Good fences make good neighbours

William S. Burroughs, doyen of the beat poets, once said that “in the magical universe, there are no coincidences”. What to make, then, of the improbable confluence of news that the Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) and the University of Edinburgh (UoE) could merge in 2013 with rubbished reports of plans to sell the Moray House education campus? Suggestions that the éminences grises of the two institutions, ECA’s Professor Ian Howard and UoE’s Sir Timothy O’Shea, are plotting an asset-strip of one of Britain’s oldest art schools?established by a happily coincidental act of philanthropy by Board of Trustees for Fisheries, Manufactures and Improvements in Scotland in 1760?likely belong in a fantasy world as vivid as Burroughs’. The fire sale of ECA’s property portfolio may not be the only danger, however.
Of the two student bodies, it is certainly ECA students who live in a ‘magical universe’. Resources at the art college are directed in such a way as to have the greatest effect on the student experience possible. The majority of the physical plant itself is put at students’ disposition; everyone is guaranteed a personal studio space, and wall space is set aside for student-curated exhibitions. Funding is directed in a similar fashion; while UoE students have long awaited the benefits of the Main Library Redevelopment Project, ECA students have enjoyed top-quality modern library, study and catering facilities in Evolution House since 2003. Extensive free-to-use audio-visual and art equipment facilities; student-run cash prizes for degree exhibitions; assessment by artists-in-residence and professional designers; college-subsidised excursions to destinations across the globe – all these reflect an institution that recognises its top priority is the standard of education its students enjoy.
Contrast this with the University of Edinburgh, where funding that dwarfs the ECA budget and the financial security of a weighty property portfolio cannot guarantee a positive student experience. The list of indictments is damning: budget cuts across multiple subject areas; growing class sizes; underpaid, overworked, and in some cases soon-to-be unemployed staff; poor feedback; often non-existent contact time; crumbling, overstretched facilities only now being overhauled by a redevelopment programme playing catch-up. In and of itself, the University of Edinburgh stands, as it always has done, near the summit of higher education in Britain; put alongside ECA, however, and it looks very much like an institution that doesn’t care about its students.
It is questionable whether UoE would even be an appropriate partner for ECA; who could deny that a Russell Group university—whose reputation and funding is driven by research in medical and scientific fields, with a population of 25,000 studying a wide range of disciplines?might simply swallow up an art college of just 1,600 students? The evidence suggests as much: since switching its diploma allocation from Heriot-Watt University to UoE in 2004, ECA programmes have increasingly had to adapt to an academic culture that has little to do with training talented and creative artists and designers. Fashion students have had one of their projects designing and produce an outfit replaced by an essay; the recently-imposed CVCS course in art history is so unpopular that one candidate in the recent student presidential elections made its abolition part of his platform.
A recent study found that roughly 80 percent of art students are dyslexic; how will they fare with the obscurantist bureaucracy of UoE’s disability office, ‘special circumstances panels’ and ‘adjusted timetables’? ECA students enjoy the close, day-to-day informal contact with their tutors that the small size of their college affords them; will they adjust to the one-hour-a-week office times of Directors of Studies they have no rapport with?
Professor Howard’s email to ECA students suggests that the art college and the university have much to learn from each other, but no amount of cliché can obscure the reality that ECA has nothing to gain and much to lose from a merger. Though the character of their college may identify with the anti-establishment Burroughs, in this case ECA students would do well to embrace the words of the far more mainstream Robert Frost: “good fences make good neighbours”.