Vice-chancellors, add your voices to the call for a second EU referendum | Nick Hillman

Since the EU referendum, university leaders have worked hard to accept the result while highlighting the challenges ahead. Amid concerns that the vote for Brexit showed a disconnect between universities and their local communities, some have sought to engage with those outside their institutions more deeply. But they have, seemingly, shied away from becoming too involved in the wider public debates. It is worth asking whether the time has come to re-enter the fray.

It seems to me that the higher education sector’s leaders could be helping to prepare the ground for a second referendum on our future relationship with the EU. There is a long tradition of countries having two votes on controversial European matters and it seems increasingly plausible that the UK could do likewise.

Vice-chancellors may feel they got their fingers burnt last time around by criticisms of their Universities UK-coordinated campaign, which included those from journalist Michael Crick, who branded it “unhealthy” and “un-academic”. But it is university leaders’ core function to fight for what they perceive to be in the best interests of their institutions, and students should be exposed to a range of views – including theirs.

The second referendum matters because if negotiations go well and the UK ends up with a closer relationship to the EU than any other independent country, some will say the referendum result had not been respected. Conversely, if they go badly and we end up with “no deal”, this too could look different to what many people expected.

The end result of the negotiations could also be somewhere between those two outcomes of a good deal and no deal – perhaps a messy and uneasy compromise, satisfying few. In those circumstances, it would be odd to think the 2016 result should be the final word.

The UK’s membership of the EU is an issue of such profound importance that it would be strange not to put the alternative, when we know more about it, to a vote. The UK has had 11 other official referendums in less than 50 years. Arguably, not one of them was on an issue as important as the outcome of the Brexit negotiations.

The most important issue for the university sector is that campaigning for a second referendum could increase the likelihood of a better outcome.

Having a second referendum hanging over the heads of those on both sides negotiating the UK’s exit could do two things. First, it could provide Brussels and the other EU countries with a road map for keeping the UK in the EU, encouraging them to offer us more positive options for the future – including on science and research. Second, offering another referendum could give further cause for the UK negotiators to secure a good deal – if they do not, their deal (or any no-deal situation) risks losing at the ballot box, sending them to political ignominy.

The Brexit issues most bothering the higher education sector – such as staff and student mobility, EU research funding and regional development cash – could be placed centre-stage in the negotiations if universities lobbied confidently for a second referendum.

There is no guarantee a second referendum would overturn the first, but it is surely better to set the country’s future path on the basis of a referendum on a detailed proposal than on the last one, when people were not sure precisely what they were voting for.

Let us not forget that Dominic Cummings – who was the director of Vote Leave and the person who probably did more to ensure Brexit than anyone else – wrote a year before the UK voted to leave that “a no vote does not mean we would immediately leave and it seems likely that the parties will be forced by public opinion to offer a second vote”. Universities, take note.

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