Madam, - Your extensive coverage of the issue of poaching academics is indeed laudable. This cruel and inhumane activity must stop.
What next? Will we see academics boiled in Belfield? Will the name Brady be listed alongside those of Topcliffe and Torquemada (absence of alliteration notwithstanding) in the history of torture?
Can anything be done to deflect university presidents from their crazed and obsessive quest to achieve a listing in the top 10,000 in the Annual International University Beauty Ratings?
This listing, organised jointly by Hello Higher Education Review and the Red Army Memorial Free Enterprise Department of the University of Hai Faiv, is of course as valued in the academic community as the Golden Cleric Award is in its own sphere; but cooking academics, whether by poaching or boiling, in order to improve productivity, is hardly in good taste.
Why are other culinary excesses in the university sector not receiving the same attention? With increased external review activity, academics are now very often grilled by committees, often consisting of UK or US "experts", usually called Nick or Doug respectively, and whose areas of specialist expertise tend to be either Elizabethan methods of interrogation and torture, or WMD. I have even known hapless academics to receive a roasting from such persons. Where will it all stop?
And there is worse to come. While no-one could argue against increasing the accountability and relevance to society of the activities of universities, this too is now being taken to culinary extremes. Many university leaders and academics spend much time currying favour with politicians and government agencies, often, some would say, to the detriment of educational and academic principles.
Many feel that the excessive use of this oriental spicing practice may lead to an erosion of academic freedom, and of the important critical role that universities should play in society.
Perhaps, taken in the overall context of what is happening in our universities, poaching is one of the milder items on the menu.
- Yours, etc,
MARTIN CLYNES, Professor of Biotechnology, Dublin City University, Dublin 9.