| Description | Second interview with Sir Fraser Noble recorded on 13 July 1985 by John Hargreaves
Transcript of Interview :
Yesterday we ended with your going off to the Indian Civil Service, and you have recorded elsewhere that very important chapter. How did it come about that you returned to Aberdeen as Lecturer in Political Economy?
N. You will remember that I had always expected that there would be a transfer of power in India but nobody expected it to come quite as quickly as it did. The announcement that Mountbatten made early in June was that the transfer was to take place .not in the Summer of 1948 but in the middle of August 1947, and that gave us. barely two months to get .any decisions made. The government of the North West Frontier Province indicated that they wanted me to stay on but my wife had a little baby daughter in a hill- station about 150 miles away and, although telephonic communication was extremely difficult, I did convey to her that I thought we ought not to stay on, that I ought, for the sake of the baby and herself, to get home as quickly as possible. I was then faced with the decision whether to apply for a transfer to wither the Home Civil Service or the Colonial or Foreign services, and my inclination was for some weeks to aim at the .Home Civil Service, but in the end I jibbed at the notion of starting to bring up a family in London or in one of the suburbs of London in those immediate post-war years and I had a great nostalgia for my own home country and conceived the idea that I dad no other ambition but to live the kind of life that my father had lived, although he had died before I had really got the full benefit of being brought up as a country schoolmaster's son. I wrote on the spur of the moment to Principal Sir William Hamilton Fyfe and asked him whether I would be eligible for a shortened teacher-training course which was open to men returning from war service, and within a very short time a reply came from him saying that it was all fixed up and that there was a place for me in the course beginning in October at the Teacher Training College in Aberdeen. We found a furnished house in Collieston and I started on this course. I may say I finished the course and I used to boast in the 1960s and 1970s, when there was a lot of discussion about teacher-training in high circles in education and in government, that at any rate I was the only British Vice - Chancellor who had had a formal training as a schoolteacher. But, before the training was finished I had begun to wonder whether I was .going to be fully satisfied with this. Of course the basic reason for it was that there was no way at that stage of envisaging a career an schools teaching economics. Iindeed, I had always taken the view that the subject was not a subject to be taught at school formally - and I was therefore training in Classics. Now I hadn't really read any Classics since 1938 and naturally I was finding it pretty difficult. Although I could cope reasonably well with Latin to the Higher level, I wondered whether I was going to have the drive and energy to sufficiently worked up again to make anything like a successful career; and I began to cast around for other possibilities. I think when I was preparing to leave India one must remember that I was pretty tired, although I was a young man, because in my service we had all worked extremely hard during the war and the years just after the war. There had been a great deal of tension in last twelve or fifteen months of my service, and there was very little time for thinking. I suppose it was a month or two after I had got back to Aberdeen that I began to wonder really what the future would hold, and I began to apply for various jobs that I saw advertised, one of which was a Lectureship in Agricultural Economics at Bristol. I wondered whether I might be able to tackle that. In my work in India I had got some knowledge of certain aspects of agriculture, not of course directly relevant to agriculture in this country, but it gave me some sort of notion of what might be involved in applying my knowledge of economics to the subject. I was rather surprised when I was summoned to an interview and, in fact, was getting ready to go when one day Henry Hamilton, the Jaffray Professor of Political Economy, who had succeeded Lindley Fraser turned up at the training college in St. Andrews Street and asked to see me. This was to suggest that I might work at Aberdeen. There had been an episode that probably is very relevant to you which I ought to recount because it immediately preceded this invitation. The post of assistant Secretary to the University had been advertised and I had applied for that, and I had been interviewed, short - listed of course. The people interviewed were Jimmy George, who was of course senior to me in the ICS from Bengal (I think some eight or ten years senior to me), and another Aberdeen graduate who subsequently became Secretary of the Queen's .University, Belfast, and I think there was one other - a lawyer. The Committee took quite some time, I think a week or two, to decide the result of these interviews. In the course of my interview Sir William Hamilton Fyfe several times came back to the question: Would you not rather teach in the University than take this job as an administrator? And I couldn't understand the question because frankly I felt I knew something about administration because I had been doing something not at all irrelevant to the duties of the Assistant Secretary when I was in the ICS, whereas I felt that I didn't really feel expert enough do any subject to profess to teach in a university. But the outcome was that Jimmy George rightly got the appointment of Assistant Secretary and .a week or two later Henry Hamilton made a last -minute attempt to stop me going to be interviewed at Bristol. I may say that years later I .met the Professor at Bristol and said to him that I couldn't really understand thy they had sent for me for a post as a Lecturer in Agricultural Economics and he said: 'Oh, but we wanted you to comedown and if we had liked the look of you we thought from your previous record that what we wanted was to appoint you to a post the Department of Economics at Bristol. It turned out, of course, that that Professor was the man who had been the External Examiner when I took my final exams at Aberdeen in March 1940. Anyway, that's how I joined the University staff in April 1948 as an Assistant Lecturer, and I think in a most remarkable way this was converted to a Lectureship, or a probationary Lectureship, the following October - perhaps in deference to my age.
H. How had the University changed from - the. place you had known in the late ;thirties?
N. I suppose the most obvious change was that there were many very prominent ex - servicemen amongst the student body and indeed there was already a number of ex-service lecturers about the place. There seemed to be more of a lively element amongst the junior staff. Pre-war junior staff had not really been very noticeable, they had been very much assistants to professors, but even in 1948 and in the years immediately following chat the junior staff had things to may for themselves: they were terribly interesting and stimulating people to be amongst. And the senior, students, right. up until 1950 as I say, brought experience of the armed forces, experience life to bear on their attitudes to study, and it really was a most stimulating time to begin to learn ones trade as a university teacher. I think that was the most prominent change in the early part of that period
H. Was the trade you were learning itself changing? You described instruction in the 30s as being on the whole rather formal and confined to lectures. Was that beginning to change?
N. Yes, and I think that the younger members of staff had a great deal to do with that. We used to talk amongst ourselves about the need to get more tutorial work done, for example. One point I would like to make in that connection is that the NUT in those days seemed to regard itself primarily as a professional association rather than a trade union, and the NUT was very active in arranging discussions and seminars about such things as teaching methods. I think in the Economics Department I played a fairly .active role in changing the nature of the old tutorial system which had tended to be a kind of mini lecture to ten people. It was gradually changed into a programme of weekly meetings with topics set in advance to comply with the development of the course of lectures, and individual students designated to prepare short five minute papers to introduce discussion other students designated to open the discussion that was one of the first changes I remember that I was able to persuade Henry Hamilton to accept. We followed that up in various other ways, .and I think that in the 1950's there was a considerable development and, I would say, an improvement in the arrangements to bring greater liveliness into the teaching methods of that department at any rate, and I think the same sort of thing was going on in other departments.
H How had the department - if we could concentrate on that for a moment changed? Henry. Hamilton had become Jaffray Professor. Were there other Changes, or were you in at the beginning of the expansion of the department?
N. I was in fairly well at the beginning of it, but very soon there were other additions to the staff. In Political Economy itself of course the most notable addition was that of Denys Munby, who really was a very good economist and a very lively colleague, not always perhaps the easiest of colleagues because he had so many interests and it sometimes was difficult to pin him down to the priority of teaching his particular course, but he brought a great liveliness to the scene. There was of course development also in the Economic History section of the department where Henry Hamilton, on his translation to the Chair of Political Economy, had been succeeded by Ethel Hampton who was a distinguished scholar. There was considerable development in Agricultural Economics and research in Agricultural Economics which was led by Edith Whettam who eventually left us to go to Cambridge where she had a most distingushed career. Henry Hamilton was awfully good at securing I suppose a disproportionately large share of the Clapham Committee monies for the development of research in Aberdeen, and he procured a succession of research Fellows, many of whom were quite outstanding young economists, and more particularly, young economic historians. So there was a liveliness in the department in the first five or six years of the 1950s that was totally different from anything that there had been before the war.
H. Was the appointment of Henry Hamilton as a distinguished economic historian, to the Chair of Economics - did this have an effect on the general orientation of the department. If that's not a slightly leading question, was Henry Hamilton a good Professor of Political Economy as well as a good, even a great, economic historian?
That's not an easy question to answer, because he wasn't a great economist, although he had had a good training in economics in Glasgow in the old days and he was much more a man who interpreted current economic issues through the eye of an economic historian; but frankly that was no bad thing. My personal view is that in more recent times economics has gone much too abstract and mathematical and that it has perhaps for too long neglected to draw into the analysis of economic problems the lessons that can be borrowed from related subjects like Economic History, Politics, and Psychology, - various other things like that. I was always a great believer in Inter-disciplinary approaches to the study of applied problems, and Henry Hamilton .certainly encouraged that kind of approach. It may -be that he wasn't an outstanding Keynesian or anything like that but he was sufficiently well versed in Keynesian economics to be able to take Senior Honours students through their course satisfactorily and in that period certainly in the first four or five years that I taught in the department, perhaps a little longer, we had a good supply of students a fair number of whom went on to successful academic careers and others went on to successful careers in business and in other fields, very few of them, remarkably enough, remaining in Scotland, nearly all of them going south of the Border or overseas
H. What was the size of the Honours Class in a normal year at this time?
N. I can remember some years when we had eight or nine, have we may even have had ten. Occasionally it would drop to three or four, but it was certainly bigger than it had been pre- war.
H. Had the structure and the content of the courses changed very much since pre - war?
N Oh, it was changing all the time. One of the things that I seemed to spend hours and days working at was the working out of the syllabus for the Advanced Class, the syllabus for Special Options classes. One of the things we did quite early in the 1950s was to introduce Special Options in the Honours curriculum. Oh, yes it kept changing all the time, and developing.
H On the wider front of the University community, you referred to the growth in numbers and I suppose the gradual .rise in status of the non-professorial class: 'gradual rise in status, would that be a fair description?
N. We used to talk a great deal about the need fox this. It was a preoccupation of the AUT. I wasn't all that much .concerned with it myself. My colleague, Denys Munby, to whom I referred a few moments ago, was very concerned with it, and I think rightly. It wasn't that I felt that I had been knocking my head against a brick wall, but I just found other things to interest me; I didn't want to indulge in heated controversies of that kind, but it was going on. I was more concerned, I think, personally, with external activities. I, to my great surprise, was nominated by the University to membership of one of the new Boards of Management, I think it was the Board of Management of the Mental Hospitals Group under the new Health Service, and I found great satisfaction in doing that kind of thing. I did - one or two other voluntary jobs of that kind. I think we were all engaged in that kind of activity, in fact. The thing that surprised me about this was that I was nominated by the University to represent them officially on this particular Board.
H. Soon after your return Sir William Hamilton Fyfe was succeeded by Sir Thomas Taylor as Principal. Did that bring about a change in the University? How would you remember Sir Thomas as a Principal and Vice-Chancellor?
N. I don't remember a great deal about the early years. I didn't know him very well at that stage. I had great respect for him. I remember feeling by 1957 when I had left Aberdeen, that my own attitude had ;altered very considerably from feeling that he was a slightly aloof and separate figure into, feeling of real warmth and affection, and I think that applied throughout the university community. He wasn't a man whom it was easy for young people to get to know. but when one listened to what he had to say one couldn't help feeling a great deal of respect for him. He could be a very eloquent man and he could sometimes move one very considerably by his arguments. I remember just a few months before I retired being rung up by an alumnus of the University who was himself a retired Minister of the Church of Scotland. He was telling me that he had a tape of a speech which Tom Taylor had made at some sort of church week, I have forgotten now the actual title of this, which aroused a lot of public interest in Aberdeen; and this speech was the sort of keynote address delivered. He sent this down to me to be put in the University Archives where it now island I played it in my office and I was so moved by this that I stopped the playing of the tape and went through to Gordon Hector's room and said, "Come through and sit and listen to this with me". He always somehow had quite a profound message in whatever he said when he made public utterances. Sometimes, of course, he got onto hobby horses and one could be slightly amused by these hobby horses, but he really was a very considerable figure, I think, and was greatly respected by the other Scottish University Principals - they had a great affection for him - and greatly respected in the Committee of Vice-Chancellors, also.
H. Could I venture to ask you, as one with unrivalled knowledge of the species to compare the strength ,of Principals Fyfe and Taylor in that role as Principal and Vice-Chancellor?
N. I think that's difficult. They were Principals in very different periods. Principal Fyfe I thought was a very good Principal in that period from the mid 30s through to the late 40s and I think did everything very well. I have heard it said of him that he was always so agreeable that people with diametrically opposed views would interview him one after the other at separate interviews; each would come out feeling that the Principal had been in entire agreement with what they thought. I never saw that angle in Hamilton Fyfe. I always found him to be a man who was concerned with encouraging young people; I think he really was extremely good with students. That, I wouldn't have thought was one of the outstanding qualities of Tom Taylor. Tom Taylor was intellectual in rather a different sort of way. He was also of course a very religious man and very courageous often in the line he took; he was a great leader in the church and carried the University's reputation forward in that way, and it was a way that mattered in Scotland, certainly at that stage. He was uneasy, I think, about any very large expansion of the University, although he was ready to go .along with it when he was persuaded that it was going to come about, but he had certain uneasinesses in his mind about the whole. thing. But I don't think one could make .any direct comparisons between them; they were quite different people but then each was suited to quite different stages in the University's development.
H. Were there any other outstanding University figures you remember from this period?
N That's an interesting question. Personalities had changed. Before the war one thought always about the Professors, the outstanding Professors: they seemed to be figures that everybody in the city knew. Now that was also true in those early years after the War and I knew quite a number of them in different Faculties. We used to comment on this a little bit there didn't seem to be the characters around that there had been. Whether it .is that only when one looks back in one's lifetime that one remembers characters as such, there were fewer of them around in the mid 50s than there had been in the mid 30s I would say, but there quite a few and there were some very remarkable men, like Dugald Baird in the Faculty of Medicine, whose achievements in .Aberdeen were very considerable and had a great influence .in the development of his particular field of Medicine. People like R V Jones were characters in the eyes of the students particularly, because he could produce quite spectacular lectures. I don't remember individuals making a huge impact on me. perhaps I was reaching an age when I was less impressed by older people than I had been when I was a student.
H Did you know your namesake, Peter Scott Noble?
N. Oh yes. I had known him only very slightly before the War not as professor of Humanity because he arrived in his Chair a month or two after I had taken my final exams in Classics, but he was one who joined the International ,Student Service Committee and on more than one occasion I accompanied him to Glasgow and places like that to represent the Aberdeen committee at Scottish mmeeting. When I returned after the War l got to know him a little better, but I do remember meeting him once outside the Library at King's and he immediately plunged into a very gloomy forecast of the mistakes I had made in deciding to abandon my original plan to train as a teacher and teach Classics in Scottish schools and instead attempt a career as a University lecturer in Economics. He thought that was a great mistake and that I would have made a good headmaster but there would, be no future for me at all as a lecturer in Economics. But of course I got to know Peter Noble much better after he went to King's College, London and after I went to Leicester.
H. Did Professors join the AUT in any large numbers or was the AUT at this period largely a .lecturers' union, an assistants' union?
N. We had a convention, I don't know if it was more than that, that in alternate years the President or Chairman of the AUT was a Professor, and there were several. professors who played .fairly active parts in the committee. Kermack, I remember doing that for several years when I was on the committee and Dugald Baird was another one. I suppose essentially it was a non-professorial committee, but there were professors on it.
H. In 1957 you left to become Secretary :of the Carnegie Trust - and another chapter. Why did you decide to apply for that job?
N. Again, I go back to the way my whole career had evolved, I won't say 'developed' because its evolution was governed by external circumstances and there was nothing, if you like, planned or properly organised about it. I seemed to have spent these very important formative years, from the time I had first graduated in Classics to the mid 50s, reacting to circumstances and adapting. Even in the Indian Civil Service I missed out on the careful stages of career development that were the normal practice up to the outbreak of the Second War, and I simply was thrown in at the deep end in one job after another. I think I was regarded by the Governor and the Chief Secretary in the North West Frontier as a chap who could probably be sent to do whatever needed to be done and not to make too serious a mess of it. They were very good in the early years about trying to ensure that I was given the right kind of training, but their hands were always being forced by the transfer of senior officers to the Government of India or to some emergency somewhere, and younger men were consequently always being called on to undertake jobs that were really beyond their capacity in terms of their training. Somehow I felt in the early 1950s that here l was trying to teach Economics to Honours students, some of whom were very bright and rightly ambitious for their .careers, possibly in academic life, and I really hadn't been properly trained myself as an economist. My own undergraduate career, as you will.remember, from that first interview had been truncated in terms of Economics and had been affected by the sudden move of Lindley Fraser in my final year when he went off to the Civil Service shortly after the outbreak of the War, and I felt that I really ought not to have suddenly plunged into a lectureship in Political Economy without doing what every self-respecting young academic would do nowadays, which is to follow a fairly leisurely, carefully thought-out career in postgraduate training before embarking on the teaching side of it. While I think I was quite a good teacher and I did find ,a field of research that interested me, I always felt that I had missed out in having started all this after too short an initial training followed by seven interrupted years out in India and then suddenly back into what would normally be the sort of work and role for a man of my age but I felt that I hadn't bean properly equipped for it. So, in fact, for two or three years I had thought quite a lot about whether I ought not to move into something more administrative, and I did think about this in terms of one or two other possibilities. I applied once or twice for chairs. I was actually interviewed for a Chair once, and in my own mind I felt that when I didn't get that Chair, the right decision had been made and that I really probably was not going to get a Chair in Economics even though I might well produce a book or something like that, because I didn't feel that my basic equipment in the discipline was solid enough. That's why I began to cast around for alternatives and the Carnegie iob was almost the first opportunity that presented itself to me, that struck me as being something I would both be interested in and equipped to do, and I regarded myself as being extremely lucky to get the appointment because I knew there was pretty strong competition for it.
H. When you were at the Carnegie Trust - I don't quite know how to express this - did you feel that your experience at Aberdeen influenced your own sense of priorities in the work at all? Were there things that you felt you wanted to see the Carnegie Trust doing to Scottish universities?
N. Yes, I think there were. The first thing that had to be done, however, had nothing to do with that; it was simply to get the Trust back on to a proper financial footing and that took about a year. It had to be done very quickly because the way the financial markets were going there was still a chance to get in on the equity market in time to transform the financial prospect for Trust, but there wasn't a great deal of time, it had to be done in a matter of months rather than years. In fact, if it had been delayed another year it. would have been too late. That took up a good deal of my time and energy in my first year at the Trust. The various changes I made in the Trust's regulations and practices of course had to be made by the Executive Committee on proposals and advice from me and it was very interesting finding how they reacted to these proposals. The Executive Committee, of course, is always very much influenced fist of all by its Chairman - and I got on extremely well with my Chairman, Lord Cameron - and secondly, by the University Principals. In those days there were only the four University Principals; theoretically only two of them at a time were members of the Executive Committee, but the practice was for the other two to attend although theoretically they didn't have a vote. And inevitably when I was making proposals they were proposals that had been formulated, if you like under the influence of Aberdeen experience. I got to know all the Scottish universities while I was serving at the Carnegie Trust, really very well; and the Aberdeen experience, for example, in the need for more financial support for young members of staff to travel in connection with their research, that was undoubtedly something that I brought to bear in developing the Trust's policies very quickly, and I suppose there are a number of other things. I remember a scheme of merit awards for students that kind of thing; a scheme that enabled young doctors to get to America for short periods of experience in research. There were a number of things like that which I have no doubt I drew partly from the background of Aberdeen.
H. The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland has been a great blessing to those universities and its existence - assumes that the Scottish universities are a very distinctive group and with a certain institutional and spiritual unity among them. How far was this true at the time of your work with the Trust, or how far had they at that time begun to become absorbed into a UK University system?
N. I think they were fully absorbed into a U.K. University system, but they had of course their own characteristics and traditions. Their history had been quite different. I think one has to remember that the Trust, the Carnegie Trust for the Scottish Universities, was set up on behalf of the four ancient universities and they are, I think, so described in the Trust Deed; and when we are talking about the Scottish Universities today we're talking about not four but eight, and the four new Scottish Universities are part of the Scottish .system but clearly bring different characteristics to it. When I was at the Trust they did not exist as separate institutions. Dundee was of course part of St. Andrews University - Queens College, Dundee but - Heriot Watt and Strathclyde were still not universities and not primary beneficiaries of the Carnegie Trust deed. But the four ancient universities were clearly closely linked although each one had its own separate characteristics, the result of historical evolution. I think this; indeed, is really illustrated from the point that I have often made in the past about the United Kingdom university system. It's a system of great complexity: it incorporates institutions of very widely varying characteristics and yet it has a fundamental unity, it's a unity of purpose, it's a unity of standards or at least attempting to reach similar standards, and it's still a system which is the envy of the higher university systems of every other country that I know throughout the world; but it combines both this great diversity amongst individual institutions and at the same time unity of a central purpose which gives these very diverse institutions a sense of belonging to a single system.
H. That answer seems to be rather suggesting that the unity of the Scottish universities, or the ancient universities at least, is partly unity of tradition and history and some might say of sentiment. You don't seem to give great prominence to that.
N. Well, when the issue of Devolution first (perhaps first is the wrong word) was thrust into the central position in controversy some, what was it, twelve, thirteen years ago, politically; the Scottish universities you will remember, were confronted with the need to decide whether, if there were Devolution in Scotland, they would want to break away from the UGC, the UGC's aegis and the answer that emerged very clearly from the Principals and the University Courts and, I think I am right in saying, the great majority of the academic staff, was that they wanted to remain part of the British system and not to be separated from the UGC, not to be in any way subordinated to a devolved government in Edinburgh, I would guess that that would still be the point of view although there might be hesitations about it as a result of the weakening of the UGC's apparent role in the university system, which has resulted from the growing attempts of government in Whitehall to insist on certain governmental policies being pushed through regardless of their consequences to the individual universities. The University Grants Committee itself now is in a weaker, more exposed position; it's no longer the powerful, influential, confidential adviser of the Government; it's apparently increasingly the instrument or agent of Government policy. And that might produce a change in the attitudes of the Scottish universities if certain major changes in political constitutional arrangements were to take place.
H. I wasn't thinking solely of the constitutional position of universities. I was thinking of the position which would certainly be held by many people who wish to maintain the UGC connection, feeling that nevertheless the Scottish universities have features which are not always understood south of the Border and in UK committees the most obvious distinctive feature, I suppose being the four year Honours degree which clearly depends on the school system; and quite clearly I have been infuriated sitting on a UK -based committee seeing the assumption that British equals English in this and other matters. What I think I was really asking was whether, leaving aside things like the four-year Honours degree, Scottish universities are really doing anything distinctive. It used to be said, for example, that the Scottish Ordinary Degree was something special and different from the ordinary degree which might be taught in English universities. Do you think that that is true, that the Scottish universities do things differently in important ways while remaining clearly institutionally within the UK system?
N. Yes, I think you have answered the question in the comments that you have made. The question of syllabus, for example, is a clear answer. The Scottish Ordinary Degree, a four-year Honours Degree, are distinctive features and so long as the Scottish school system remains as it is and the arrangements for the admission of first - year students remain what they are, (and I hope that they will remain),then there will be something very distinctive in the characteristics of the Scottish universities and that will affect the way in which they have to be funded and their relationship with Government and with' the University Grants Committee. I agree with you; there have been problems about this being understood, certainly in the Department of Education and Science and of course the Scottish Education Department which I think takes an increased interest in the affairs of the Scottish Universities as compared with the situation, for example, when I was at the Carnegie Trust when any question relating to the Scottish universities would be shied away from by the officers of the Scottish Education Department and the Secretary of State for Scotland; but over a period of at least the last seven. or eight years there have been regular, at least annual, meetings between the Secretary of State himself and the Scottish University Principals, and very useful meetings they have been. The Secretary of State in my estimate on one or two occasions has been quite an important ally of the Scottish universities and, through them, of the British universities as a whole, in important Cabinet decisions when he has brought his weight to, .bear with his views enlightened by conversations with the Scottish Principals.
H. Perhaps, just one last question: you said 'so long as the four-year Honours course remains and you hoped it will remain. Why do you hope it will remain? Supposing the schools system in Scotland was changed, supposing it was decided that the English education pattern were better and - we had a UK system of education, what would be lost?
N. Oh, of course it was an hypothesis in my argument that the schools system would remain distinctive. lam a little out of touch with what has been happening over the last four or five years, but throughout my career in the universities it was my view that the English school system had serious weaknesses, for example, in terms of premature specialisation in curriculum and it had a great deal to learn from the Scottish school system. I think in some ways, the :Scottish school system may have lost something in recent years through having tended for various reasons to move rather in the direction of the English system than was historically the case. It may simply be that in my old cage my innate conservatism has come through, but I certainly would regret very much losing the distinctive Scottish characteristics of our school traditions, the historical evolution reflected in current school practices in curriculum and attitudes; and I would think that the Scottish universities must remain at the pinnacle of that system, and in many ways would hope that they would play a more direct part in helping to preserve - and helping not just to preserve it because you cant preserve something unchanged forever - but helping it to develop in a very Scottish rather than an English way.
End of Interview
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