Education

 

Hark the Herald

 

R D Kernohan

The University of the Highlands and Islands, now confirmed in full status, has been a long time coming. Most Scottish media recognised that in a rather general way, though the BBC offered a detailed account of the stages since the Highland Council in 1991 set up a steering group to look at the project.
     But media memories are short these days, and one modest opportunity for self-congratulation was neglected. I don't suppose the present rather gaudy Herald actually has a policy of refusing credit for the occasional dreams and visions of its staid days as the Glasgow Herald. What I fear is that most newspapers now go through such frequent changes of style, staff, and editorial location that they lose some continuity and collective memory. For the Herald should have allowed itself a gentle toot of its own trumpet when the Highland University finally graduated.
     If its campaign in the early 1960s had succeeded, the first new Scottish university for four centuries would have been based on Inverness and not Stirling, probably developing (given subsequent trends) to gather in the various Highland colleges and institutions that have gone into today's university. Unfortunately the campaign succeeded only to the extent that it concentrated academic, political and bureaucratic minds wonderfully on the need for expansion and stimulated (once it was clear there was going to be a new university) rival campaigns in Dumfries, Perth, Ayr, and Stirling.
     At the time the Stirling campaign seemed the weakest in local support and far less enthusiastic than one down the road, to which the Herald also gave benevolent coverage, for an East Stirlingshire technological university in the Falkirk area: not a rival to Inverness but an additional proposal. But the academic establishment of the day thought of Inverness as Ultima Thule and frowned on Falkirk. The political one concurred. Stirling won the day.

 

     I dip into this ancient history partly to make my point about the weakness of collective media memory but also to vindicate the only begetter of the Herald campaign for Inverness, the then editor James Holburn. He had come back to the Herald on the strength of his career with the Times as a foreign and diplomatic correspondent. He was to leave it a little prematurely because his protest during the Thomson takeover battle, about a great paper being treated 'like a beast in the ring', displeased the eventual victor, Hugh Fraser. The university campaign was his most individual attempt in the Herald to make an impact on Scottish life, but he was ahead of his time. It was also a good example of a Lowlander (he was a son of an Alyth U F manse) trying to do something to recognise Scotland's debt to the Highlands.
     I did most of the writing in the Herald campaign for him, but it was his vision and passion. I started off sharing the academic world's view of Inverness's remoteness (for I was only a few years away from the arrogance of Gilmorehill and Balliol) and was only converted after he had sent me not only to Inverness but to see how new English universities were faring in North Staffordshire and Sussex and why local initiatives had succeeded in York and Norwich.
     Maybe I was also less sanguine about the prospects than he was, for I found the earnest Inverness local campaign worthy but undynamic and handicapped  (if my memory is right) by lack of support from that notable but sometimes idiosyncratic institution, the Inverness Courier. But we were right, even if the Inverness of the time was only half the size of today's city and seemed more isolated. Some of the things I see quoted now from the new university's management share, in very similar words, ideas Holburn promoted in 1960-61. The university can stimulate and reflect new vigour in the region and it can reverse the traditional drain of talents which enriched the Lowlands and the world but debilitated the Highlands.
     Anyone in the new university (or even in the contemporary Herald) interested in this contribution to Highland and Scottish academic history will find a lot about the campaign through the fine index volumes which the newspaper kept in those days, in the Scottish Council's 1961 hardback publication of its symposium on Scottish natural resources (for which Holburn and I wrote a submission), and in the pamphlet-offprint version of my swanning round the new English universities, originally Herald articles in September 1960.
     That campaign is now no more than a footnote to history and soon seemed a lost cause once Stirling became the officially preferred bidder. But it was an honourable defeat and a claim of right for Highland Scotland which has now been vindicated by events.

R D Kernohan is a writer and broadcaster and a former editor of the Church of Scotland's magazine Life and Work