Excellence begins at home
A well-known Scottish politician recently remarked that in spite of all its pretensions of being World Class, there is something missing, that as a nation Scotland consistently falls short of the mark. There are few fields in the world today in which it could claim to be a global player and a large part of its efforts are directed towards exploiting past glories at the expense of creating new directions and pathways for the future.
Take the capital for example: the world’s first Unesco City of Literature is situated in a country whose once thriving printing and publishing industry has dwindled and whose limited output of literary fiction is periphery and perhaps wholly irrelevant to the modern world of belles lettres. Consider too its prestigious university: whilst it would be unjust to claim The University of Edinburgh merely trades on its past, it would not be unreasonable to assert that it has become overly focussed on exploiting its prestige for commercial gains and that by concentrating on building its brand—a word that will always seem awkward next to education—it not only runs the risk of becoming distracted from its core function as a centre of learning and research but, to a certain extent it also fails to address the issue of how to invest in the nation’s cultural and intellectual capital.
Nowadays such investment is almost ignored completely. If Scotland played a major role in the Age of Enlightenment—and here too we have adopted the term Scottish Enlightenment in a characteristic overstatement of our own importance to the process—it did so because there was a vigorous undercurrent of intellectual activity whose vitality helped develop ideas which shaped the modern world. The nation’s political and economic life was underpinned by a world class intellectual infrastructure which produced generations of prodigious Scottish thinkers and if Edinburgh was once the Athens of the north, it was so because its university was home to Scottish intellectuals and luminaries with the kind of real interest in the nation and society in which they lived which can only come from being born and bred into it.
Excellence begins at home, and the current school of thought which seeks to ensure survival of the nation’s past glories by attracting intellectual capital to Scotland is a dangerous one. Whilst the many excellent contributions made by international researchers to Scottish universities should be gratefully welcomed and acknowledged, surely any such gains are Pyrrhic ones if Scotland is unable to cultivate and nurture its own, home-grown talent. Until it can seriously invest in its own academics and intellectuals, it will remain the not quite world class nation we have come to know, its political debates will continue to lack vision and substance, and its economy will continue to reflect a stagnant society which has long since run out of ideas and imagination.
Not quite World Class
Excellence begins at home
A well-known Scottish politician recently remarked that in spite of all its pretensions of being World Class, there is something missing, that as a nation Scotland consistently falls short of the mark. There are few fields in the world today in which it could claim to be a global player and a large part of its efforts are directed towards exploiting past glories at the expense of creating new directions and pathways for the future.
Take the capital for example: the world’s first Unesco City of Literature is situated in a country whose once thriving printing and publishing industry has dwindled and whose limited output of literary fiction is periphery and perhaps wholly irrelevant to the modern world of belles lettres. Consider too its prestigious university: whilst it would be unjust to claim The University of Edinburgh merely trades on its past, it would not be unreasonable to assert that it has become overly focussed on exploiting its prestige for commercial gains and that by concentrating on building its brand—a word that will always seem awkward next to education—it not only runs the risk of becoming distracted from its core function as a centre of learning and research but, to a certain extent it also fails to address the issue of how to invest in the nation’s cultural and intellectual capital.
Nowadays such investment is almost ignored completely. If Scotland played a major role in the Age of Enlightenment—and here too we have adopted the term Scottish Enlightenment in a characteristic overstatement of our own importance to the process—it did so because there was a vigorous undercurrent of intellectual activity whose vitality helped develop ideas which shaped the modern world. The nation’s political and economic life was underpinned by a world class intellectual infrastructure which produced generations of prodigious Scottish thinkers and if Edinburgh was once the Athens of the north, it was so because its university was home to Scottish intellectuals and luminaries with the kind of real interest in the nation and society in which they lived which can only come from being born and bred into it.
Excellence begins at home, and the current school of thought which seeks to ensure survival of the nation’s past glories by attracting intellectual capital to Scotland is a dangerous one. Whilst the many excellent contributions made by international researchers to Scottish universities should be gratefully welcomed and acknowledged, surely any such gains are Pyrrhic ones if Scotland is unable to cultivate and nurture its own, home-grown talent. Until it can seriously invest in its own academics and intellectuals, it will remain the not quite world class nation we have come to know, its political debates will continue to lack vision and substance, and its economy will continue to reflect a stagnant society which has long since run out of ideas and imagination.
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