Madam, - Prof Tom Begley's article of September 19th unintentionally exposes one of the fallacies at the heart of Ireland's new faith in the "knowledge economy" - namely the fallacy of the freebooter brain.
He tells us that in 2006 UCD's business schools offered salaries of over €200,000 to tempt "top talent" to apply for no fewer than 10 chaired professorships. Alas, international big fish failed to bite the bait.
Prof Begley's account of this disappointing trawl raises many questions. For example:
1. Are world-class brains preferably "international" brains?
2. What if academics, even world-class academics, amount to no more than brains for hire?
3. Could it be that most people's social, cultural, family and personal lives locate them not just in economies, but in meaningful and complex relations, societies and communities from which they will not choose to move at any price?
Some of my academic colleagues of North American origin or training have made the seemingly irrational choice of refusing to stay within a deregulated knowledge economy. European-trained Irish, British and French colleagues are disinclined to move to such an economy.
Those decisions have not prevented them from working on - nor indeed from leading - world-class projects with their peers both within and beyond dollar-land.
I am sure they share my amazement at the extraordinarily simplistic view of labour and society apparently held by those who are trying to reinvent the concept of higher education using the reductive and misguided mantra of the "knowledge economy". - Yours, etc,
Prof MARY GALLAGHER, French Francophone Studies, School of Languages Literatures, UCD, Dublin 4.