those decisions are too complicated for Senate to understand). And now the Senate has voted overwhelmingly against the management's proposed cuts.
But management has, to date, spent almost half a million pounds on private sector consulting firm PA Consulting to identify what to cut and who to fire. To give you an impression of the sort of company PA Consulting is, its clients include Diagio, Unilever, the Ministry of Defence, Heathrow, Proctor and Gamble...
What is important about both these cases is that they are very clear signs that universities in Scotland have now been utterly transformed into businesses which are not notionally different than most other consultancy-heavy sectors. Universities are no longer communities of expert learners, they are service providers.
They take public money to provide education services and they then seek the cheapest staff in the most photogenic buildings to minimise costs while luring as big a market share as they can by shifting spending to marketing and advertising and a host of secondary services as they sell a 'lifestyle' to prospective students.
The Glasgow Caledonian model is the next expression of this, but Edinburgh University isn't far behind. It is not a long stretch from where we are now to simply putting out a tender for operating Edinburgh University and letting KPMG or Deloitte to take over the franchise and sell it on in a PFI-type deal to a US venture capital firm.
That would produce prospectuses, market to students, hire casual staff and look for opportunities to extract more of the value of the institution’s assets. This sounds unbelievable, but we are currently perilously close to that situation already. What is of most alarm is that this is being done with apparent political consent.
If this is not stopped, higher education in Scotland could go into a dangerous doom loop. The politicians must be forced to step in and either justify what is being done as government policy (and be held accountable accordingly) or stop this from happening. While we still have universities left.