Today I have been at a conference in London considering the future of Higher Education under the new coalition government.  It has been a meeting sponsored by UniversitiesUK, the National Union of Students, and all the various mission groups (Russell Group,1994 Group, University Alliance, million+ and so on) with lead speakers from all these organisations.  I was a speaker on a panel with Aaron Porter (the new President of the NUS) and a representative from AMOSSHE - the organisation that brings together all the Student Services departments in the UK.  (If I mention that the panel I was on had been scheduled to take place at 1500, and went ahead at that time - in conflict with a certain football match - readers will guess that attendance was somewhat lower than at some of the other sessions at the conference).

A further coincidence in timing was that the conference had been planned on the day after what became emergency budget day.  Inevitably there was considerable reflection on how the likely 25% cut in government funding for higher education through BIS might pan out over the four years for which it is scheduled.  Much more detail will become apparent in the autumn when the Comprehensive Spending Review is published - a date of 20 October was mentioned - and this could well also coincide with the publication of the Browne Review on student fees and funding.  We need to remember that a very significant amount of government funding for higher education does not go to HEFCE or to the Research Councils, but goes to finance a student support system that is now generally acknowledged to be one of the most expensive and inefficient in the OECD countries.  The outcome of the Browne Review could be to cut that cost to government and thus provide some protection to government support for core teaching and research activities.

But because of the presence of all the different mission groups at today's meeting, the reflection I want to make here is on the need for the sector as a whole to stand together whilst also identifying the particular strengths of individual parts of it.  I will mention no names, but I felt that some speakers were involved in special pleading for their particular types of universities - trying to show that they constitute a 'special case' and should be protected from the cuts that would then have to fall more heavily elsewhere.  I think this is divisive.  The value to the country and to individuals of higher education is under scrutiny - alongside the value of other expenditure on health, overseas aid (both now protected although many, including me, would argue that they shouldn't be), defence, environmental protection and so on.  We need to defend higher education as a whole,  But then we also need to declare strongly how individual universities contribute to that in their own ways.  This is an argument that our VC, Keith Burnett, recently made in an article in the Times Higher, and I agree with it.  Some at the conference felt the same - but there were some who didn't and who, I fear, will continue to push the special pleading arguments to support their own causes.

But where a university gets into difficulty in these new circumstances, I would not want to see it being propped up using public money.  If we should ignore special pleading from particular parts of the sector, we should not listen to it for particular institutions either.