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A Personal View by Professor David Swinfen Vice Principal of the University of Dundee and Steering Group member |
| When the announcement was first made of a Scottish Higher Education Funding Council grant of £318,000 to the two universities to develop their plans for collaboration, the press immediately scented a new merger in the air. Those journalists with longer memories recalled that Dundee had for many years been a college of St Andrews University before going independent in 1967. Although each side has grown scar tissue over the wounds left by that amputation, they are still to some extent complementary or, more significantly, now able to offer matching strengths in similar areas. | |
| I have to confess that for a time I was attracted to the merger argument. Having been on the staff of Dundee since before independence, I have watched the growth of the young university over the years with the greatest interest. The university has grown not just in terms of student numbers, but more importantly in terms of reputation and self confidence. In areas such as biochemistry and medical sciences it is of world class, and it has many other departments, subjects and activities which can boast high reputations in research and teaching. Any lingering feelings of being in some sense a junior partner have long since dissipated, and Dundee would be able to merge with St Andrews on at least equal terms. A university of around twenty thousand students would be a useful counterweight to the powerful Edinburgh-Glasgow nexus. The opportunities for collaboration and rationalisation of provision would be easy to grasp. The external pressures on Scotland's Higher Education institutions to combine rather than to compete would be satisfied. | |
| And yet, and yet. Mergers are not easy to achieve, nor are they costless. Discussions on merger would almost certainly get bogged down on side issues. What was the merged university to be called? Would its Principal reside in Dundee or St Andrews? How would we manage the internal merger of departments in the same academic discipline? How would we overcome the apprehensions of the staff? I know from experience that the easiest mergers are those between institutions which are unlike each other, at least in terms of subject coverage. And the real crunch question - what advantages would a difficult and expensive merger bring which couldn't be achieved at least as well by straight forward collaboration between two independent and high quality universities? | |
| The Partnership Agreement which has been concluded between the two universities, and which is to be launched on 28 November, is seen by neither of them as a prelude to merger. It is a plan to build on acknowledged and identified strengths in both universities, and even more importantly in my view, to carry out an inventory of both institutions to discover new and as yet unidentified areas for collaboration. The Steering Group which oversees the operation includes as a member the Vice Principal of a third university - the University of Abertay - and this points the way to a wider network of co-operation which may well as things develop involve other institutions as well - not necessarily all of them HE institutions or even educational institutions. Linkages with the local enterprise companies are very likely to be a feature of our discussions. | |
| What has actually happened so far is that the two universities have identified five areas in the first instance which appear to offer really exciting opportunities for joint action. In the complementary areas of art and art history there are plans to develop new under- and post- graduate degree programmes, as there are also in biology, biochemistry, and chemistry. Planning for a new joint honours degree in optoelectronics is now well advanced. Within the medicine and health sciences working group there is an investigation into the opportunities for graduate entry medical students, and into a variety of possible postgraduate masters' level degrees. The fifth group is looking at the whole area of commercialisation of research, both from the point of view of bringing the procedures of the two universities into line, and in identifying new openings. In addition, an inventory within both universities is now winkling out other areas for collaboration. In many ways, this is the single most important objective of the whole enterprise. Indeed, although the programme is funded only for three years, we will be disappointed if it does not become self sustaining over a much longer period, as new projects come on stream. | |
| It is early days yet, but already tangible progress is being made. A project manager, Dr Laura Meagher, has been in post for some time, and we have recently appointed Sharon Black as a facilitator in her support. | |
| What outcomes do we expect? New degrees certainly, new lines of collaborative research, leading where possible to commercial exploitation. But there is more to it than that. We will develop new modes of collaboration which are applicable to a wide spectrum of activities, and will bring into the network new institutional partners. The end result must be to the benefit not just of the universities, but to the region, and ultimately to the wider Scottish economy. | |