Madam, - Prof Brendán Ó Cochláin gets it wrong when he asserts (August 10th) that "the teaching and learning role of the university is being downgraded in an all-out rush to establish research reputations".
For far too long there was little or no explicit research funding for Irish universities. Research funding initiatives, initially from the EU, and more recently from the Irish Government, have been long overdue and have generally been welcomed within the universities. The establishment of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and the Social Sciences is hardly indicative of an all-out rush to applied, business-oriented research.
Of course there are problems. Some of them are generated by a new managerial culture which universities themselves have embraced, perhaps too uncritically. Universities are not business corporations, but rely much more on collegiality. In the research area, problems can arise from the imposition throughout a university of procedures that are more suited to the natural sciences, where research projects can be expensive and require a lot of teamwork. By contrast, in humanities and the social sciences, research is relatively inexpensive and requires relatively modest financial incentives and good peer-review procedures rather than "management".
There is one glaring omission from Prof Ó Cochláin's list of concerns: salaries. University lecturers and senior lecturers are now paid less than their counterparts in the IT sector. This is the result of the recent benchmarking exercise and is in my opinion a poor reflection of IFUT's ability to make its case to the benchmarking body. While the reasoning of that body was (scandalously) never made public, one gets the impression that IFUT singularly failed to argue a case for attracting and motivating good academic researchers. The benchmarking awards were, as far as one can judge, made largely if not exclusively on the basis of teaching contact hours.
Our universities need all the encouragement they can get to improve their research performance. This need not be to the detriment of good teaching: on the contrary, the two are complementary, especially at the postgraduate level. - Yours, etc.,
JOHN SHEEHAN, Department of Economics, UCD, Dublin 4.