Universities and Brexit: ‘We’ve 2,500 EU students – talent we don’t want to lose’
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Version 0 of 1. Anton Muscatelli remembers his shock on the morning of the EU referendum result. He felt upset, shaken by its implications and by the forces that drove the vote to leave. It was “that feeling that something had changed, and that feeling of deep uncertainty. Not only the future of one’s own sector but the future of the country, the future of Europe.” Muscatelli, the principal and vice-chancellor of Glasgow University, is perhaps the most prominent and politically active of Scotland’s university executives. As chair of Nicola Sturgeon’s European advisory council, he helped to shape the first minister’s stance on Europe. And he has helped to entrench devolution with the Calman commission. But now Muscatelli sees a future with conflicting, contradictory trends. “I have always seen the EU as above all an enterprise that has helped to bring peace in Europe,” he says. “You go back to the foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community [in 1951]; to the Treaty of Rome. The preamble to these treaties was about bringing the peoples of Europe together, to avoid the disastrous conflicts we have seen in the past.” Now Brexit and Donald Trump’s election as US president raise substantial threats, he says, and Glasgow University is already seeing serious fallout. The greatest threat, he says, is uncertainty, and the damage that has been done to the ability of the UK’s universities to attract academic and scientific talent. Already key figures are turning down important posts. “There have been at least three instances over the last six months where we were trying to attract senior professorial level appointments – not all EU by the way, some were non-EU but they wanted to come into the European Research Area,” Muscatelli says. “And [they] basically said: ‘You know there’s uncertainty at the moment whether the UK will be part of the European Research Area and therefore we will wait and see.’” This has a knock-on effect on his city’s economy, he points out. The university provides 9,000 jobs. No one yet knows whether the UK will remain a member of the EU-dominated European Research Area (ERA), launched by the European commission in 2000, with the aim of developing attractive research opportunities in Europe. Scotland’s universities take about 12% of the UK’s ERA funding – well above its 9% population share. There are question marks too over the UK’s future membership of the Horizon 2020 European science funding programme and the Erasmus student exchange programme, which gives students the opportunity to spend time studying abroad. Now he’s also dealing with the fallout from some of the executive orders being signed by the new US president. When Trump’s ban on travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries came suddenly into force, Muscatelli had to step in to help a Glasgow University postgraduate veterinary student, Dr Hamaseh Tayari, an Iranian national brought up in Italy, who was barred from flying home to Glasgow via the US from a holiday in Costa Rica. The university paid towards her hotel costs and the last leg of her flight home from Heathrow, after campaigners at Women for Independence had crowdfunded her flight costs from Costa Rica. Muscatelli says he was appalled at her treatment. Having completed his MA and PhD at Glasgow and taught economics there from 1984 to 2007, Italian-born Muscatelli has a strong affinity with the university, which is in good economic health. It is wealthy enough to have embarked on a £775m campus expansion plan funded by its normal income and surpluses, some borrowing and an appeal to former students. Despite its outposts in Singapore and China, a large proportion of its students are Glaswegian or Scottish. Yet Glasgow’s growth has been driven in large part by strong EU links, he says. Nearly 20% of academic staff come from the EU, as do many undergraduate and postgraduate students. And those academics bring European research grants with them. “It’s a hugely important pool of talent,” he says. Another urgent concern is the highly charged issue of student visas, for new students and those hoping to stay on to work. The UK government has withdrawn so-called tier 4 post-study work visas, barring a new pilot for a small select group of English universities, and Amber Rudd, the home secretary, has spoken of restricting student visas for all but elite institutions, as well as overall rationing. That proposal has been robustly challenged by Muscatelli and his colleagues. “There’s no doubt that would have a huge impact on the UK university sector, and that’s something on which we continue to express serious concerns,” he said. “But we want to work with government to make sure they fully understand the impact of this.” And this is urgent. The UK government has so far pledged it will honour visas for EU students starting this year, but there is no certainty for next year’s applicants, Muscatelli says. “We have 2,500 EU students in Glasgow and clearly that is a talent pool we would rather not lose. Exactly how funding will work across the UK for these students is going to be an important question for 2018 as we enter that admissions cycle for the summer,” he said. “We need to know by August, September this year, what is the policy stance going to be?” Despite these fears, Muscatelli believes there are positive signs for the sector. The Horizon 2020 and Erasmus programmes are pan-European, as is the ERA, drawing in non-EU member states. So the UK’s membership could continue post-Brexit. With Universities UK and Universities Scotland, the sector’s umbrella organisations, pushing UK ministers to protect their membership of these initiatives, senior European colleagues at universities on the continent are pressing their governments to do so too. “The reaction from colleagues in Europe has been absolutely exemplary,” he says. “It has been wonderful, actually, the messages of solidarity we have received from our European partners. That signal that we’re part of Europe is really, really important.” Muscatelli is a co-founder of a pan-European collaboration called the Guild of European Research Intensive Universities. It was launched with the University of Warwick, and the universities of Uppsala in Sweden, Olso in Norway, Göttingen in Germany and Groningen in the Netherlands last year, only a few weeks before the EU referendum. And other European universities are still joining. “I heard reports in the news about the fact that some UK universities feared they might be shut out of some partnerships,” Muscatelli says, “but we certainly have no evidence of that here. From what I understand, our partners are arguing with their own governments that we as individual institutions, but also the UK, are absolutely critical to the research effort that is happening around Europe.” |