Connect/Eddie Holt: The future of Irish university education has featured in the news and letters pages of this newspaper in recent weeks.
The future of University College Dublin, the country's largest university, has featured most prominently. On Wednesday, a page-lead headline proclaimed: "Expert group calls for radical reform of UCD". The experts were from the Washington Advisory Group (WAG).
It would be churlish to suggest that WAG has not expertise; it has. However, it's equally churlish to ignore its agenda. Like the Skilbeck report of 2002 and this year's OECD education review, WAG's recommendations are not politically neutral. It is, after all, a privately held group which, like Skilbeck and the OECD, predictably urges more private sector involvement in education.
WAG, comprising scientists, engineers, doctors, information technology and management specialists was bought last month by the LECG corporation. LECG, another private entity, is a law and economics consulting outfit which has received funding from the infamous Enron. Nonetheless, "the Washington Advisory Group is pleased to join LECG," said WAG's president, Bruce Guile. The group, Guile added, was pleased to join LECG, "as it enables us to offer LECG's intellectual property management and economics expertise to our clients, while leveraging investment capital for growth". "Leveraging" means using borrowed money to buy a company. The entire LECG (now including WAG) agenda is business and that's a disastrously narrow basis for education.
Frank Rhodes, a WAG director and president emeritus of Cornell University, confirmed the group's agenda in March, 1999. He told the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges: "We this_is_a_left_sq_bracketacademia] are about to become a deregulated industry with all the turmoil that has produced for other industries, including the airlines. We are now in a new ball game." We certainly are, Frank.
Anyway, he continued: "The University of Phoenix had, last year, 60,000 students enrolled and its profits - its profits - [note Rhodes's repetition for emphasis] were $33 million in 1997. Its price to earnings ratio is 50, which makes it a glamour stock."
Borrowing (leveraging?) from Rhodes's repetition: do we want universities to aim to become "glamour stock"? Is that what education is about - making mega-money for investors? Perhaps in the "new ball game" it is. The Ryanair model (Rhodes did mention the deregulated airline industry) for universities sounds alarming. Yet the rest of WAG's head honchos would agree with him. Consider a few of them: Allan Bromley, Robert White, Maxine Savits, Thomas Caskey and Victoria Hamilton.
Bromley, a Yale science professor, has railed against the "general media" for disseminating thinking that technology can be "destructive of the world environment". The "indoctrination all too frequently begins in elementary schools where science courses too often focus on endangered species and the fate of the rain forests to the exclusion of almost all else," he said in March, 2001.
White has consistently emphasised new energy technology to deal with climate change because the Kyoto Agreement would be a "massive experiment with the US economy". Savits recently retired from the position of general manager for technology partnerships at Honeywell. She is on numerous US boards including that of the Electric Power Research Institute.
Caskey, a doctor, is also chief executive and president of Cogene BioTech Ventures, a venture capital outfit. Hamilton was vice-president of General American Investors from 1992 to 1995 and a director from 1996 to 1998. And so it goes with WAG, all of whose members repeatedly emphasise the economic returns of technology. Fair enough, but these are not neutral "experts".
Anyway, Rhodes has the best lines. His article The 'Art of the Presidency' (of a university) was published in a journal titled The Presidency in 1998. "Passive presidents litter the landscape and their pallid institutions reflect their listless leadership," he wrote. Rhodes clearly sees himself as a man of action. "Too many mission statements are shallow and self-serving," he added. "They are full of academic buzzwords and scholarly clichés but empty of substance and bereft of significant purpose. The president should employ his or her best skills to dream [to dream?] the institution into something new, to challenge it to greatness, to elevate its hopes and to energise it to new levels of success and galvanise it to higher levels of achievement."
Well done, Frank. (No buzzwords or clichés in that advice, of course!) Allan Bromley, lobbying for investment in science and technology, told a meeting at Yale: "It is important to remember that the technology deployed in Desert Storm in the early 1990s that caught the attention of the entire world resulted from investments in science and technology made in the early 1960s."
It's clear that WAG sees universities as business corporations to develop technology. No doubt UCD, like the rest of Ireland's third-level colleges, requires radical reform. But nothing would be more radical than persuading "socialist" Bertie Ahern not to sell them off on the advice of a cabal of millionaire academic neo-cons. Now that would be real leadership.