This article argues that Scotland’s universities have undergone a profound but largely unacknowledged transformation amounting to an administrative ‘silent coup’. Over three decades, governance has shifted from collegial, scholar-led institutions to managerial, performance-driven organisations shaped by New Public Management logics. Universities came to frame themselves as global businesses, prioritising property expansion, branding, and international fee income over academic autonomy and intellectual community. Performance indicators replaced professional judgment, undermining scholarly freedom, deskilling academic labour, and incentivising short-term, instrumental decision-making. The consequences have been demoralised staff, disillusioned students, financial fragility, and the erosion of the university as a public good. The article concludes that recovery requires dismantling the pseudo-market system: restoring democratic internal governance, ending intrusive performance metrics, and funding universities as unified academic communities rather than collections of measurable units. Trust in scholarly purpose, not managerial control, is essential to rebuild a sustainable and genuinely vibrant higher education system in Scotland.

This article describes setting up a University of Edinburgh Challenge Course called ‘Wicked Problems: Reason and Rhetoric’, and some resistance to it. The course aims to help students understand the nature of argument and disagreement, and how to engage in these productively in their university work and beyond. The article then explores the culture of modern universities, seeing them as shaped by processes of neoliberal marketisation, and discursive emotionalisation, rendering students as simultaneously free consumers and psychologically vulnerable persons. We see these as forms of social control that interfere with the culture of universities, as sites of autonomous intellectual development.

This article explores current challenges to academic freedom in universities, arguing that it faces dual threats: external political intrusion and institutional pressures from within. The author critiques how policies intended to promote inclusion, in particular those related to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) and Dignity and Respect, can inadvertently suppress viewpoint diversity and enforce ideological conformity. The article highlights how activism and policy can blur the line between discomfort and harm, conflating disagreement with hostility. The author defends academic freedom as foundational to higher education, essential for the pursuit of knowledge through rigorous debate, and for societal trust in academia. While acknowledging that academic freedom is not absolute, the article calls for its protection through reasoned discourse, scholarly integrity, and institutional neutrality on divisive issues.

This paper explores the rise of a new ‘etiquette’ in Scottish higher education – a governance-infused code of conduct that fuses a rhetoric of care, inclusion, and wellbeing with the logics of performance management. Rooted in Scotland’s publicly funded civic ethos, this etiquette emerges from the interplay of devolved policy priorities, sector-wide performance metrics, and reputational incentives. Through an analysis of Scottish Government initiatives, national funding agreements, accreditation schemes, and institutional strategies, the paper traces how progressive policy commitments are translated into emotional norms and embedded in everyday academic practice. While recognising the sincerity of inclusion and wellbeing agendas, the paper argues that the codification of care as compliance signals a broader transformation: from the epistemic to the affective, from the primacy of thinking to the regulation of feeling. In this shift, dissent risks being redefined as harm, fragility is anticipated, and affective conformity is valorised, narrowing the democratic and intellectual functions of the university. The paper calls for a renewed commitment to pluralism, contestation, and intellectual risk, contending that lasting wellbeing arises not from the avoidance of difficulty but from active engagement with challenge, nuance, and the open exchange of ideas.

This article offers a critical perspective on the current state of Scottish higher education. It is informed not only by conventional forms of evidence (e.g., legislation, official reports and academic analysis) but also by the writer’s personal experience of working in different types of Scottish universities over a period of nearly fifty years. It argues that the vital democratic function of higher education has been weakened by a combination of factors: the steady incursion of corporate thinking into institutions that have traditionally been committed to a different value system; a growing divide between senior managers and front-line academic staff; performance management practices that tend to demoralise rather than incentivise; governance arrangements that fail to ensure adequate accountability for financial and strategic decisions. In developing these points, reference is made to the rapid expansion of the sector, the economic challenges this has presented, public criticism of the leaders of some institutions, and debates over academic freedom. Questions about where responsibility lies for the present situation, including whether academics themselves have shown insufficient resistance, are raised. It is acknowledged that, on the metrics that are currently employed, the leading Scottish universities show up well on UK and international comparisons. Much good work continues to be produced by dedicated individuals and teams of researchers. But will this continue if corporate culture remains unchecked?

Scottish higher education stands at a crossroads. This special issue explores the forces reshaping the nation's universities: balancing mission against market pressures, care against critique, and collegial traditions against expanding managerial control. Contributors examine the erosion of academic freedom, the rise of emotional and bureaucratic governance, the risks of ideological conformity and the challenge of sustaining scholarly purpose amid massification and consumer-driven expectations. Yet alongside critique, the collection identifies grounds for optimism, including the revitalisation of collegial culture, renewed moral purpose and commitments to sociable curiosity. Taken together, the essays argue that the future of Scottish higher education depends on honest debate, institutional courage and a re-affirmation of universities as places of inquiry, disagreement and public good.

Policies and discussion of academic freedom tend to be problem-oriented and defensive. They focus on harms, difficulties, and risks more than on the positive values and benefits that give freedom its raison d'être. Must we see freedom solely in these negative terms, mainly as an eternal struggle against obstructions? Or could we promote and celebrate freedom in more proactive and appreciative ways – spreading stronger awareness of the many intrinsic and instrumental benefits of an academic culture in which curiosity, considerate debate, and open-mindedness flourish? This paper is an invitation to consider more carefully these more aspirational approaches, with particular reference to the development of universities in Scotland. Drawing on both adverse and positive experiences, it highlights the importance of nurturing a campus climate of shared curiosity. Noting that some of the threats to academic freedom come from self-censorship and from silences and avoidances rather than from visible and active threats, and hence are elusive and hard to address, I argue for more explicit and appreciative promotion of academic freedom, and for more careful attention to the kinds of culture in which it flourishes.