History is a series of rooms whose doors close as we pass through them; we can never return to those rooms, and at best we are allowed to glimpse their insides only through opaque windows. Some of what is visible makes sense; much does not. The furniture within speaks of human responses, attitudes, emotions which might be as closed to the modern mind as those of the domestic cat.
Take the episode in 1936, described in Donal McCartney's marvellous UCD: A National Idea (Gill and Macmillan), when the deeply Catholic university authorities found themselves being out-Catholicked by the student body. A college newspaper demanded the creation of a Catholic university and complained that the staff did not attend enough student Masses. The high point in the student campaign to Catholicise what was already a starkly Catholic university arrived when students nocturnally placed crucifixes on walls in every classroom in the college and in the main hall.
Points of contact
What does a 19-year-old of today, easy and libidinous, equally familiar with sex and drugs, and equally unfamiliar with passionate political belief or religious ardour of any kind, make of his fellow student of 60 years ago? Where are the points of contact which reassure them both of their shared humanity and their common Irishness? Are the two like Inca and Spaniard running their fingers along one another's nostrils and eyebrows, understanding virtually nothing, minds not merely not meeting but advancing in parallel towards infinity?
Of course we have had a revolution or two since 1936: and the complete closure of mental shutters is the true hallmark of a revolution. Some pictures from the past enter the mind, but they are incomprehensible. The brain cannot shape the signals it is getting into a coherent image. On the one hand, we know students once crept around in the dead of night with step-ladders and a stock of crucifixes to erect so high they would not easily be removed; but I have no idea what was going on in their hearts, minds - or in any other vital part for that matter.
The study of a university, more than of any other institution, reveals an extraordinary amount about the society in which it functions. So, although the figure of its president Michael Tierney cast a long and terrible shadow over UCD, the question one must ask is not, "Why did such an arid, authoritarian figure do so much to stifle academic inquiry for nearly two decades?" but, "How was it possible he was allowed to get away it?"
The truth is that Ireland, up until the 1960s - and for many, up until the 1980s - disliked intellectual inquiry of any kind; it distrusted debate, questioning, doubt, uncertainty. It cherished conformity, rigidity, control, especially when accompanied by an iron hand. Thus it was that Michael Tierney in 1949 felt able to forbid the Literary and Historical Society, and the guest speaker Dr Owen Sheehy Skeffington, from debating the motion that "the ideals of the Communist Manifesto are worthy of humanity".
Changed title
Actually, on this occasion the L & H proceeded with the debate, but with the title more prudently changed to, "the ideals of the Communist Manifesto are unworthy of humanity" The auditor was later called before President Tierney and instructed that henceforward no subject could be discussed or guest invited without his approval. The auditor reported this to a meeting of the L & H, announced his assent, and furthermore forbade the members of the L & H from discussing the issue. Begob.
Clearly, in such an authoritarian/submissive culture, the concept of "academic freedom" is as meaningful as the study of snowflakes in Chad. Today we simply cannot understand how a university could have functioned within the straitjackets tailored by Tierney and John Charles McQuaid; yet function it did, after a fashion.
But of course revolutions necessarily revolve; the whirligig goes round, and maybe one day students will again erect crucifixes by torchlight. You think not? In 1916, the president's report dwelt at length on the war in Europe, and on the 450 students of UCD who had enlisted "for noble service", with a passing aside: "There occurred during the session the sad and tragic events of the rebellion in Dublin." Thus was the Rising disposed of.
The following year, the president wrote that he hoped a suitable memorial would be raised to students "who had made the great sacrifice", not in the Rising but the war. Within a few years, and for decades afterwards, the students of UCD who had died in the Great War would be completely forgotten.
Cultural revolution
Indeed, had such a history of the college as this been written even 20 years ago, there would probably have been no mention of those student soldiers. Today, in a cultural revolution almost as great as that which obscured the truth about 19141918, the State acknowledges that greater truth. For the wheel turns; and having turned, keeps turning. Sometimes the vanished room reappears, and the forgotten past is remembered.
It is pleasing, moreover, to see one's own name mentioned in the history of a great institution one loves. Fine men and women, often in appalling conditions, did their best for young minds in UCD, and my gratitude to people such as Donal McCartney is both permanent and inexpressible. Yet when I say I know of no single volume which provides so many insights into the workings of the Irish mind through this century, I speak not in gratitude but in truth. This is a wonderful book.