Strathclyde University Convocation

Friday, 7th May 2004

Can I first thank the Principal for inviting me today. When I was preparing for this afternoon I was acutely aware it was Friday afternoon and there are two important things about Friday afternoons in May.

One – however committed you might be to Higher Education and to this institution in particular, it’s still Friday afternoon and there’s no doubt that thoughts are turning to the weekend, so I promise not to overly prolong proceedings.

And the other thing about Friday afternoon, especially for politicians – it’s the time when Sunday newspapers are looking for quick exciting headlines for their Sunday editions. We had one last week, “UNIVERSITIES TO BE ABOLISHED”; it broke on Friday and died by Saturday- the reality proved to be nothing more than a slight reorganising of the institutional furniture in the funding council.

 

So tempting as it is for a Politician to look for the cheap headline – I could indeed blast the current Enterprise Minister, or issue a challenge about the funding of Universities – I want to try and do something, less newsworthy to headline writers, but fundamentally more important. That is to talk about my appreciation and affection for this institution and what I have learned over the last two years as a visiting professor. As some of you may know Strathclyde has proved a home for the project team behind the Allander Series that has been considering the future of the Scottish economy. Through that process I have learned something much more fundamental about why our universities matter. I want to share that with you, but before you think I have abandoned all my political training, let me assure you that what I’m going to do this afternoon is tell 3 or 4 stories or indeed sound bites about Scotland’s future that have come to us through the Allander Series.

 

The sound bite I want to start and end with is whether Strathclyde, indeed, lives up to its sound bite of being “a place of useful learning” and I ‘d like to start with last Tuesday evening where we had the most recent of the Allander Series of seminars. It was conducted by James Heckman, who is a recent Nobel Prize Winner in Economics.

 

Now for those of you who follow economics the people that win Nobel Prizes these days typically win it for econometric models of such obscurity and complexity that nobody other than there peers could possibly understand whether they had contributed to learning – useful or otherwise – and therefore it’s a rare Nobel Prize winning economist who has indeed contributed something accessible as well as useful.

 

James Heckman is one such man. He comes from Chicago with all the baggage of being the home of Milton Friedman, but has the commitment to helping his fellow human beings understand how we all learn with the most extraordinary statistical analysis to support his arguments. His prescription for Scottish education had two essential insights.

 

First – that we learn more in the first five years of our life than at any other time and that we learn more in the bosom of our families than we do at school. So the first place of useful learning is within our families. Secondly schools have increasingly become factories for education rather than sites for skills acquisition and so we have become obsessed with promoting cognitive skills as symbolised by IQ rather than developing non-cognitive skills. Heckman argued that both matter and those non-cognitive skills of discipline, motivation and persistence are the things that bring about success in life.

 

All very interesting you might say, but what does that mean for Scotland and for Strathclyde? Well the post seminar discussion moved on to how here in the Education faculty at Strathclyde we could attract some of the world’s leading educationalists to help train the next generation of Scottish teachers in new ways of educating the next generation. Because unless we influence tomorrow’s teachers we will never offer the best start in life to the next generation – Leadership from our education faculties will be vital.

 

So if the sound bite Professor Heckman gifted to us was the first five years matter most, what were some of the other big ideas emerging from the series?

 

Well perhaps the biggest beast in the jungle of economics in the U.S. and anticipated by many to be a future Nobel Prize winner is Paul Krugman – who in his earlier career having rewrote the then rules of International Trade theory, was persuaded to turn his energies to Scotland.

 

His sound bite of the day – the Scottish economy needs to find a third wind.

 

The first wind was of course the Industrial Revolution, when this City was the Second City of the Empire, the workshop of the world. Scotland’s second wind was semi-conductors, a time when Scotland manufactured half the silicon chips required for the rest of the continent of Europe. But the second wind of semi conductors has petered out much more quickly than the shipbuilding. So Professor Krugman’s challenge was – where would the third wind come from? Unfortunately he did not have an instant answer but he stressed the legacy of the first and second wind for shaping the third wind. And this institution first created as Anderson’s Institute in the 19^th Century was indeed at the heart of creating and sustaining the engineering capacity required for the first wind of shipbuilding. And it has made and continues to make a contribution to the success of the electronics industry past and future. But Prof Krugman was clear the power to support any third wind, will come from our universities.

 

So, if the first sound bite was the earliest years matter most and the second that Scotland needed to find it’s third wind, the next big idea came from the U.S.’s best expert on cities – Ed Glaeser. His prescription for success was “sun, skills and sprawl.”

 

Now, I have to confess, I don’t know if Strathclyde has a meteorology department but even on a May weekend it may be unrealistic to expect Strathclyde to fix the absence of sun in Scotland, to which Professor Glaeser, who came from Boston, acknowledged “if you can’t do sun, then you must do more skills and more sprawl”.

 

And behind that sound bite was the critical insight that half of Scotland’s wealth is generated in her two principal cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and that neither Glasgow and Edinburgh on their own are sufficient to make an impact on the European or Global stage and only by these cities cooperating together can they have the critical mass required to make a global impact.

 

Glaeser said some very important things for this city. Notably that the decline that Glasgow had suffered was no greater than other Atlantic cities like Boston, his own home city. He posed the essential question for Glasgow – does it want to be a Boston or a Detroit? By that he meant a Detroit that languished in its past or a Boston that reinvented itself for its future. And when asked to identify the critical aspect in determining whether Glasgow became a Boston or a Detroit, it was indeed the skills of its people and the role of Universities in those cities. Glaeser was clear – after sun – the most reliable predictor of city growth was skills and the environment for learning in that city. So to all of you who are here from the town tradition rather than the gown tradition; I invite you to take that lesson to heart to understand that Caledonian, Strathclyde and Glasgow Universities may be the single most important institutions in the city in determining this city’s future growth. Lose them and we lose our most valuable resource. That is a perspective that we in Scotland haven’t yet really taken on board and we miss the role of universities as the foundations of city growth at our peril.

 

And for those of you who recall the sound bite – after sun and skill was ‘sprawl’. Here it is of course tempting to court the cheap headline by saying, “Well Strathclyde was here also ahead of the game by closing its planning department first”. But the point Glaeser was making was slightly more fundamental – it was that unless you are capable of analysing the downside of not pursuing development you will never have a level playing field for decision making. So if we have the idea the first five years matter most; that Scotland needs a third wind and the future of Scotland lies in her cities and the future of those cities lie sun, skills and sprawl, we then turned in the Allander Series from the U.S. big hitters to much closer to home across the Irish sea.

 

Our Celtic cousins can always contrive to make us feel more uncomfortable. As Bradley put it, Ireland has recently been promoted into ‘The Premier League’; whereas Scotland’s already playing in the Premier League but lives in fear of relegation. And you don’t have to be a football fan to understand the power of that analogy. Scotland to our Irish cousins looks like a country comfortable, insufficiently determined to stay in the Premier League. A case of a country grown used to “satisfactory under performance” because Scotland doesn’t yet think like a nation. He wasn’t making political point he was simply saying we haven’t got our act together about how we want to succeed. To prove his point he produced a list of all the economic research undertaken by the Scottish Economic Policy Network (SCOTECON) and said it was all too detailed, too small scale and insufficiently ambitious for mapping the future of a nation. This was very uncomfortable for my husband who has dedicated a lifetime trying to encourage economists to analyse and think about the Scottish economy, despite the fact that it is not valued by the U.K. research councils – who discourage thinking about anything as parochial as your own country. And herein I think we come back to the role of this institution as a place of useful learning.

 

Because more than I ever realised when we embarked upon the Allander Series, it is simply not possible to do the right thing by Scotland unless you recognise the role of its Universities.

 

And can I end about some of our home grown talent in turning some of those sound bites into a reality. As the series progressed, one academic at Strathclyde, undoubtedly, one of the most eminent in his field came to us and said “I would like to write a paper”. There are only a few walks of life where people come forward to offer to undertake a huge amount of hard work, because it simply seems the right thing to do. And last week when we tried to foist on him just a fraction of the honorarium that some of U.S. contributors had commanded, he was typically self effacing. There are at grass roots level in this institution many people who simply want to do the right thing by their country – it is not possible to imagine the future of Scotland without Universities being at the centre.

 

The role of its Universities is in understanding what is happening, supporting new directions and creating an arena outside the political sphere for that discussion about the nation’s future.

 

And, if on this Friday afternoon, when I hope you manage to depart for a wonderful weekend, you ponder just for a moment, you take away an appreciation of why Universities matter in Scottish life, much more important fundamentally than any quick headline in a Sunday newspaper could capture.

 

And here I want to end with a word about time horizons and another sound bite from Professor Heckman.

 

The typical audience for the Allander Series want a quick fix now, for the ills of Scotland. So inevitably there was a question from the floor to Professor Heckman about if we did everything he recommended – how would Scotland be different in 5 years time? The professor drew himself up to his full height and he said “well, of course if you introduce the world’s best programme for 0 to 5 year olds, what you’ll have in five years time is lots of slightly better behaved 7 year olds”. And of course the point he was making was that time horizon of politicians is sometimes so short compared to the challenges they face. And so Universities can be part of shaping the consensus that lets Scotland play to win – not just in the next 5 years but in the next 20, 30, 40 years.

 

Scotland’s Universities, and Strathclyde in particular, lie at the heart of the nation. In Andrew Hamnett, this institution currently has a Principal who lives and breaths that reality.

 

To all of you who work with the University, in whatever sphere, take advantage of that commitment and that willingness to look outwards in the way we have done through the Allander series and I hope you find it as rewarding an association as we in the Allander team have.

 

Many Thanks.