Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No113
Themes: policing incorrect ideas, and the loss of leadership in university education
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As we ‘go to press’ news is just in that the Supreme Court has ruled that the Equality Act's definition of a woman is based on biological sex. Now, even those who identify as women and have a gender recognition certificate, will not be treated as women. The world is almost back to being sane!
The likely result is that people who say they are women but are not will not be able to use women's spaces, compete against women in sports, and in general when talking about women in law and society, we will actually mean women and not men who identify as women.
Our congratulations goes out to For Women Scotland who fought to get this case taken seriously. Of course, it is utterly ridiculous that we need judges to decide on this matter and, as with many rulings of this kind, I suspect it has come in part and possibly in large part because of the growing public opinion and outrage that has grown around this issue. And it is through the action of the various campaign groups like FWS that this shift has taken place.
SUE would also like to thank the many parents, and teachers, who have written to us and for us on this issue, and we would especially like to thank Dr Jenny Cunningham for her work in exposing the harm that transgender ideology is causing to children.
Now let us see if we can get schools, our politicians and education authorities to start teaching children that biology is real, rather than that kids might be ‘born in the wrong body’.
Last week we mentioned Billboard Chris, the Canadian man who stands around city streets carrying a sign stating that ‘Children cannot consent to puberty blockers’. Well, Chris has been arrested by the Australian police for ‘causing an obstruction’.
But, of course, he doesn’t cause an obstruction to anyone other than those responsible for embedding transgender ideology in our institutions. Hilariously, as you can see in the video, while Chris is being arrested a man walks up to him and tells him that he ‘should get a f***ing job’, and this aggressive insult is used by one of the arresting group as an example of the ‘obstruction’ being caused by Chris.
Back in Blighty, we find that a trans-sceptical mother has been banned from her child’s playground, one assumes for causing another obstruction! Her cultural crime was to complain about lessons that promote transgender ideology to 11-year-olds.
Even closer to home, we find that Scotland’s Care Inspectorate (care being in name only) have instructed those working in children’s homes to avoid using the phrase ‘boys and girls’, as part of the seemingly mandatory ‘gender-inclusive language’ required to be a right-thinking person today.
Meanwhile, there is expected to be a debate at the Scottish TUC in Dundee later this month that will call on the Scottish government to ignore the ‘prejudiced’ Cass Review and start allowing children who identify as ‘transgender’ to be given puberty blockers again. Using the example of children who enter puberty at a very young age (i.e. precocious puberty), who receive puberty blockers as a part of treatment that is accepted as medically necessary and has a solid evidence base behind it, those demanding the change argue that giving these drugs to these kids but not to other children who want to ‘transition’ is simply a form of discrimination.
As with most – possibly all – arguments made by transgender activists, this idea of discrimination is ludicrous, irrational and harmful. The reason medical professionals give blockers to children with precocious puberty is because this condition can cause many health problems if left untreated; it carries long-term risks of cancer, obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and infertility, and can also lead to shortening of height due to bone density developing too quickly in a child’s life.
By contrast, giving puberty blockers to otherwise physically healthy children does itself carry a number of health risks, as described by Dr Jenny Cunningham last week.
The obsession of the transgender lobby to create more and more ‘transgender’ children, regardless of the significant dangers and damage to them, should be called out, and let’s hope there are some individuals of substance and principle left in the trade union movement who will oppose this.
Finally, it is worth going back to another recent obsession, this time over the showing, watching and moralising associated with the Netflix ‘documentary’ Adolescence.
YouTube clips of Kemi Badenoch being grilled by BBC presenters for having not watched the programme have gone viral. The interviewers were outraged that, in their minds, the Tory leader had not bothered to watch it, or to engage with the issue of misogyny. In response, Badenoch said that she did not think she needed to watch a drama to understand this issue, and that she was more concerned with actual events, like the real misogyny exposed by the ‘grooming gang’ scandal. The BBC interviewers did not appear to want to engage with that particular example of mass misogyny; indeed, to their shame, the BBC did not bother to report on the fact that the Labour government had quietly dropped their planned local inquiries into the scandal.
Don’t watch a drama that the culturati are all excited about and you’re a heartless fool of a politician. Want to talk about the mass rape of children … nothing to see here!
As Kathleen Stock (hardly the epitome of the ‘far right’) has pointed out, the problem with this approach reflects what she calls a ‘zoom out, zoom in’ bias affecting our government and much of our media.
Where there is a problem that has an ethnic dimension, like the rape gangs, the media zoom out, refusing to address it. However, where there is a negative issue of white people, the media and politicians, ‘feel free to zoom in with as high definition as your camera provides’.
As Stock notes,
a desire for better understanding is not the only reason to hold inquiries in public. They also serve an important symbolic function. In this case, an inquiry would bear witness, in front of the watching world, to the wholly undeserved suffering of women who by now have been victimised multiple times: first as children at the hands of their aggressors and then by police, social workers, councillors, politicians and everyone else who sneered or looked embarrassed, then looked away. They fully deserve a public hearing of their own. Assuming Labour doesn’t want the right to take over the issue entirely, it simply cannot afford to prioritise the avoidance of hurtful words over the scrutiny of hurtful deeds.
I mention Stock partly because she was infamously hounded out of Sussex University for daring to question transgender ideology in her academic work – something for which the university has now been heavily fined for breaching freedom of speech rules. And it is this issue, or the wider issue of the governance of universities, to which we now turn.
Stuart Waiton, SUE Chair
Stuart Waiton in conversation with Malcolm Clark
Wednesday 23rd April, 18.00 (GMT)
SUE is delighted to announce that we have an online event where Stuart Waiton will be talking to Malcolm Clark, the brilliant writer, film maker and former trustee of the LGB Alliance.
To purchase your Eventbrite ticket click on this link.
Dundee University: what is going wrong in academia
Malcolm Marshall (name changed) speaks out about the problems within the university sector.
No doubt you have heard about the black hole in the finances of the University of Dundee.
In November last year a £30 million deficit in the university’s accounts appeared, and this year we learned that the university barely had enough cash to make it to the end of semester.
This very bad news was followed by a proposed restructuring plan which involved the slashing of 20% of the existing staff and a resizing and reshaping of the university’s courses. The dire state of affairs appears to have come as a shock to most of the senior management and the funders at the Scottish Funding Council (SFC). The SFC, which is responsible for distributing the bulk of teaching and research grants to Scottish universities, has set up an inquiry led by Pamela Gillies, the former Principal of Glasgow Caledonian University, to try to understand how and why the deterioration came as such a surprise to the university leadership.
Since the revelations about the financial crisis in November, there has been a parade of resignations by senior players. Back in October 2024 Peter Fotheringham, the director of finance, jumped ship. Wendy Alexander, the Vice Principal, International, left sharply following the November announcement. In December, Iain Gillespie, the Principal, resigned, and by January Jim McGeorge, the University Secretary and Chief Operating Officer, had gone ‘on leave’. Then, in February, Amanda Millar, the Chair of Court, the universities highest governing body, also resigned. In the last week, the Vice Principal for Education announced his retirement, and the Vice Principal for Research has a new job as Pro-Vice Chancellor in Northumbria. The only senior manager remaining is the interim Principal Shane O’Neill.
Everybody recognises that this is a financial crisis. There is a lot of chat about investment decisions, cash management, accounting controls, and budgets based on unrealistic savings projections. The Gillies-led inquiry will be ‘supported’ by accountants BDO, so there will be a fair amount of number crunching and plenty of spreadsheets and pie charts and diagrams. We can hope that Gillies will have the imagination to step outside the narrow ‘terms of reference’ and ask some more fundamental questions about the future of higher education in Scotland, but it seems unlikely.
Those of us on the outside of the official procedures might want to begin our own investigation. We might start with the honest recognition that the problem is systemic. Higher education is underfunded, but there is a more serious cultural crisis: the way we run our universities. We are short-changing Scotland’s young people by operating an education system in which recruitment drives decision making and the space for genuine investment and innovation, inquiry, research and open discussion is very limited. One of the immediate solutions proposed to address Dundee’s problems is to recruit more young Scots (where SFC permits it) by lowering entry requirements. Dundee likes to pretend it is extending access and opportunity, but in truth underqualified young people are providing cover for a government that is not prepared to address the funding crisis.
If there is one lesson that the public and students might learn from Dundee’s tragedy, it is that the old structure of university governance, loosely based on democratic principles, has gone. The people running our public universities are accountable to no one; the old mechanism of accountability and engagement – the court, the senate, school boards, staff and disciplinary meetings – largely exist in name only. They are no longer expected to contribute to the daily and monthly operation of the university and its intellectual life. They have been abandoned in favour of corporate management structures which substitute reporting and auditing for decision making or direction.
If you want to understand what has gone wrong at Dundee, the parade of resignations is informative and suggests a pattern of unaccountability that has developed over the past two decades. University leaders are overpaid, but more importantly they don’t lead. This new generation of vice chancellors, vice principals, and chief operating officers share a set of common attributes. They rarely remain in senior posts for more than five years, and each time they arrive in a new place, they insist on organisational restructures. They use weasel words borrowed from government (of access, diversity, inclusion), they describe their institutions as a community and ‘our’ and ‘my’ to suggest a sense of belonging, but they are rarely prepared to challenge government or funders. When it comes to the day-to-day running of these longstanding institutions, they prefer to contract out services and decisions; they are experts in how to evade responsibility.
As Masud Husain from Oxford writes,[1]
We are losing sight of the academic mission: to think, to enquire, to design and perform new research, to innovate, to teach and communicate our findings for the purpose of social improvement. […] there is nothing wrong with making universities strong businesses, incorporating within them systems that make them financially secure and endow them with strong governance. However, a key problem has been that instead of facilitating academic work, these systems have created obstacles to performing this core mission.
The crisis at the University of Dundee cannot be reduced to poor accountancy. The focus of attention should be on accountability, and all those involved in the university sector in Scotland need to seize this opportunity to prise open a public discussion about the future of higher education in Scotland.
As Michael Marra, Scottish Labour MSP and a former University of Dundee employee, argued in the parliamentary committee, staff who felt unable to raise concern about finance are, ‘indicative of what was a culture where dissent and questioning was being closed down by management’. To which Shane O’Neill, the interim Principal, replied, ‘dissent wasn’t welcome’.
In some senses it remains a mystery how an institution with a turnover of about £325 million can be audited by Ernst and Young and assessed as financially stable in July 2024 and yet be in serious debt a little over a year later.
Dundee’s funding crisis has been brought on by the Scottish government, which is so keen to stick to its popular ‘no tuition fees’ position but unprepared to face up to the consequences. Until very recently the Scottish government has been hiding behind the SFC. The bodies that represent university leaders, Universities Scotland and its UK equivalent Universities UK, have been talking about underfunding for a while, but they present their case like civil servants, not as the committed leaders of autonomous universities. An intolerance of dissent is not unique to Dundee. Universities Scotland and the SFC must have seen this crisis coming, but they chose to keep their heads down.
Finally, last week, Sir Paul Grice, the temporary convener of Universities Scotland and Principal of Queen Margaret University, piped up, after the fact, ‘We need to be straightforward about the extent to which the decade-long pattern of structural underfunding of Scottish undergraduates and research has eroded universities’ financial resilience. This must be addressed…’ Dundee is not alone in its financial difficulties. We have known for several years that higher education is being chronically underfunded. A PricewaterhouseCoopers report commissioned by Universities UK in 2024 noted that funding across the UK has been falling but that the problem is particularly acute in Scotland, where ‘it is estimated that per student funding has already been cut by 39% per student in real terms since 2014/15’. Many universities have operated an unofficial recruitment freeze for years.
This managerial culture has infected the university system to such an extent that many academics have given up their place in disciplinary and academic decision making. Recruitment, research strategies, timetabling, IT, and even quality and assessment are increasingly dealt with by the corporate machine. Many academics imagine that they have no more control over their work and their institutions than those working in an Amazon warehouse.
This is not special pleading on behalf of academics; we need to recognise that universities and their structures inform all of public life. Historically, they have been insulated from the pressures of the market and have been run according to a mix of ancient rules and structures which assumed that all academics were equals and there was a real value in every voice being heard. Those of us that have been working in this world for decades can vaguely recall when school boards were genuine forums for debate and discussion about the shape of the university and its staff ambitions. Today, no such forums exist; staff attend committees not to get things done but because they have been told that it’s a condition of promotion.
Dundee has what looks like an ancient structure of accountability – a court to scrutinise the management and finance and a senate to provide academic direction – but it has been overlaid by an operational system in which the Principal and the Chief Operating Officer are kings. The kings tend to prefer to deal with professional services rather than academics, and so we have seen a growth in these departments: human resources, estates, quality assurance, IT, etc. These professional services don’t discuss and deliberate – they deliver (albeit very slowly); they measure risks and work on balance sheets. They talk a very different language to that used by most academics, and so at the points when academic scrutiny should take place, academics are often left out of the discussion.
Harvard University’s motto is Veritas (‘Truth’). Dundee’s is Magnificat anima mea dominum, which translates to ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord’; this is hard to relate to in our modern secular world, but remains, even to an atheist, more compelling than, ‘triple intensity: research, education and engagement’, which is currently used to describe the university’s purpose and values.
The University of Dundee has a vision, a mission and purposes. Its mission documents are not understood or taken seriously by the majority of staff. Often, operating ambitions are confused with the core purpose of the university. Documents seem to borrow the ‘newspeak’ and infographics from government and the public sector to hide the fact that decisions are driven by recruitment and research grant criteria rather than public good.
Dundee calls itself a ‘social purpose’ university with an ambition to create ‘global citizens’. How do you make global citizens? Not, apparently, by educating them about their discipline, but by exposing them to a raft of proscribed values. Are these Dundee’s values? No, but when the SFC agrees to give grants to universities they come with conditions. Those conditions might be that the university can evidence their commitment to ‘equality and diversity’, or to a ‘net zero campus’. As a result, the universities are obliged to follow a script on these issues, which usually involves an auditing process by another organisation also connected to government. The Race Equality Charter and the Athena Swan initiative are the most explicit examples of this process.
This kind of buying-in of corporate values – such as ‘equity’ – and the contracting out of judgements on the performance is what now passes for governance. These top-down processes make no impact on the work or lives of your average staff member or student, but they allow management to pose as progressive and to cherry-pick certain staff for promotion on the grounds of diversity.
Amanda Millar, Dundee’s former Chair of Court, who joined Court in 2022, was the first openly lesbian president of the Law Society of Scotland. An article in Dundee’s Courier (18 February 2025) suggests that many in and outside the university have suggested that Millar was unsuited to her role as Chair of Court.[2] There have been complaints that she was overly focused on the equalities issue rather than good financial management. It’s understandable, in a culture which puts a very high status on virtue signalling on issues of equality, that Millar thought her role was to steer the university to a more ‘progressive’ outlook rather than hold the university leadership to account.
Many people think that what happened to Kathleen Stock at Sussex University was an aberration, the result of bad management and a misguided University and College Union branch. But if Gillies (through the inquiry into Dundee) does her job well, we might discover that cases like Kathleen Stock’s are the norm. Athena Swan and the Race Equality Charter are management tools based on auditing, but they are increasingly used as a proscribed ideology by university gatekeepers. Perhaps in Scotland there are thousands of academics (not just the gender critical ones) who don’t share the values of Advance HE or Universities UK etc. When the university of Dundee says it’s a social purpose university, what it is really saying is that it follows the funders’ script developed around the theme of social justice.
It has taken months for Dundee’s executive group to come up with a proposal to change the size and shape of the university. None of the issues about overseas recruitment appear to have been addressed; we don’t know what is happening, because neither the new plan nor the old one has been shared. It generally takes months for any decision to be made. These people are not deciders; they are people who go to meetings and gather data and then try to contract out decision making to private companies rather than presenting them to staff for scrutiny.
The only way they want to talk to staff is through the unions, but this isn’t really a union issue. The purpose and shape of the university is a question for academics to address. The academy was founded on the ideas that if we bring the best minds together, we have the best chance of understanding the world, and that understanding is predicated on an appreciation that through discourse and debate we are most likely to arrive at something that approximates reality. As such, the idea of academic investigation has traditionally been linked to western liberal ideas of democracy.
As Shane O’Neill, the interim Principal, has said, neither dissent nor discussion has been encouraged. O’Neill has promised a new style of management, but yet there is no evidence of this. In fact, the new leadership seems even less able to talk to and listen to staff. When anyone suggests that he might consult with academics and professional services staff, the reply is always that management is talking to the unions. However, not all staff are in unions. And this is not a simple case of no redundances, and the matter of pay and conditions. We need to revisit our purpose, as well as think about how we spend our time. We need a bottom-up project, but for this to happen we need academics to take responsibility and to speak in public about how the universities can be brought back to their original function in society.
References
1. Husain M. On the responsibilities of intellectuals and the rise of bullshit jobs in universities. Brain. 2025:148(3):687–688. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awaf045
2. Clark A. Dundee University court chair resigns. The Courier.18 February 2025. https://archive.ph/lTzkX
News round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.
https://www.familyeducationtrust.org.uk/media/xewjwmhq/boys-and-the-burden-of-labels.pdf Lottie Moore, BOYS AND THE BURDEN OF LABELS. An examination of masculinity teaching in schools .
https://archive.is/KVXrO Geraldine Scott, Keir Starmer pledges 16-year-olds will ‘definitely’ get the vote. The prime minister reaffirmed his manifesto commitment, in what would be the biggest change to the electorate since 1969 08/04/25
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yr0zw65lro Kate McGough, A third of teachers reported misogyny among pupils last week, survey suggests 09/04/25
Joanna Williams, Why does Keir Starmer want to give 16-year-olds the vote? 10/04/25
https://archive.is/UzWQT David Bol, SNP U-turn urged over gender services Cass Review as trans 'discrimination' claims made. The Scottish Government has been urged to rethink its full endorsement of the Cass Review into gender services for young people. 11/04/25
https://archive.is/FNZY9 Charlie Parker, Mother arrested for ‘confiscating iPad from daughters’ Vanessa Brown, 50, describes the ‘traumatic incident’ when police held her in a cell 11/04/25
https://archive.is/IJn8Z#selection-2127.4-2131.45 Michael Deacon. If ‘white privilege’ is real, answer me this. Stop forcing our police to parrot Left-wing rubbish on race 12/04/25
https://archive.is/53zef Tim Sigsworth, Don’t call children girls and boys, says care watchdog. Staff told to use gender-inclusive language as part of ‘good LGBT practice’ 12/04/25
https://archive.is/vqoxu Editorial, Why early leavers in Scotland's schools is a serious cause for concern. It may not have hit the headlines in the same fashion as school violence or falling academic performance, but a recent trend in education circles should rightly cause alarm. 14/04/25
Susan Dalgety, Why the UK Supreme Court may be about to destroy lesbian identity. The UK Supreme Court is about to issue a landmark ruling on the definition of a ‘woman’ 13/04/25
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