An independent Scotland could become a film powerhouse

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State Higher Education Spending and the Tax Revolt

Public effort in support of higher education – measured as state funding per thousand dollars of personal income – has declined by thirty percent since the late 1970s. During this time period many states implemented Tax and Expenditure Limits and/or supermajority requirements for tax increases. We use a forty-eight state panel from 1961 to 2001 to evaluate the effect of these tax revolt institutions for state effort on behalf of higher education. These provisions have a statistically significant and economically large impact on the timing and magnitude of this decline in state effort. An understanding of the fiscal environment caused by these provisions is critical for the future of state-supported higher education.State higher education spending, tax revolt, Tax and Expenditure Limits

Filmmaking in Scotland

In this short paper, I attempt to lay out the current state of film-making in Scotland before addressing four separate but connected issues: film funding, a film studio, the filmmaking community’s attitude towards Creative Scotland, and film education

The Spanish Civil War in cinema

In this thesis I present a case study of the Spanish civil war in cinema. I examine how this period has been represented in cinema through time, in different countries and in various cinematic forms. I reject the postmodern prognosis that the past is a chaotic mass, made sense of through the subjective narrativisation choices of historians working in the present. On the contrary, I argue that there are referential limits on what histories can be legitimately written about the past. I argue that there are different, often contradictory, representations of the Spanish civil war in cinema which indicates a diversity of uses for the past. But there are also referential limits on what can be legitimately represented cinematically. I argue that the civil war setting will continue to be one which filmmakers turn to as the battle for the future of Spain is partially played out in the cinematically recreated battles of the pa

Some aspects of rural adult education with special reference to East Lothian

The period covered by this paper, from the early eighteenth to the opening of the twentieth century, was one of remarkable progress and development for Scotland's agriculture generally. From a deplorably backward and inefficient agricultural country she rose in the course of two centuries to become one of the most highly mechanised and forward -looking farming communities in western Europe. This progress was especially rapid in favourable situations like East Lothian where relatively fertile soil, climatic conditions, the early development of transport facilities, and the close proximity of a large centre of population like Edinburgh, all aided development. To these must also be added the influence of able and enthusiastic individuals who, either brought in new methods and ideas, or made an effort to spread existing improvements and the results of experiments by means of lectures, correspondence, the printed word, or practical example.In this process, technological advance depended on specialist education in agriculture and the related sciences, but not on that alone. It was equally evident that a general uplifting of basic educational standards of the whole rural community was a necessary pre-requisite to ensure scientific and technological advance. The founders of the Haddington School of Arts saw that very clearly and responded to the need in their provision of a wide diversity of courses in their educational programme. Visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1851 were also, convinced of the need to reassess general educational standards to improve technical efficiency in the light of growing foreign competition. The Haddington School Board endeavored to provide sound basic courses of education so that future specialist knowledge could rest on strong foundations., Professor Wallace of the University of Edinburgh insisted on practical training, together with schoolroom learning as the soundest base for future specialist studies. A measure of their success can be seen in the fact that where Cockburn of Ormiston had to struggle manfully to convince fellow Scots in his own parish that ideas from the outside world could be of value and benefit to them, Professor Wallace, about two centuries later, was sending out highly trained Scots to every quarter of the globe as teachers, managers, and agricultural advisers.The initial beginnings of improvement of Scotland's agriculture appear to have been originally an imported idea from countries like England and Holland where farming practice was core advanced, tut import d by her own sons -- not by foreigners. The Edinburgh Society of Improvers became the first society to generate ideas and distribute agricultural knowledge,that Scotland had known. Party by its influence and by the influence of the general growth of science and technology brought forward in the mechanics' institute movement, local societies like the Haddington School of Arts b -came the main vehicles of advance. The essence, of the printed word to education in a dispersed, rural area through cheap publications or village libraries was also of marked importance, as was the visible example of improved methods given by practising farmers in the area. These, however, proved to be inadequate to bear the growing pressure which the increasing needs of education and the mounting volume of scientific and technological knowledge placed on their resources. Though local school boards could provide a basic education for the children and young adults in their on area, they had neither the financial resources nor the facilities to provide full programmes of adult education, especially in such demanding subjects as agriculture or its related sciences. Improved transport towards the last decades of the nineteenth century Enabled East Lothian people more ready access to Edinburgh, where the advantages to be gained from centralizing agricultural education in larger units could be fully utilised. These advantages, however, had to be carefully weighed against a growing remoteness of the main centre of agricultural education from the farming community in the counties. A sensible via media was arrived at in the courses prvided by the Edinburgh and East of Scotland College of Agriculture in the opening years of this century.The development of facilities and the widening of the scope of agricultural education may be viewed. both as an accumulative and as a continually varying process. Each generation throw bout the period contributed something of value and helped to prepare the way for the next addition or improvement. Although the early societies may appear in retrospect as unsophisticated and woefully inadequate in their resources, they nevertheless played a vital part in their contribution to the general advance. It was from such humble beginnings that our present system of nation-wide provision in agricultural education and research developed. The importance of such advance to Scotland as a nation cannot be over stressed, ad George Henderson reminds us:In the soil lies all that remains of the work of countless generations of the dead. We hold this sacred trust, to maintain the fertility and pass it on unimpaired to the generations to come. The farmer above all must have faith in the future... for a civilization lasts but a thousand years, while in his hands lies the destiny of all mankind

From street to screen: Debord’s drifting cinema

This essay offers a new and original way of relating to the drift by positing it not simply as a pedestrian activity, something that occurs on streets and in cities (as the SI wanted) but rather as a practice that can be expressed in celluloid – in the rhythms and syncopations of montage. Through a close analysis of Debord's second film Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (1959), we argue that this cinematic reading of the drift retains and performs its politics through its capacity to disrupt capitalist modernity's temporal regime. For us, such a regime, as it was for Debord, is predicated on the production of an endless present, in which what matters is how attention is seduced and captured by an expanded notion of the cinematic – the ubiquity of networks of screens, consoles, images and data flows. Faced with the continual refrains of ‘24/7 capitalism’ (Jonathan Crary 2014), it is no longer enough to express political content explicitly and/or to highlight, in Brechtian fashion, the structures of the apparatus. Rather by drawing on (amongst others) the work of Jonathan Beller, Bernard Stiegler, and Michael J. Shapiro, we show how Debord's films retain their relevance in the extent to which their drift-like quality, the irregularity of their rhythms, contests the unspoken choreography of what we call, after Henri Lefebvre, capitalist ‘dressage’. Through its interruptions and stoppages, Debord's cinema, we claim, manages to use the drift as a device for producing memory – the temporal lag that contemporary capital is desperate to erase in order to exhibit its own immediacy as a kind of eternity, the only time worth living

Does Federal Aid Drive College Tuition?

The “greedy colleges” thesis conflicts with how nonprofit universities decide on admissions and pricing

Kilts, tanks, and aeroplanes: Scotland, cinema, and the First World War

This article charts commercial cinema’s role in promoting the war effort in Scotland during the First World War, outlining three aspects of the relationship between cinema and the war as observed in Scottish non-fiction short films produced between 1914 and 1918. The existing practice of local topical filmmaking, made or commissioned by cinema managers, created a particular form of engagement between cinema and war that was substantially different from the national newsreels or official films. The article offers an analysis of surviving short ‘topicals’ produced and exhibited in Scotland, which combine images of local military marches with kilted soldiers and enthusiastic onlookers and were designed to lure the assembled crowds back into the cinema to see themselves onscreen. Synthesising textual analysis with a historical account of the films’ production context, the article examines the films’ reliance on the romanticised militarism of the Highland soldier and the novelty appeal of mobilisation and armament, sidelining the growing industrial unrest and anti-war activities that led to the birth of the term ‘Red Clydeside’. The article then explores how, following the British state’s embracing of film propaganda post-1916, local cinema companies such as Green’s Film Service produced films in direct support of the war effort, for example Patriotic Porkers (1918, for the Ministry of Food). Through their production and exhibition practice exhibitors mediated the international conflict to present it to local audiences as an appealing spectacle, but also mobilised cinema’s position in Scottish communities to advance ideological and practical aspects of the war effort, including recruitment, refugee support, and fundraising