Sir, – Tom Garvin’s passionate polemic on “the bleak future of the Irish university” (Education Today, May 1st) is timely.
There has been an astonishing and largely unchallenged transformation in the governance and ethos of most Irish universities in little more than a decade, and immense damage has already been done.
We now have an enlightened Minister for Education who has set himself an ambitious and radical agenda in primary and post-primary education, but who appears to accept that the university sector is already changing along the right lines. I would ask him to think again.
He might reflect that much the most successful Irish university, Trinity College Dublin, is the only one in which serious attention is still paid to academic opinion, and which is allowed to operate and see itself as a community rather than a business. Academics vote for their provost and dominate its governing authority. The other universities, for the most part, are dominated by business interests and by a business ethos totally unsuited to their core functions. Their presidents are appointed without reference to their staffs, and in turn appoint “middle management”, such as deans, who used to be elected.
Meetings of academic councils, hitherto important engines of reform and custodians of academic values, have been become a farce. Within months of a particularly crude managerialist model being imposed on my own university, I listened in disbelief as a senior colleague, hitherto a champion of collegiality, congratulate the new president on getting through a long agenda of academic council in 20 minutes. His secret? He allowed no debate and accepted questions only from those he trusted. To our shame we all let it happen.
No modern president in these universities ever has to listen seriously to opinions he doesn’t like. No modern academic feels empowered to contribute meaningfully to change, and most have long ago retreated into their own world of teaching and research. Is it any wonder we have lost our way?
I would urge the Minister to talk to people; change the mould, which may be new, but is as detrimental to our future as our outmoded primary and secondary systems. – Yours, etc,