Owen Dudley Edwards: Our universities are warm places

On 11 July 2002 an all-party House of Commons select committee proposed that the interest rate for student loans be raised appreciably. Government intentions for higher education "reform" will not be known until November, but this straw probably tells how that wind will blow. Tories supported Labour, perhaps because the report declared that the 1998 reforms had failed. A Liberal Democrat was swept aside when he proposed that England follow Scotland with its graduate tax.

A majority of the present Scottish Parliament was in fact pledged when elected in 1999 to oppose any fees for university students. Only Labour wanted to follow England and after tortuous attempts to mobilise pressure from English-dominated bodies the Labour/Lib Dem coalition Executive compromised. So the first clear signal that the Scottish Parliament won't simply be a rubber stamp for Westminster, came on university education.

Scotland believes in higher education as a national investment for the future. England is told by the select committee that it is a private investment which on the whole the individual should find worthwhile. It shouldn't take long to convince prospective students that Scotland's system is preferable, if the November proposals follow the select committee. But as things stand now, the blue water between Scotland and England tells its own story.

Traditionally, the Scots have portrayed themselves as believers in the diffusion of higher education to the widest possible number (which from the later 19th century meant both sexes). Scots contrasted themselves with the supposed educators of future rulers, and owners of England at Oxbridge were unhappy if sometimes brilliant scholars pounded Latin conjugations into the mutton heads of English squires dreaming of huntin', shootin', fishin' and wenchin'. The Scots may have exaggerated their Democratic Intellect, but in this case a myth is as good as a mile. Scottish national identity – with or without independence – sees itself as investing in the potential achievement of its students.

There is a grim side to it. Most Scots lower-class children still don't think in university terms. If they did, they would have a free ride, in England as well as Scotland.

But the Scots are giving some chance to the lower middle-class, who can least afford the Government loans and who yet have so much to give to the future prosperity of the country. The Scottish Nationalists, Opposition in the Scottish Parliament, are pledged to a free education for all, so unlike England the leading alternative to the present government supports more, not less, funding for the future intellect of the country.

This is the great case for seeking a university education in Scotland. The student is looked on here as the hope of the country's future, not as the victim of its present. It's no paradise: students here, as in England, are still being driven from study to frequently demeaning underpaid part-time jobs to give themselves the basics of life. This is shameful, and it is a betrayal by all present politicians, every one of whom got their start in far better conditions.

The four-year degree is another example of the higher Scottish respect for young intellects. It's based on the belief that a university is a place to study a subject, not to cram for it. It's no longer the case that Scottish universities differ so much from English as they did when Arthur Conan Doyle was able to say 100 years ago that the Scottish graduate was an adult, where his English counterpart was still a magnified schoolboy. But the extra year makes that vital difference more than a mere ghost of the past.

Scottish universities have become warmer places, in all senses, even if pressures of bureaucracy are making it harder for us, as well as for our English counterparts, to give as much time to students as we would like. (We're still regularly thanked by American visiting students for giving more time and interest than they get back home.) We offer more cosmopolitanism than England: you get more sense of living among several peoples watching the Scots hosts and their many differing student incomers, none differing so much perhaps as the northern and southern English. The northern English are very popular in Scotland, and discover much in common with it. The southern English have more to unlearn, especially that they are no longer still in England. In four years, some of them never learn that, and over longer periods neither do some of their teachers.

And that, of course, is the catch. If you come to Scotland expecting it to be an England with trivial and faintly irritating local differences, you are wasting your time. You'll get a good education, but you won't be alive while you're getting it. If you know you are there, you will be participating in a fascinating, developing society, with everything to play for, and with fine traditions – above all that students are to be encouraged.

The writer is a lecuturer in history at the University of Edinburgh