Friday 28th February 2014 - The EU debate and the universities

Four months ago I was asked by the Guardian to write an article for their higher education web pages arguing that in the possible forthcoming debate on the UK's membership of the European Union, university leaders needed to take a strong line in pointing out the cost / benefit equation as it applied to their institutions.  I argued that the balance was almost entirely positive - the UK gets much more out of European research funds than it contributes through its budget payments, and schemes such as the Marie Curie and Erasmus exchange arrangements are very beneficial to agendas for internationalisation.

Some people draw attention to Switzerland and Norway as countries that are not EU members but who benefit from many aspects of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Today's news suggests that may be about to end.  Today it has been announced that Switzerland will no longer be a major partner in the European Research Council and will not be able to lead projects.  Similarly, it will not be part of student exchanges through the Erasmus scheme.  It seems that these are the out-turns from the referendum earlier in the month when the Swiss electorate narrowly voted to tear up the free movement of labour agreements it had with the European Union. 

The vote in that referendum interests me greatly.  (I did part of my doctoral research in Switzerland and have always had a keen interest in the country.) The very first journal article I published when I arrived in Sheffield, with a colleague, was on a Swiss referendum on immigration.  Plus ça change ... The analysis in that article almost exactly fits the voting pattern of the referendum two weeks ago - with German-speaking Switzerland voting to restrict immigratiuon and French-speaking Switzerland voting not to. 

Now we have a Swiss model of what could happen in the UK if a referendum here took us out of the EU; increased isolation in both research opportunities (particularly research funding, for which the European Union has been an increasingly important source) and the mobility of students and researchers.  I don't think that's a very enticing prospect for UK universities.