Dr Edward Walsh, the retiring president of the University of Limerick (in the literal rather than the self-effacing sense), is a unnerving figure.
At the age of 29 - my age now - he was given the responsibility of creating and managing the institution that would become the National Institute of Higher Education, Limerick and eventually, in 1989, the University of Limerick. At the age of 29, I can't manage my finances. I can't manage relationships. Given the opportunity to manage a college, I would run it into the ground within 12 months and be tied up in expensive litigation for the rest of my days.
So Dr Walsh, in his three-piece pinstripe suits, tends to make me a little nervous. There is also, it should be noted, his startling physical resemblance to the actor Ian Richardson, who played the villainous prime minister Francis Urquhart in the TV series House of Cards. At one point, I recall, Urquhart pushed an unfortunate journalist from the top of the Houses of Parliament. As I shake Dr Walsh's hand in his small but well-appointed office in the University of Limerick, I have an unsettling vision of my fragile body plummeting from the top of the university's Foundation Building.
"Compelling ideas"
You see, Dr Walsh and I don't see eye to eye on certain matters. I am not alone in this. There are probably a great many people who don't see eye to eye with him. Thumbing through yellowed press clippings about his various pronouncements, it's not difficult to see why. Absentee parents, former government ministers, arts educators, trade unionists, socialists and those who procreate excessively have all felt the lash of his tongue. He was once described, somewhat left-handedly, as "a man of a few compelling ideas". This was unfair: he has lots of ideas, some compelling, some irritating, some profound and some profoundly irritating.
It is in the area of arts education that Dr Walsh has tended to act like a particularly ill-tempered cat among a gathering of highly-strung pigeons, and it is in this area that Dr Walsh and I knock heads. Dr Walsh's view is that an arts degree, unmodified by some grounding in the sciences, is too narrow an education for today's - or tomorrow's - world. He has tempered this opinion by suggesting that it would do scientists no harm to have a knowledge of the arts, yet the force of his criticism appears to lie more heavily on the arts than on the sciences.
There is a grain of truth in what he has to say - a wide education is preferable to a narrow, blinkered course of study - but it seems to me that underlying Dr Walsh's pronouncements is not just a lack of confidence in the ability of an arts education to produce a rounded individual, but a lack of faith in the value of a liberal arts education.
And, while he applies similar criticisms to the sciences, it strikes me that those criticisms are not equal in their effect. Take this pronouncement from 1992: "I think it is an appalling state of affairs that our education system should produce people who rejoice in saying that they know nothing about sciences when the sciences are the greatest moving force of this era. Similarly, I'm horrified by scientists who go out of their way to proclaim their ignorance of the arts - although scientists are more likely to delve into the arts than vice versa."
Criticism undermined
The force of his criticism of philistine scientists is undermined by that last, probably unsustainable, "although. . .". Why are scientists more likely to delve into the arts? How many students actually "rejoice" in their ignorance of the sciences? And of what sciences in particular are they ignorant? Are they any more ignorant of, say, nuclear physics than an engineer is? Any less aware of the merits of molecular biology than a geologist?
Equally, one might argue that it is science education, not arts education, that is too narrow in its focus. After all, few subjects cross interdisciplinary boundaries as regularly and as unavoidably as the arts. History, philosophy and literature are inextricably entwined with each other and intimately involved with the human and scientific issues of their time. They are not isolated in some ivory tower from the development of the world of which they are an integral part; instead, they inform, and are informed by, the changes in that world. Yet, assuming that some balance could be found between teaching students their primary subject - philosophy, say - and introducing a scientific component to that education which goes beyond a whistlestop tour of scientific developments, is there really an guarantee that these graduates will be so much more well-rounded than their predecessors? In fact, is there not a danger of producing an individual who has more in common with the inhabitants of Swift's island of Laputa, stranded in a no-man's land between mathematics and music, unable to appreciate the true beauty of either?
I worry, too, about whether or not arts education would survive in the Walshian world which the good doctor has sometimes postulated. He has said in the past that education should be exposed to market forces, that education "like anything else, is a commodity, or a service, which should be available to those who wish to purchase it." Aside from a general unease with the concept of education being reduced to the same level as a bag of sugar or a new car, what place for the arts in a privatised education system? Supply and demand
According to figures published by Forfas, the Irish business sector invested only £69,000 in arts research in 1994, compared with £6.53 million in business, engineering and the sciences. Civil engineering received five times as much private research funding as all languages and literature put together. In a system in which market forces are the major determining factor, the profit motive and the law of supply and demand will determine whether or not a subject survives, rather than the intrinsic value of philosophy, history or Shakespeare's sonnets.
Yet, when Dr Walsh retires from his post next year, I will feel a pang of regret. While I may not agree with all of his views, I am glad that he has expressed them. I believe they have forced those in arts education to consider their positions, to perhaps modify their teaching in certain ways without losing sight of the value of the subjects they are teaching. I don't mind sharing the world with its Dr Walshes. I'm just glad that it's not his world.