Created on: 18 Feb 2026
Date: Wednesday 25th March
Venue: The Radisson Blu, Royal Mile, Edinburgh
Higher education sector in Scotland currently faces a crisis driven by a volatile cocktail of funding instability, systemic governance failures, and the unchecked financialisation of our universities.
The reliance on the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) has become increasingly precarious as real-terms funding declines, while the high-stakes gamble on international student fees exposes institutions to global geopolitical shifts.
This financial fragility has already manifested in aggressive proposals for redundancies and the alarming reduction of course diversity, threatening to turn universities into narrow, market-driven vocational hubs and not the institutions for the betterment of society they once were.
Over the next decade, there will be many aspects of higher education which the EIS ULA will need to be proactive in and ready to engage with when required, including funding security, transparent institutional governance and oversight, charitable status of universities, student recruitment, maintaining and strengthening academic freedom, workload transparency and fairness, and resisting the marketisation of HEIs.
The discussions we have at the 2026 conference will set the basis of our efforts to ensure that the next ten years of higher education in Scotland are defined by academic integrity and professional dignity, rather than austerity and executive overreach.
All EIS ULA members are welcome to attend both the conference and dinner.
