Madam, - Your Editorial last Monday, referring to the proposals of the Higher Education Authority (HEA) that some of the Irish universities might evolve into private not-for-profit colleges, similar to Harvard and Yale, displays disturbing symptoms of the "Harvard fallacy".
This disease has obviously infected the HEA and is making dangerous inroads among some of my academic colleagues. Wholesale slaughter, however, is not required as the disease is curable by the administration of common sense.
The primary symptom of the disease is to assume that the primacy of Harvard is due to the fact that it is a private rather than a public university. The reality is, of course, that Harvard is a great university largely because it can afford to be.
It is rich, incredibly rich by European standards. Its endowment - that is, the money it has in the bank for a rainy day - is almost $20 billion. In 2002 it received gifts of $477 million. And Harvard is not alone in being so wealthy. There are about 50 universities in the US - many of them public - whose endowment exceed the total annual budget for higher education in Ireland.
I am not decrying the possession of such wealth. Having studied and taught at one of the less wealthy American universities - its endowment was a mere $3.5 billion - I am conscious of the value of such wealth in achieving great academic goals. I am merely pointing out that the accumulation of similar wealth has been made possible by a combination of factors which are peculiar to the US. UCD used to observe that it had been sustained by the pennies of the Irish Catholics in the 19th century. Making UCD into a private university is not going to unlock the purses of their millionaire descendants in the 21st. - Yours, etc.,
PADDY O'FLYNN, Leinster Road, Rathmines, Dublin 6.