QMU in crisis talks on how to tackle £20m debtBy Edd McCracken Education Correspondent
Edinburgh's Queen Margaret University has been considering merging with Napier University as an option to arrest its financial situation - described as potentially "terminal" in an internal paper.
Documents obtained by the Sunday Herald show that senior figures from the university and the Scottish Funding Council, the body which distributes public money to the country's universities, are in the process of discussing solutions for servicing QMU's debt, which has ballooned to more than £20 million.
On October 22, SFC director of learning policy Laurence Howells met with Liam McCabe, a finance director from QMU, to discuss several options drawn up by the SFC's chief executive, Mark Batho, Howells and QMU's principal, Professor Anthony Cohen. They included the university continuing as an independent institution, merging with Napier University, and forming an east coast federation with Robert Gordon University and the University of Abertay.
Yesterday Cohen was quick to play down any talk of mergers. The Scottish Funding Council, however, refused to rule out any of the possibilities.
Cohen said: "These discussions do not portend a merger between us. It was an entirely hypothetical exercise. We have made our position entirely clear to the funding council on what our preferred route is, remaining independent with more collaboration with other institutions, and that is what we will pursue."
According to Howells, the SFC's director of learning policy and strategy, all the options were still on the table. He said: "The test is what is going to improve provision and how best we can take that forward. So there are a whole range of options that we would explore. Merger is one option, federation is another option, staying independent is another option. But we don't have a preferred or favoured option."
QMU's financial position recently weakened. The late completion of its new £100m campus in Musselburgh cost the institution several million pounds. A 5% lecturers' pay increase, with 35 redundancies being sought to finance it, has combined with the credit crunch's effect on property deals to see QMU's budget pinched further.
In 2007 the university forecast it would have to service long-term debts of £10m to £12m. Within a year the total was revised to £20m. A document from a QMU strategic management group in September noted that the university's "financial position was weakening" and that "unless strong remedial action was taken to arrest the decline QMU's already difficult financial position would become unsustainable, if not terminal".
With this as a backdrop, QMU approached the SFC.
Cohen stressed that listing all possible options was "a perfectly routine process, where you look at all possibilities from the unacceptable to the unthinkable".
He added that rather than merging with Napier, QMU is in "very intense" talks with at least four other institutions that received university status after 1992, to pool resources and create a postgraduate school that could compete with the ancient universities.
The University and College Union Scotland, which represents lecturers, urged the university to include all stakeholders in talks.
David Bleiman, assistant general secretary for UCU Scotland, said talks had to to involve representative groups from each institution.
"Any merger requires an academic rationale so academics need to talk to academics. A shotgun wedding is to be avoided."
