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The screeching sound of U-turns was to be heard at the AUTS council, where delegates vied with one another to welcome the prospect of a Scottish parliament, which would undoubtedly cherish higher education. The AUTS is planning a major conference for 1997 on this topic, but gremlins in the press release transformed the date to 1977, a time when the AUTS took a somewhat different view of devolutionary politics. Indeed, assistant secretary David Bleiman suggested that the conference title at that point would have been "Higher education under a Scottish parliament - the threat, and how to fight it".