This week, The Herald is collaborating with Scottish Affairs - Scotland’s longest running journal on contemporary political and social issues - published by Edinburgh University Press. Each day, academics from across Scotland's universities will be giving their thoughts on Scotland's university crisis: the battle for survival. From finances to management, what is going on behind the scenes at our institutions? What is needed to secure their futures?

Here, Sebastian Monteux and Linda Murdoch warn that rising emotional‑safety rules are changing how Scotland’s universities teach, regulate behaviour, and handle debate.

Our articles are a shortened version of full academic papers, all of which can be found at Scottish Affairs.

The historic mission of universities has long centred on knowledge, debate, and intellectual inquiry. In Scotland, in particular, universities have traditionally been understood as civic institutions oriented toward the public good and the cultivation of democratic culture. However, in recent years, growing concern over emotional safety and discomfort around contentious issues has led universities to more tightly regulate behaviour, speech, and the boundaries of permissible debate.

This shift reflects broader political, cultural, and economic forces such as marketisation, internationalisation, and Scotland’s devolved social policy. Universities are actively reinterpreting and reshaping their missions in response to these pressures. Financial sustainability, reputation management, and visible alignment with moral and social priorities have become central governing imperatives, sometimes displacing traditional academic goals.

At the same time, an expanded interpretation of universities’ ‘duty of care’ has legitimised greater involvement in students’ wellbeing, blurring the boundary between academic provision and a more paternal in loco parentis model of corporate responsibility that extends beyond traditional pastoral care.

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Once confined largely to pastoral and welfare services, concerns about emotional and psychological safety now play a central role in shaping university governance and sector-wide regulation. This shift toward a therapeutic understanding of higher education places increasing emphasis on managing feelings and regulating behaviour, reshaping how authority and responsibility operate within academic life.

Harm, Safety, and New Expectations

The corporate culture of contemporary higher education now sets expectations for behaviour as well as for the emotional dispositions of students and staff. Policies and frameworks encourage people to monitor and share their emotions, normalising some feelings while casting others as problems. Reports of rising student mental health issues reflect complex generational challenges but also signal a shift in how difficulty is understood and responded to. Ordinary academic challenges such as critical feedback, intellectual disagreement, exams, or deadlines are now framed as potential threats to mental health rather than as integral parts of learning.

Increasingly, staff refer everyday emotional challenges to counselling or disability services, believing these fall outside their academic role. Issues once handled informally through conversation and pastoral discretion are now routinely referred to specialist support structures. While often appropriate, this strengthens the authority of therapeutic language and moves decision-making away from pedagogy towards the management of wellbeing and emotional risk.

'An expanded interpretation of universities’ ‘duty of care’ has legitimised greater involvement in students’ wellbeing' (Image: Getty Images)

Here, we advocate a forward-looking approach rather than a return to a mythologised past, recognising that attention to care and inclusion can be important, while questioning whether the systematic avoidance of discomfort and challenge can coexist with the university’s scholarly and civic purpose. As emotional safety becomes a governing norm, challenge and risk – the conditions through which knowledge advances – are progressively constrained. In a sector historically defined by inquiry and contestation, the growing regulation of feeling raises a central question: can universities still foster intellectual resilience, or are they in danger of institutionalising vulnerability?

By the time they reach university, many students in Scotland have already been conditioned through Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) to view education in terms of emotional safety and regulation. “Therapeutic education”, as articulated by Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes, has centred schooling around self-esteem, resilience, and emotional literacy. This expectation, that feelings will be recognised and supported, persists into higher education, shaping both student experience and institutional priorities.

Since 2010, CfE has embedded social and emotional skills at the heart of national education policy, reinforcing this therapeutic orientation that higher education increasingly mirrors. CfE’s four capacities: “successful learners,” “confident individuals,” “responsible citizens,” and “effective contributors” are tightly linked to emotional governance ideals. This context predisposes students to expect and value emotional safety, giving wellbeing frameworks particular resonance in Scottish universities.

The ‘therapeutic turn’ does not displace scholarship altogether, but it does reweight priorities, placing increasing emphasis on managing feelings and regulating behaviour alongside teaching and research. Linda Murdoch’s research on changes to student mental health and wellbeing support suggests that universities are beginning to resemble quasi-health environments. Increasingly, psychological vulnerability is anticipated, managed, and even encouraged, with more students identifying as mentally and emotionally fragile.

Marketisation and Emotional Governance

The rise of emotional language in universities is often presented as a welcome cultural correction. Yet as higher education has become more market-driven and metrics-led, the authority once grounded in disciplinary expertise and open debate has weakened. Concern for care and wellbeing now steps in to fill that gap, offering a morally resonant basis for legitimacy in a competitive and reputationally sensitive sector.

This development is closely tied to the marketisation of higher education – the growing tendency to treat universities as competitive service providers rather than scholarly communities. Performance metrics risk privileging efficiency and satisfaction over educational depth, embedding managerial structures at the expense of academic democracy. Students are increasingly framed as consumers, and reputation hinges on wellbeing indicators, satisfaction surveys, and employability outcomes. Despite free tuition for Scottish undergraduates, universities remain responsive to UK-wide metrics such as the National Student Survey (NSS), which frames students as consumers prioritising satisfaction and employability over intellectual rigour.

In Scotland, these dynamics are channelled through the Scottish Funding Council’s (SFC) Outcome Agreements, which tie funding to demonstrable progress on access, equality, and wellbeing. While socially valuable, such frameworks also embed reputational incentives into governance, encouraging performativity and risk aversion. Emotional governance thrives in this environment because managing campus climate becomes a strategic priority alongside teaching and research.

Moral Regulation and Self-Censorship

Emotional governance also overlaps with moral regulation. Codes of conduct, inclusive language guidance, and Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion strategies now define respectful behaviour and the emotional boundaries of acceptable speech. The familiar refrain, “It’s not what you said, it’s the way you said it”, shifts attention from argument to emotional tone.

This development is felt across the UK. Many academics now self-censor out of concern for emotional impact and reputational risk. The Sullivan Review documents how social and professional pressures, including ostracism and complaints, shape behaviour informally yet effectively. A 2025 Office for Students poll found that one in five academics avoid controversial topics for fear of backlash.

'Many academics now self-censor out of concern for emotional impact and reputational risk' (Image: PA)

This form of regulation rarely relies on explicit punishment. Instead, it operates through self-monitoring. Where boundaries are unclear, staff and students learn to adjust tone and content pre-emptively, acting cautiously to avoid offence or complaint. Over time, values such as kindness, psychological safety, and inclusion acquire strong moral authority, making them difficult to question without social and professional risk. The result is anticipatory compliance.

These expectations are then embedded through training modules, reporting systems, and performance audits that translate ethical aspirations into administrative routines. Wellbeing becomes a measurable outcome; care becomes a deliverable.

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Policy, Massification, and Emotional Control

Scotland’s devolved education system allows close alignment between national priorities and university strategies. The SFC’s Outcome Agreements tie funding to access, retention, equality, and wellbeing, turning symbolic commitments into regulatory imperatives. Government frameworks such as the Student Mental Health Action Plan further extend emotional governance into curriculum design, staff development, and policy.

Massification – the rapid growth and diversification of the student population – has brought greater visibility to underrepresented groups and significantly increased universities’ responsibility for student wellbeing. In Scotland’s post-devolution context, this responsibility is reinforced by progressive policy commitments, operationalised through funding formulas, quality assurance measures, and reputational incentives. As a result, emotional safety has become a baseline expectation of the university experience.

Emotional governance in Scottish higher education is increasingly proactive. Universities codify emotive language and values such as ‘safe space,’ ‘compassion,’ ‘inclusive excellence,’ ‘belonging,’ and ‘lived experience ' into policies, training, induction, and pedagogy. This institutionalisation extends school-based emotional literacy into a university regime in which emotional affirmation is treated as a virtue and discomfort is more readily understood as harm.

Labels such as ‘trauma-affected,’ ‘vulnerable,’ and ‘neurodivergent’ do not simply describe experience or signal additional need but help constitute new subjects, shaping norms about how staff and students are expected to feel and participate. The moral imperative to disclose vulnerability normalises what has been described as an “invitation to fragility,” potentially limiting agency and discouraging robust disagreement. As a result, emotional self-disclosure becomes a normative expectation within strategies, wellbeing charters, and academic misconduct policies, linking moral comportment to academic and professional evaluation.

Collectively, this combination of language, policy, and incentive structures shapes everyday behaviour, recasting vulnerability as a moral and professional responsibility rather than solely a personal experience. It encourages staff and students to align themselves with the university’s emotional and ethical expectations. The convergence of school-based emotional literacy, massification, and Scotland’s distinctive political priorities has produced a higher education environment in which emotional norms play a central role in defining legitimacy and culture.

The New Etiquette – and Its Costs

University staff are now expected to manage student wellbeing, avoid ‘triggering’ content, and create emotionally inclusive classrooms. However, vague boundaries encourage anticipatory self-censorship, with many favouring emotional permissibility over intellectual risk.

'Concerns about emotional and psychological safety now play a central role in shaping university governance' (Image: PA)

Scottish political culture’s performative valorisation of social equity and the minimisation of psychological harm intensify these pressures. Universities frame inclusion and psychological safety as foundational to innovation and leadership. While seemingly fostering empathy and participation, these initiatives extend emotional norms into academic judgment, potentially narrowing the range of acceptable approaches.

These internal cultural shifts are reinforced by the outsourcing of moral governance to external accreditation bodies. Schemes such as Athena Swan and the Race Equality Charter translate Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion values into compliance frameworks tied to funding, rankings, and reputation. Although credited with progress in representation, these schemes can entrench narrow ideological frameworks and constrain alternative perspectives and debate. The risk is displacing disciplinary contestation with administrative conformity and entrenching an intellectual monoculture.

Taken together, these changes create a new kind of etiquette in Scottish higher education: a moral and emotional code of conduct where a person’s sense of belonging depends as much on emotional alignment with institutional values as on academic inquiry. As a result, care shifts from an ethical practice to a formal mechanism of governance and control.

Student distress and emotional needs require accessible, compassionate support. However, intellectual plurality and academic freedom are quietly reshaped when critique or exposure to challenge is reframed as harm. There is a growing perception that emotional conformity is valued more highly than independent critical thinking and debate.

This isn’t an argument against care or inclusion. It’s a warning about what happens when they become compulsory rules rather than being practised as part of everyday human relationships. A university that collapses discomfort into harm risks narrowing debate and undermining the conditions under which intellectual growth can flourish.

Care Without Compliance

Emotional governance in Scottish higher education is co-produced by policymakers, university leaders, professional staff, and academics who navigate reputational and moral pressures across policy, leadership, and academic practice.  Our concern is the growing assumption that formalised rules and etiquette must govern every interaction.

A sustainable way forward depends on recognising the difference between care as an ethos—voluntary, relational, and open to difference—and care as governance, where support becomes formalised, compulsory, and closely monitored. Scotland’s devolved policy landscape presents an opportunity to safeguard dissent, pluralistic inquiry, and intellectual risk, rather than to design procedural frameworks.

Universities thrive when ideas, rather than feelings, define the limits of legitimate disagreement. Without careful recalibration, Scotland’s universities face a choice: whether care remains a shared ethical practice that supports intellectual challenge, or whether it becomes a governing norm that quietly narrows the space for debate on which democratic inquiry depends.

Sebastian Monteux is a Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing at Abertay University

Linda Murdoch is the former Director of Careers at the University of Glasgow, where she also received her doctorate in 2024. Her research explores the unintentional impacts of holistic mental health policies on Higher Education.

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