As participation in third-level education increases, the moral power and social influence of our universities will become enormous, the President, Mrs McAleese, said yesterday.
Much money had been invested in the university sector, Mrs McAleese said, but this did not mean the third-level system should be governed solely by "product line measurements". A university's job was to ground knowledge in a wider philosophical, moral, social and ethical framework. The university was a place "where the water engineer and poet both have space".
The President was delivering the inaugural University College Dublin Millennium lecture in Newman House, entitled: "The University in Society - The Moral Power of Knowledge."
She said: "The people have invested a lot of that hard equity, money, in our university sector. With that money they have invested the hopes of a people who believe passionately in the power of knowledge and who want that power exercised morally, exercised well, to build a country, a civilisation to be proud of.
"There has never been a period in history when we have had greater need of people empowered to debate wisely and intelligently the growing litany of weighty dilemmas which our scientific sophistication confronts us with."
Among these issues were the advances in genetic research, the "unruliness" of the World Wide Web and the poor availability of treatments for AIDS, especially in the Third World.
"We need an educated and articulate public debate which helps frame coherent and appropriate social, legal and political responses," she said. "In the coming generations a much greater proportion of our young people will go on to college than ever before. The social influence, the moral power of our small number of universities and colleges will be enormous."