This column is written from St Andrews, where our son is in his last year as an undergraduate. It is the most perfect university town I know. Held in on two sides by the Firth of Tay and the sea, and by the famed golf course on the third, it can scarcely expand at all. So when you breast the hill on the Anstruther road, you see the spires and the old stone wonderfully compacted in front of you, and the water beyond. North Street and South Street seem subtly to curve (I am not sure if they actually do) so that they converge on the noble ruins of the cathedral. It has been a place of learning for 600 years, and it thrives. But the insane policy of the Scottish government of no fees to Scottish students means that the government has to ration severely the number of places granted to rein in the costs it has imposed on itself. Extremely well-qualified Scots are now, for the first time, being turned away. In St Andrews, where the English (on full fees, of course) and the Americans (on stratospheric foreign fees) are numerous, Scots make up only 30 per cent of the student population. Meanwhile, Alex Salmond’s government, which has fully devolved powers over universities, has decided that they must be run in a different way. It demands that their governing bodies be ‘democratically’ elected and contain at least 40 per cent women. Whenever I am inclined to believe that we live in a country (north and south of the Scottish border) which instinctively respects freedom, I look at the way our politicians treat universities, and realise that it is not so. They actually hate the fact that a university, in spirit and by charter, is an independent institution.
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