Eight months after the installation of its new president and vice-chancellor, Queens University Belfast is at the centre of a staff dispute. A £25 million investment and academic restructuring package has caused great ire in some quarters.
Departments are to be axed and 110 academics, deemed to be "not actively involved in research" or "research inactive", have been offered early retirement and severance deals. Meanwhile, the college intends replacing these academics with new staff who have good track records in research. Understandably, the academics whose services are to be dispensed with are angry, but whether they can muster the support of the rest of the staff is doubtful. Professor George Bain, the new president and vice-chancellor - and incidentally an expert in industrial relations - is adamant that he has the support of 80 per cent of Queens' staff. "I feel comfortable with 80 per cent," he says. "The Good Friday Agreement only achieved 70 per cent support." It was the "Research Assessment Exercise" (RAE) of 1992, in which a number of QUB departments fared badly, that prompted a strategic review of the university to be put in place. RAEs and "Teaching Quality Audits" were introduced by the British Conservative government as a means of monitoring the quality of university work. Fare badly in the assessments, the policy said, and you lose your funding. The Queen's review group recommended a critical review of the subjects offered by the university. An academic planning group was set up "to determine the future academic size, shape and structure of Queens". The group's study highlights a number of departments which are under-achieving and some staff whom it describes as "mediocre and barely research active". As a result of the review, Queen's has decided to axe a number of departments - Italian, Semitic studies, geology and statistics and operational research - and the 110 academics have received severance notices.
The report, Bain stresses, was opposed by only 20 per cent of the academic council and "was passed by the Senate without a single dissenting vote". In fact, Queen's vice-chancellor asserts, he is under pressure to take even stronger measures to improve QUB's research quality. Academics working in good research departments believe that they are currently being forced to bankroll weaker areas, he says.
Bain has been accused of downplaying the role of teaching in the university, but he denies this. "Teaching is not a problem at Queen's - in the national Teaching Quality Assessments the university came in the first quartile of universities. The problem is in research where we have areas of great strength but also areas of great weakness.
`There is an assumption that because you are a good researcher you're not a good teacher, but nothing could be further from the truth. We are looking for balanced excellence. I don't think it's too much to ask academics to be good at both - otherwise what's the difference between a university and a good high school? "High-school staff have heavy teaching loads but do no research. In university, academic staff have teaching loads of eight to 12 hours per week. There is no question of devaluing teaching. Queen's will continue to work to improve in this area." If Bain appears to have a tough job on his hands, he relishes it. He took up his new position because he saw it as a challenge, he says. "In my career I've changed jobs every seven or eight years - because after that period I've stopped learning." When you start to do your job on automatic pilot, it's time to move on, he observes.
But why Queen's? "Everyone told me that Queen's was not achieving its full potential and needed to change. In my career I've tended to to take jobs which called for the management of change. It's something I have a knack for." Tall, slim and urbane, Bain has impressive credentials. A Canadian by birth, son of a Northern Irish mother and Scottish carpenter father, he comes to the job via the University of Manitoba, Oxford University and the Universities of Manchester and Warwick. Most recently he was principal of the London Business School and remains chairman of the Low Pay Commission in Britain. The introduction of RAEs was a controversial one in Britain, but George Bain is a firm supporter of the process. Irish universities, incidentally, are concerned that a similar approach will adopted here. "The Research Assessment Exercise is a system of peer review which broadly gives the type of assessment that the academic community would give," Bain asserts. "I'm a strong supporter of academic freedom, but that doesn't mean that we don't have to be accountable. To get money and not do research would be a dereliction of duty. "I'm in favour of outside scrutiny. The performance of British universities has improved since the assessment exercises began." Universities in the Republic would also benefit from the type of benchmarking available in Britain and Northern Ireland, he says. Recruiting a raft of academic high fliers could prove difficult. "For the last few decades, Northern Ireland has not been a place to which people were coming naturally," Bain replies. "To the extent that we now have a sustainable peace, even after Omagh, I think it's going to be a lot easier."
However, good academics are in short supply. "We have established new chairs in Celtic (studies) and history and we don't anticipate difficulties in finding good people, but in computing and electronic engineering, for example, where we are competing with industry, it will be more difficult."
The university, he recognises, will have to offer good financial packages; however, he says, you don't become an academic to make a lot of money. Research support and opportunities to pursue areas of interest are equally important. Nonetheless, a major task in the coming months is to examine incentive packages for academics.
The Queen's vice-chancellor says he is a champion of mature students. A major theme at third level is the widening of access, he says. But, "in some quarters there is a view that if you widen access you have to dumb down courses and push up exam results to let people pass". This view is wrong, he argues. "There is a tremendous amount of talent out there, especially in a region which still retains the 11-plus exam. A lot of people miss the boat and don't get a chance to have a good academic education. "I've spent most of my life working with mature students and they are a joy to teach and do as well or better than school-leavers with traditional A-Levels." Northern Ireland, Bain says, "has the best education system and in some ways the worst. The proportion of people in Northern Ireland sitting A-Levels is higher than in Britain and they get higher results. Forty-two per cent of 18- to 21 year-olds here go to university. In Britain only 32 per cent go. Having said that, the worst-educated group in Europe are young, working class, Protestant males."
The new vice-chancellor raised some eyebrows when he took to going for a pint in the students' union bar. "I'm keen to encourage all sections of the community to use the union," Bain explains. These days, QUB's students' union is regarded as a Catholic enclave and is avoided by Protestants. "The reality is," says Bain, " that the student union is doing everything it can to rectify this. We are very fortunate in our student-union leaders. They have gone out of their way to create an environment that is supportive of both communities."
By the end of this academic year, Queen's hopes to announce a major new initiative for the union. "My objective is to improve the student union building," Bain promises. "We want to make it so attractive that no one can afford to avoid it."
