By Douglas Cusine and Fred Hay

The Higher Education Governance (Scotland) Bill could cause irreparable damage to institutions of which Scotland can be justifiably proud: its universities. Three of the Bill’s sections seek to give ministers powers to intervene directly in the bodies that lead Scottish universities: courts and senates in the older ones.

Moreover, academics are no longer considered to be an essential component of their governing bodies. This will kill the autonomy nurtured by the universities for nearly 600 years, modelled on the academy’s independence from external control established by the University of Bologna in 1088. This legislative step may lead to Scottish universities being classed as public bodies, constraining such financial autonomy as they are presently permitted.

University staff’s loss of security of tenure in the late 1980s and the imposition of "quality assurance" appraisals of teaching and evaluation of research have propelled British universities into a tournament to capture scarce research funding, promoting a transfer market in the highest-regarded staff, arguably increasing the cost of research.

Forced by heavy-handed and costly measures into a league-table mentality, institutions and degree programmes have been restructured in the managerial interest, giving an unstoppable momentum to managerialism and, as one author has put it, the "virtual enslavement" of academics as "intellectual living tools".

The defining purpose of the university has always been not to impart received wisdom but to challenge received wisdom, seeking to replace what was once thought to be reliable knowledge with something that passes more stringent scrutiny. There is no successful industrial activity that does not have a foundation in the ability of university research in the "hard" sciences to distinguish between truth and error, spawning hitherto unimagined possibilities.

It is this potential to facilitate further material progress that politicians would wish to seize control of to maintain their credibility and power. Arguably it is in respect of the humanities that the responsibility to challenge what passes as received wisdom needs to be most staunchly defended: the freedom and ability to challenge dogma in law, philosophy, history, politics, theology, social policy and even economics. These are about questioning the interpretations of the past; testing the guiding principles of orderly life; challenging distinctions between right and wrong; separating out malign from benign motivations; issuing warnings about the manifold but frequently obscure and unintended implications of particular policy choices. It is only through the distorting lens of dogma that every human problem seems to have a technical solution; precisely the one – surprise, surprise – endorsed by the dogma.

The pursuit of material benefits from industry can only take place in a social structure. Ideally the humanities perspective should inform all university qualifications. To represent a university education as merely a matter of skills acquisition rather than acquisition of a critical mind seems driven by the dogmatic assertion that our purpose in life is merely to be efficient, obedient and compliant workers, conforming without question to some party’s message.

This legislation is not a response to any identified shortcoming in the universities’ performance. Our universities have already satisfied many of the criteria of accountability, that obsession of the contemporary age. But the political process has to be accountable too, and who can do that, other than those whose task it is to challenge received wisdom?

The Bill makes much pretence of upholding academic freedom as though a university could exist without the very means to discharge its responsibility. But in contrast to the Universities (Scotland) Acts (governing the older Scottish universities), the Bill makes no explicit provision for academics to have a formative role in the determination of universities’ academic strategy.

And tucked away at the end of the questions in the Call for Evidence section of the Bill is a hint that expressions of academic freedom might only be permitted within the individual academic’s institution, rather than in the public arena. Hopefully all university graduates – particularly those with first-class honours degrees in politics – will realise that to muzzle academics is to muzzle them, too. This legislation is, at root, an attack on freedom of speech.

Douglas Cusine was professor of conveyancing at the University of Aberdeen and Fred Hay was a senior lecturer in economics at the University of Glasgow.