This week, The Herald is collaborating with Scottish Affairs - Scotland’s longest running journal on contemporary political and social issues - published by Edinburgh University Press. Each day, academics from across Scotland's universities will be giving their thoughts on Scotland's university crisis: the battle for survival. From finances to management, what is going on behind the scenes at our institutions? What is needed to secure their futures?
Here, Jonathan Hearn and Gale Macleod warn that universities are losing the intellectual toughness and open debate that once defined higher education.
Our articles are a shortened version of full academic papers, all of which can be found at Scottish Affairs.
Why have universities become zones of emotional safety rather than intellectual risk? The background to this article was the development of a new ‘challenge course’ for undergraduates at the University of Edinburgh called Wicked Problems: Reason and Rhetoric. The course has a simple, as it turned out apparently radical, purpose: to help students learn how to argue, and, crucially, how to disagree well.
On one level, the story of the course is a familiar tale of university bureaucracy - forms, committees, and months of email silence. But the obstacles we encountered were not just procedural. We believe they were symptomatic of something deeper: the way modern universities increasingly see students in two, seemingly contradictory, ways. On the one hand, students are framed as savvy consumers in a competitive marketplace, whose satisfaction must be managed and measured.
On the other, they are treated as emotionally fragile, in need of protection from intellectual challenge and potential distress. These two trends, marketisation and emotionalization, now shape university life and act as subtle modes of social control. Our concern is that we are seeing the erosion of the university’s core purpose as a place set apart for rigorous, sometimes uncomfortable, inquiry.
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At various points throughout the new course approval process we, quite rightly, had to answer a series of questions about our proposal. However, these rarely touched on pedagogical issues. Instead, the queries seemed driven by a concern for students’ emotional wellbeing. When the proposal reached the oversight group that accredits challenge courses, discussion again focused heavily on student wellbeing and safeguarding. Members asked what would happen if students became distressed during difficult discussions, what skills tutors would need to manage this, and whether postgraduate tutors should be barred from teaching the course lest they be unable to cope with emotional fallout. One person voiced their anxiety that “some students might even cry”.
This was revealing. The university leadership wanted to be seen to offer bold, cross‑disciplinary courses tackling the hardest problems of our time. Yet a powerful anxiety lurked just beneath the surface: that allowing students to grapple with such questions might expose them to unacceptable emotional risk. This puts the institution in an impossible bind in which it attempts simultaneously to be a marketplace of ideas and a therapeutic refuge. The result is an incoherent set of expectations about what students are there to do - and what they can be trusted to cope with.
To understand how universities arrived here we need to go back to the rise of market thinking in higher education from the late 20th century onwards. Reforms since the 1990s have increasingly pushed universities to compete for students, research funding and prestige, often justified in the language of “efficiency”, “value for money”, and “choice”. Variable tuition fees, the proliferation of league tables, and the central role of the National Student Survey have all helped to recast students less as apprentices in a scholarly community, and more as paying customers.
In this model, students are encouraged to see themselves as purchasers of a service leading to a credential which they expect to translate into economic returns. Universities, in turn, are incentivised to prioritise what is measured: satisfaction scores, completion rates, graduate employability. Those aspects of higher education which are less easily quantified, but no less important such as intellectual discomfort, exposure to unsettling ideas, slow‑burn transformations of outlook and character, risk being sidelined.
Scotland sometimes presents itself as an exception. However, in practice, Scottish universities function in much the same marketplace as their English counterparts.
The language of “customer service” has followed. Student satisfaction scores now appear prominently in rankings and marketing materials. Internally, feedback is combed through for indicators of where the “student experience” might be letting the side down.
Yet, as many educational thinkers have noted, there is a deep tension between “satisfying” students and educating them. Good teaching often involves unsettling people, exposing them to strangeness and uncertainty. When students are nudged to see themselves primarily as consumers, research suggests they are less likely to adopt a strong learner identity: less inclined to take risks, less tolerant of difficulty, more focused on the transactional. In that environment, courses which explicitly promise “challenge” and exposure to contentious debate can feel risky, and not only to nervous students, but also to managers conscious of metrics and complaints procedures.
Layered on top of this consumer logic is a powerful emotional turn. Across society, public debate has grown more emotionally charged, from news reporting to social media to the polarisation of politics. Universities, far from being immune, are in some respects especially susceptible.
Academic work has always involved personal investment. But as sociologists such as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have argued about capitalism more broadly, recent decades have seen workplaces increasingly sell themselves as sites of self‑realisation and meaning, even as job security declines. Universities, with their talk of “mission” and “values”, are a particularly intense example: many staff see their job as an expression of their deepest beliefs. This heightens the emotional stakes when those beliefs are challenged.
Students arrive into this emotionally saturated environment with their own expectations. Public concern about young people’s mental health has grown, and with some justification; studies across many countries show rises in reported distress, with debates about the role of social media, the pandemic and broader social changes. At the same time, a wider cultural emphasis on emotional expression and validation means feelings are more readily foregrounded as the basis for claims.
Within universities it is now increasingly accepted that certain topics or viewpoints may be off‑limits because they cause emotional pain or are said to inflict “harm”. The concept of harm has expanded from clear threats to safety into more diffuse psychological or symbolic injury. This appeal to emotional harm can, in practice, short‑circuit argument. Instead of counter‑speech, in which a claim is responded to with a better one, the preferred move becomes to label a view harmful and therefore beyond the pale. Because each person is assumed to have privileged access to their own feelings, and because causing distress is seen as an institutional failure of “safeguarding”, emotional reaction can trump the testing of truth claims.
This is linked to the growth of a “victimhood mindset”: a tendency, in some individuals, to define themselves through injury or oppression, sometimes because it brings sympathy or status. In universities where Equality, Diversity and Inclusion agendas are strongly embedded, histories of genuine injustice are rightly taken seriously. But this can shade into a competitive ranking of grievances – what has been dubbed the “oppression Olympics” – in which claims to vulnerability carry increasing moral and institutional weight.
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We should see the market logic and the emotional turn not just as cultural trends, but as ways institutions govern their members. Sociologists have long argued that power does not operate only through force or explicit ideology, but also through more subtle shaping of expectations, fears and desires. Universities that loudly prioritise “wellbeing” and “safety” may genuinely care about their students. Yet they also create an environment in which people are encouraged to feel vulnerable and to see the institution as their protector. This, in turn, gives the institution leverage: the authority to decide which ideas are too dangerous, which conversations too upsetting.
In more authoritarian societies, we are rightly suspicious of governments that rule by cultivating fear of enemies or constant danger. We should also be cautious when large, ostensibly liberal institutions rely on a pervasive sense of risk and fragility, even if the language is softer, framed around “care” rather than threat. Ironically, a relentless focus on avoiding emotional “harm” can itself be harmful. Human beings grow morally and emotionally through a process of mutual judgment which involves testing themselves against others, sometimes rubbing up against disapproval, learning to negotiate conflict.
Education, especially in the late teens and early twenties, is a central site for this. Over‑protection risks creating adults who are less resilient, less able to cope with the inevitable frustrations and affronts of wider social and working life. Where universities once assumed a certain emotional robustness as the precondition for participation in academic discourse, they now increasingly treat emotional vulnerability as the default. The message to students is confused: you are independent consumers making weighty financial investments in your future, but also easily damaged by difficult ideas.
We do not deny that students have real mental health needs, or that universities must act responsibly. Our concern is that, under the combined pressures of markets and emotions, universities are losing sight of their distinctive role in society.
That role is not just to pass on skills, or to mirror back the preferences of students as clients, or to serve as general purpose welfare providers. It is to offer a space where truth claims can be tested and contested with unusual rigour; where no position is immune from question; where people can practise reason‑giving with others who disagree. To serve that function, universities must maintain a degree of neutrality on contentious social issues, and they must assume, and foster, a baseline of emotional robustness.
Jonathan Hearn is Professor of Political and Historical Sociology at the University of Edinburgh.
Gale Macleod is Professor of Interpersonal Relationships in Education, and Co-Director of the Higher Education Research Group.
