Mark Chalmers

While working on my piece for the next issue of UR, the flow of ideas was interrupted by a loud boom from a few miles away. That was the sound of the University of Dundee’s finances imploding, causing several hundred casualties – although the captain had already scuttled the ship and escaped in his golden lifeboat.

Distracted by memories of university, my mind drifted to a summer school I won a place at twenty years ago, then further back to a student award I was invited to enter at the end of fourth year.

Around this time in June, architecture students from across Britain brought their work to the dungeons under the Royal Academy in London. We’d each been allocated a space, and I pinned up next to a student from the Bartlett. We shared a brick vault in the middle of the labyrinth, and I recall he was particularly keen to let me know that he'd just bought an Apple PowerBook, and that his father worked at CERN in Geneva.

I was more interested in the tall, thin drawings he’d hung as a pair of triptychs. His scheme had a hybrid brief – something along the lines of a heliport for VTOL aircraft, perched on a tower of hydroponic gardens, with a videotheque at the bottom. All very 1990’s, and the programme was wrapped in a cluster of parasitic towers of the sort which Kevin Rhowbotham’s students usually produced.

For scale, each drawing included a couple of figures from Tank Girl, which dates it even more accurately. TG and her kangaroo Booga were the work of Jamie Hewlett, who produced a strip in Deadline magazine long before the Gorillaz were born. Meantime my own scheme was a portable auditorium, which folded out from an artic trailer like a clunky lotus flower made from fibreglass panels and carbonfibre strakes.

After hanging around eating nibbles while judging took place, we each received a certificate, then hung around some more. As time passed, I looked at my watch and shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. By 5pm I realised I needed to go, immediately, if I was going to make it back to Kings Cross for the last train that would get me back to Scotland that night.

After some hassle from the frosty woman running the awards – who evidently didn't need to get back to Scotland – I pulled down my drawings and fled towards the Piccadilly Line. I ran past clusters of red phoneboxes, which in those days were plastered with the lurid calling cards that you saw along the Euston Road and other down-at-heel parts of London.

With anxiety rising in my gorge, I managed to go through the wrong turnstile at Kings Cross Underground. I was rescued by a cheerful Glasgwegian in LT uniform who unlocked the gate with his universal key and laughed, “Well, ye’ll no dae that agin!” But I made it, clambering aboard an Intercity 225 with ten minutes to spare. Despite the bad press the pre-privatisation British Rail receive nowadays, the whistle blew on time and I was glad to discover there was food on the train, too. My pulse settled and I slowly calmed down.

The last train of the day terminated at Waverley, so my Dad had arranged beforehand to collect me. As I recall, he parked initially on Market Street, but told me that he didn’t like the look of the area; I realised later that was a euphemism. The south side of Waverley was a grimy backwater where ladies in short skirts loitered under the streetlamps. Maybe they still do.

Instead, a railwayman let my father drive down the ramps into the heart of the railway station, to wait for me on the concourse. Nowadays that wouldn’t happen, with all the terrorist barriers, tank traps and ANPR cameras which have turned one of Europe’s great railway stations into a fortification. The train pulled in to a far platform, more or less on time, and its passengers dissolved into the surrounding streets. By now it was almost midnight; it had been a long day.

Casting my mind back to that university trip, I enjoyed a moment of golden reflection which soon turned to a mixture of sadness and anger. As a graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone, I feel bitter that the university’s name is being dragged through the dirt, due to a £40mn funding deficit – just as I imagine graduates of Glasgow School of Art feel betrayed by the chaos which has ensued since the Mackintosh Building burned down, not once but twice.

The obvious question is – why are the people who run Scotland’s universities incompetent? Why do university courts appoint low calibre principals? Why are the financial leaders financially naïve? Why do university managers mismanage budgets and contracts? In most cases, they’re not academics, nor entrepreneurs, nor people who are exceptional in any way.

Instead, I reckon that the university’s so-called leaders are an example of what the political theorist Maurice Glasman calls the “lanyard class”. They’re a cadre of mediocre, middle class professionals who practice a sort of officious managerialism, and whose only loyalty is to themselves. Go on, prove me wrong.

The recent grilling in the Scottish Parliament demonstrates that the deficit is down to a lack of financial probity. The lanyard class believed that the universities were “too big to fail”, just like the major clearing banks were during the financial crash of 2008, so they tried to cover it up, in the belief the government would step in to bail them out if things got worse. And that’s exactly what happened.

I’m no fan of Douglas Ross, but I admire how he wrung an admission of incompetence from the disgraced former principal of the University of Dundee, Iain Gillespie. Hopefully action is now taken to claw back all the golden parachutes, bonuses, expenses for overseas flights taken in First Class, and superannuation schemes which Gillespie and his cronies gained from.

Meantime, what links my trip to London in 1994 with the current débacle is the contrast between public probity and private vice. During the 1990’s, the vices in London and Edinburgh were on public display when you passed through the low-class parts of town. Today’s vices in Dundee and Glasgow are hidden in university boardrooms. Great effort has been taken to keep them out of public view, until now, so that public money continues to churn through the system, benefitting the lanyard class while the students and lecturers suffer.

As a friend said to me recently, pity help the current generation of architecture students who have watched their buildings burn down, followed by financial scandals causing cuts to the teaching staff.

Surely this can’t go on?