Madam, – Your education editor, Seán Flynn (April 4th) reports that no one from the world’s top 25 universities applied for applied for the provostship of Trinity. I’m not surprised, seeing that in the same piece it reported that the Department of Education ordered TCD to reduce the new provost’s salary of €200,000 by more than €10,000. I don’t know which is the greater deterrent to any really good outside applicant: a salary which is a lot less than most vice chancellors in the UK Russell Group earn, or the fact that a government department can order a university how much it may pay an individual.
Your Editorial on the same subject bemoans the "flawed" process whereby Trinity elects rather than appoints a new provost. You seem to think that the Trinity electorate has the same mentality as someone voting for a Kerry county councillor. So if a search committee comes up with a shortlist of half a dozen and the final choice is made by a carefully selected committee of seven, that's okay, but if 700 are given a say, that's a recipe for pork-barrel politics. So much for The Irish Times's regard for democracy and openness in higher education.
Nearly 20 years ago I visited the University of Bucharest, which was so starved of money that they could not turn the lights on. When I asked one professor how he felt about the situation, he replied that morale was very high, because they were now able to freely elect their own rector, free from the diktats of the party and its carefully selected committees.
Contempt for academic freedom and university autonomy in Ireland knows no bounds. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Your criticism (Editorial, April 4th) of the process by which Trinity College, Dublin has just elected a new provost is unwarranted.
As you advocate and as is required by law, the position was advertised in the jobs pages of the newspapers and elsewhere and all qualified candidates, internal and external, were interviewed by committee. You would have the process end there – hardly that rigorous.
Instead, what happened then was that over the course of the last term, every single member of the permanent academic staff of Trinity was given the opportunity to meet the candidates (internal and external) in one-to-one meetings, in meetings where they addressed the concerns of individual departments and schools, and in public debates and mass hustings around the college.
We met the candidates and the candidates met us until we were all blue in the face, and their policies and vision were explored to the point of exhaustion on all sides.
Then last Saturday all 700 of us were invited to gather in conclave in the College Dining Hall and to vote for the candidates – not once, but four times, eliminating at each round the candidate with the fewest number of votes until there was only one left standing.
And he is now our new provost. I cannot imagine a more democratic method by which the members of an academic community could choose their leader.
A lot has changed in Trinity over the years, not all of it for the better, but the method by which the college continues to select its leader is the ultimate vindication of its traditions. – Yours, etc,