Hervey Gibson: When Glasgow University became too stingy to pay properly, Adam Smith educated a young local Duke. Now, lack of money there threatens to darken Dumfries.

Hervey Gibson
Doon hame in Dumfries we did well out of the Enlightenment. Burns wrote his songs here, Carlyle was a local and Maxwell just about invented light. When Glasgow University became too stingy to pay properly, Adam Smith educated our young local Duke. From their grand tour of Europe together resulted The Wealth of Nations.

But now, lack of money at that same university threatens to darken the region. Claiming to be losing £800,000 per year from its only teaching engagement outside the city limits, Glasgow University has stopped admitting students at Crichton campus in Dumfries and has announced withdrawal.

The entire town and region are up in arms. One local paper gave it seven pages this week, and all have been inundated with letters and petitions; there is lobbying galore of the university and the Scottish Funding Council; politicians of all parties and parliaments are involved; as are professors from Glasgow and further afield; and Holyrood debates it on Thursday.

This is all because far-sightedly, eight years ago, Glasgow University joined the University of Paisley, Bell College, and Dumfries and Galloway College, to set up the Crichton University Campus on land secured for it by the council. It was the UK's first multiversity.

It's been a roaring success. Originally a nineteenth-century hospital, it is the nearest academic asset Scotland has to the American Ivy League universities, with beautiful but functional buildings spaced out across lawns and gardens above the River Nith. As a regeneration project, it has won accolades from all over, with companies on neighbouring campus-style developments taking advantage of "fat pipe" telecommunications, a new hotel lifting the business hospitality standards of the region and the whole area becoming a thriving place to live and work.

Specialising within the campus, Paisley focused on in-demand IT and business courses, Bell did health, Glasgow what the Americans call "liberal arts" and what you and I might call "rounded education". The early graduation ceremonies in the magnificent Crichton Memorial Church were very moving occasions, as realisation dawned on many who had given up on gaining a degree that they had succeeded.

Now the Crichton is part of mainstream education, and makes a real difference to Glasgow's performance on access and inclusion, with more females, more non-traditional students and more "firsts-from-the-family" in higher education. But when resources are under pressure, the unusual comes under scrutiny, even when 90% of students find graduate level jobs locally.

Wendy Macleod of the Crichton Development Company, which manages the campus, and her boss, Gordon Mann, have drawn up some telling comparisons between funding in the south of Scotland and the Highlands. They calculate that recurrent higher education funding - even before Glasgow threatened to take its input away - is £38 per head of population in the Highlands and Islands, and £4.81 in Dumfries and Galloway. Central sources provide £85 higher education investment per head of population in the Highlands, against £15 in Dumfries and Galloway. Economic development funding, whether from Europe or from the Scottish Executive via the enterprise networks, is 3.5 times as much in the north of Scotland as the south.

Most tellingly, youth out-migration in Dumfries and Galloway is double the rest of rural Scotland. This is the key to the economics, because achieving demographic balance is vital to Scotland's cohesion and dynamism as a country.

Cities can be temples to talent, technology and tolerance, the prime movers of our economic growth. But we can't base our society just on herding creative 20-year-olds into urban ghettos, however cool. We can't depopulate our countryside and rural towns if we want to maintain Scotland's distinctiveness. So we must make sure that opportunities outside the cities remain open.

As higher education has expanded nationally, young adults have flocked to the central belt. Early-1980s Glasgow made a net annual gain in population of 500 people aged 16-20: 20 years later that had swelled to 4000, a great tribute to the vibrancy of the city and its renaissance. But, from the other side, the migration figures are alarming: the net loss of 16-20-year-olds from Dumfries and Galloway is 700 per year. In gross terms, nearly 100% of Dumfries-born people leave. The region registered 1418 births last year, and 1325 people aged 19 and under moved out: only children moving in with their parents keep the region's numbers up.

It's not that Dumfries and Galloway is a bad place to be: quite the opposite. Among people who are free to move, it attracts more in-migrants than anywhere else in Scotland, but young people aren't free to move. They need responsibility, challenge, adventure, career posts, and educational and other learning opportunities.

The location of many jobs, and almost all the learning slots, is in the hands of Scottish politicians and administrators. That is what the debate in Holyrood on Thursday will be about.

The community continues its support in a very tangible way. The Crichton Foundation campaigns to raise money for bursaries, research and student facilities. Due to its efforts, a new reading room dedicated for HE and research students will now be built next to the new library, which will serve both FE and HE students. The foundation is near its target of £1.5m. Barbara Kelly, foundation convener (and former Equal Opportunities Commissioner for Scotland) adds: "What we need is a Crichton solution which recognises the facts of life in the south-west. It needs the will of the politicians to drive that solution, recognising the huge discrepancies between the support historically given to us compared to the north.

"There is a precedent to resolve the matter. Give the Crichton campus dedicated funded-student places, additional to the 150 given us five years ago, to be allocated between the three institutions, including Glasgow."

By stemming out-migration, investment in the Crichton yields huge economic returns to the region. Every £1m per year, 250 places, in due course increases the working population by more than 1000. This raises economic capacity by £22m on a head-count basis, and half as much again due to enhanced productivity.

Few public investments give returns of this magnitude.

Sir Muir Russell, principal of Glasgow University, entitled his invitation to enrol at the Crichton Building on Excellence. He said: "The university's key concepts at Dumfries are creativity and critical thinking . . . the tried and tested methods of one of the United Kingdom's oldest and most prestigious universities."

As well as funding council resources, the financial guddle of higher education craves these key skills. Let us hope Sir Muir becomes famous in the south of Scotland for applying them, rather than for demolishing excellence.

Hervey Gibson is chairman of strategy consultants cogentsi and a regular contributor to the Sunday Herald