It is a European crisis. The continent which invented the university and developed it as a crucible for knowledge and unashamed excellence has fallen behind in whatever academic league table you care to study.

These days, all the best universities are in the US. It is no coincidence that they are also the best funded and pay their staff wages which match their heavyweight intellects.

The Times Higher Educational Supplement's respected "Top 200 World Universities" places Harvard number one and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology second. England's Cambridge and Oxford make it to third and fourth place respectively, but along with France's Ecole Polytechnique, they are the only Euro stars in a top 10 dominated by America's Ivy League and its newer, private universities such as Stanford in California.

Scotland, in case you are interested, squeezed in at number 30, courtesy of Edinburgh University. Glasgow was 101.



We like to be snooty about America's educational achievements, confusing the country with its syntactically-challenged president. We imagine its campuses are peopled by well-scrubbed Christian fundamentalists, bashing centuries of scientific achievement with their Bibles.

In fact, the 21st-century US is a country which values high-end knowledge. It spends $26,000 per student on tertiary education, including research and development. The figure in this country is $12,000 and in France a mere $9000. America spends 2.6% of its GDP on higher education, more than double our 1.1%.

Show them the money and academics will show you glittering prizes. America has picked up 60% more Nobel awards than the whole of Europe since 1970. Many of the most recent recipients are not American by birth, but Europeans who have moved across the Atlantic for the better salaries, good facilities and old-fashioned prestige.




There is no Nobel prize for history, but if there was, Niall Ferguson would doubtless be a contender. The Scot has touched a broad new readership with his combination of narrative flair and fearless originality. Glaswegian by birth and schooling, he is now based at Harvard, commuting home to see his children in this country. He can afford it, as a celebrity intellectual who is well rewarded by an American system he would have Britain emulate.

He agrees that Britain underpays its academics but sees the industrial action as part of the overall malaise. In a recent article, he declared himself "disgusted" at British dons downing tools like some sort of "academic proletariat who conceive of their institutions as nothing more than degree factories". He asks where British institutions would get the money to fund a 23% rise.

Ferguson believes they should seek more private funding and become less reliant on the state. They would then be free to pay staff on merit, rather than some one-size-fits-all pay scale. He points out that Harvard's endowment – £26bn – allows it to take in poor students on generous scholarships.

These comments will come as no surprise to those acquainted with Ferguson's robust, right-of-centre views. He recently had a controversial pop at his native Scotland, provoking a national debate which involved our own leading historians. However, his critique of higher education has a sound factual basis and will ring true among educationalists who do not share his politics. There simply isn't enough cash to meet our aspirations.

Britain has expanded its higher education sector rapidly without offering a commensurate increase in funding from the state or the private sector. We have replaced quality with quantity. Even if the pay dispute is settled in Scotland, say, with a 13% offer, we will only succeed in standing still. Academics will remain less well-off than lawyers, doctors and now even schoolteachers.

So no-one is happy and the customer suffers. Students already see little of their teachers, even at institutions with good reputations. Many are busy on research papers which are needed to improve university ratings and so help income.




Can America really show us the way forward? One lesson we could learn is the value of elitism, in the best, classless definition of the term. We can provide the majority of our people with a thorough, good quality education. But we must also capitalise on the brilliance of our best minds.

Scotland has a reputation for educational excellence on which we can still capitalise. We have some of the world's oldest universities, undertaking the most cutting-edge research. That must be funded; not adequately, but with generosity.

America does offer examples of recent fund-raising which could be emulated. In particular, Stanford, near San Francisco, has transformed itself since 1970s from a small teaching institution to the best in the world for bio-sciences. In the 1980s, Stanford pulled off the largest-ever fund-raising effort in the history of higher education. Its centennial appeal raised a staggering $1.26bn. This doubled the value of the campus infrastructure and has attracted 16 Nobel laureates on to the staff.

It could be argued that the university's location in the sunshine state, surrounded by silicon trillionaires makes fund-raising somewhat easier. But we should not forget that Stanford itself has been an engine for the economic boom in the surrounding region. This is a two-way process that a small country with big ambitions – yes, that means Scotland – should study with care.