In his inaugural speech last January, Prof George Bain, the new Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University, made clear his belief that the institution was not achieving its full potential. He warned that he would be introducing early-retirement measures to make possible the recruitment of "younger and more productive staff".
The university's goal should be excellence, not elitism, he said, and a central part of striving for excellence was a high-quality research environment.
It was the first real sign that an uncomfortable wind of change was about to blow through the cosy quadrangles and leafy streets of the campus. The seeds of that change went back to 1992 and 1996, when UK assessments of universities' research performance - the key determinant of funding for British higher education institutions - showed that Queen's was low down the "league table".
In 1996 the Belfast university was placed 49th out of 102. Other provincial "red-brick universities", which Queen's likes to compare itself with, fared considerably better: Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds came 19th, 23rd and 25th, respectively. Between 85 and 91 per cent of their staff were doing work considered worthy of submission to the UK Research Assessment Exercise, compared to only 74 per of the Queen's academics.
In May, the senior academic management group charged with looking at the university's future structures, chaired by the Vice-Chancellor, made a number of recommendations aimed at improving this situation. They proposed that four departments - geology, Italian, statistics and operational research, and Semitic studies - should be closed.
They were very critical of "research-inactive" and "mediocre" staff in other areas such as biology and biochemistry, chemistry, English, philosophy, economics and even some aspects of law and medicine.
Clinical medicine, for example, had "a longer research-inactive tail than any other area in the university". Chemistry had "a considerable number of mediocre staff."
Out of this report came a package of proposals which included the closure of the four departments, as recommended; the voluntary severance or early retirement of 107 academics; the recruitment of 110 new staff in an effort to push up research performance; and £25 million in investment over the next four years, almost 80 per cent of it to go on staff costs.
The package was approved in late May by an 80 per cent vote of the academic council and in early June by the senate, the university's governing body, without a vote being cast against. The representatives of the academics' union, the Association of University Teachers (AUT), abstained.
On August 29th, 103 professors and lecturers signed an open letter, published in the Belfast Tele- graph, protesting that many people who had played an active role in the life of the university through the "difficult times" of the past 25 years were now being asked to leave. They stressed that their work involved not only research, but also teaching and administration, and it was usually these aspects which were most appreciated by the wider community in Northern Ireland.
One of the most outspoken critics of the proposals has been Prof Edna Longley, of the Department of English, one of Ireland's leading literary critics. She says many academic tasks - editing journals, overseeing theses, reading manuscripts for publishers, supervising dissertations - do not show up on the Research Assessment Exercise, which stresses publication, and thus the "drive for individual success", above all else.
She attacks the "crass man agerialism" and "sinister language" of senior Queen's administrators, with their references to the "relatively weak" not being allowed to "pull down the strong".
For the local branch of the AUT, Dr Richard Jay says everyone accepts the need to improve the university's research performance. However, the way this is being done by drawing up a "hit list" of over 10 per cent of the academic staff is seen as a "pretty simplistic and brutal way of dealing with a complex problem".
The last vice-chancellor, Sir Gordon Beveridge, used to say privately that about 5 per cent of the university's academics were not up to the job. The problem with the present proposals is that they involve double that percentage, including more than a few people with respectable research records.
The distinguished former professor of Greek, Dr George Huxley, has written to the British Education Secretary, Mr David Blunkett, asking him to stop the next Research Assessment Exercise in 2001 because "British academic life is being ruined by the imposition of business school doctrines of quantification utterly inappropriate to the life of the mind, to original thought, and profound, long study".
Prof Bain is unapologetic. In an interview with The Irish Times this week, he said he believed good-quality university teaching and research went hand in hand.
"We are looking for balanced excellence", Prof Bain said. He emphasised that quality of teaching was one of the greatest strengths at Queen's.