Madam, – Dr Ed Walsh challenges the prevailing framework of academic tenure in Irish higher education (Education Today, January 25th). This is welcome. However his implied recommendation to adopt the approach of many US institutions who award nine- month contracts renewed on multiple occasions is flawed.
This approach is more concerned with saving money than it is with excellence. Additionally, it allows the diminishing number of tenured staff to devote their time to graduate students and research, removing them from contact with undergraduates.
The non-tenured staff on short contracts are usually young PhD graduates who find themselves part of the surplus of doctoral graduates seeking academic positions. They are employed as teachers of the undergraduate population at a fraction of the rate of their tenured colleagues with little or no opportunity to engage in the wider university or to develop their own research and academic credentials.
The contracts’ nine-month duration reflects their teaching-only nature and staff on them are removed from employment outside the academic teaching year; perhaps, to be re-hired when the new academic year begins. The pay and hours for such positions are normally so low that these individuals are required to hold concurrent positions, racing from one campus to another at the behest of timetabling vagaries.
Increasingly US students and their parents are questioning this approach, seeing first-hand its effect on staff morale and competence and the increasing remove between undergraduate students and full-time academic staff. Indeed, many countries are marketing the proximity between their full-time academic staff and students and the links between teaching and research as a marketing tool to attract undergraduate US students.
Academic tenure is occasionally abused, but “throwing the baby out with the bath water” is not the answer. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – The Irish Times has done a signal service to the cause of academic freedom by giving so much space to the letter by Prof Tom Garvin and his distinguished co-signatories. The content of the letter is alarming but it surely comes as no surprise to those of us who have seen our academic freedoms eroded in recent years by a managerial ethos indifferent to the well-being of authentically disinterested academic research. There are few names of Trinity academics on this list, but I do not suppose that this is because of any lack of a similar concern in Trinity College Dublin itself.
The election of a new Provost will surely provide an opportunity for these issues to be debated in an open and constructive way. Indeed it is vital that they should be. The proliferation of contract posts in our universities is surely a threat to the scholarly way of life, since significant scholarly discoveries cannot be made on a timescale of five to 10 years but rather on one of 30 to 40 years. I wish Prof Garvin and his colleagues well and I welcome their timely intervention. We are still proud of Irish scholars, if not of our bankers, property developers and politicians. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Glad to see the brain drain is a myth. – Yours, etc,