UCD's policy of 'poaching' staff from other universities subverts explicit and open competition, writes Iggy Ó Muircheartaigh
The Irish Universities' Association (IUA) is the representative body for all seven universities in Ireland. Recent media coverage may have given the impression that the other six member-universities of the IUA were exerting pressure on UCD to collude in forming an anti-competitive "cosy cartel" on recruitment and mobility of staff. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In recent years, the Irish university sector has worked successfully to a recruitment policy based on explicit public advertising, containing clear-cut job specifications, conditions and salaries. What is now causing public concern, both within the sector and among policymakers and politicians, are the implications of a new emerging policy of recruitment, currently being pursued by one university - UCD. In contrast to existing policy, this new policy, as pursued, appears to be conducted behind a veil of opaqueness and lacks explicitness and transparency. Such a policy, if allowed to continue, would serve to subvert the process of explicit and open competition.
Over recent years the universities in Ireland have embraced the concept and philosophy of competition and have participated in competitive tendering and application processes for research funding - for example, from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions (PRTLI) - much of which has been provided by the State. This has resulted in a quantum leap in terms of the international research standing of the universities in this country and is very much to be welcomed. A key factor in these initiatives is the fact that they have all been publicly advertised, the decision processes have been open and transparent, criteria of assessment have been publicly declared and independent international experts have performed assessments.
The OECD - a staunch advocate of competition - in its review of Irish higher education recognised the competitiveness of Irish universities but strongly recommended "that the strength of the Irish higher education system . . . will only be fully realised through institutional collaboration". In this context, the Irish universities have committed themselves to increased collaboration and to ensuring that the State benefits to the maximum possible extent from State investment in the university sector. Indeed, last year, the sector, through the IUA, strongly urged the Government to increase its support for innovation and reform in the sector.
In a pre-Budget submission last October entitled Reform of Third Level and Development of Fourth Level Ireland, the heads of the seven Irish universities, through the IUA, made the following commitment: "Successful development of fourth level will require unprecedented collaboration across the sector and co-ordinated approaches to the provision of key enablers such as human resources, IT and other infrastructures vital to underpin third and fourth levels."
The Government welcomed the university presidents' commitment to a sectoral reform agenda and in particular to "unprecedented collaboration". The political imperative for university collaboration was emphasised as follows by the Minister for Finance in his 2006 Budget statement: "There must be an appetite from within our third-level institutions for greater collaboration. This is a small country. It is not sensible to have our third-level institutions pitched against each other across all key disciplines. Instead, what we need is the promotion of wide collaboration that can draw on the collective strengths of all our third-level institutions."
The Government underlined its position on increased collaboration by specifying collaboration as one of the four key principles or criteria for funding in the €300 million Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF), launched as part of last year's Budget. As in all these matters, the fact that collaboration is given significant weighting in the decision-making process is in no way inconsistent with the requirement that all proposals under SIF are to be assessed on an openly-competitive basis. The key here is to maintain a balance between competition and collaboration so as to maximise the impact of the available funding.
The sector as a whole accepts that competition is going to be a central part of the future. We welcome competition. We have already aggressively competed - and collaborated - on the development of centres of excellence in research. We also strongly support the concept of mobility for university staff, but would insist that, in keeping with internationally-accepted best practice, recruitment should be by public advertisement. Indeed, NUI Galway has both recruited staff from other Irish universities and has had its staff recruited by other Irish universities. We have no difficulty with this and believe that this kind of mobility is healthy and should indeed be facilitated and encouraged.
It is not true that - as Hugh Brady, UCD's president, stated in a recent interview on Morning Ireland - the proposed protocol on collaboration would have meant that, where one university wanted to advertise a post, a call from the president of another university could block such a move. Far from involving "collusion to block career advancement of university staff" - again as implied by the UCD president in his radio interview - the proposed protocol (extracts from an earlier draft version of which were published in The Irish Times on Monday) clearly commits the sector to an open, fair and transparent recruitment process.
The difficulty referred to by Minister for Education Mary Hanafin is the so-called "poaching" issue - i.e. the targeting and soliciting by any one university of key researchers and their teams in other universities, in the absence of specific positions being publicly advertised. We support the Minister's position on this and accept that the future of the sector (and, more importantly, of Ireland) depends critically on the ability of our very small (by international standards) university sector to work together to maximise the return on State investment. When one university succeeds in attracting a major research grant in a particular area, no advantage accrues to the State if that funding is enticed to move to another institution in the State (although the move would, of course, improve the research standing of the latter institution).
To my mind, the underlying weakness in what is going on in this area is an obsession with the "world ranking" of any one institution. It is entirely rational for a minister for education to look at the world ranking of the Irish university sector as a whole, a metric which is unaffected by internal transfers of individuals or research teams, no matter how eminent.
As has happened in the case of other Irish universities, overtures were recently made to encourage a research team at NUI Galway (which had attracted significant research funding to the university) to move to UCD, though no public advertisement of any kind was involved. Fortunately, the team in question was happy to continue to work in the strongly-collegial ethos to which we are committed here in Galway. But the reality is that these recruitment practices, if they were continued, would lead to a grossly-inflated internal transfer market for key university academics, at huge cost and with no added value to the university sector or to the State.
Controversy over poaching of staff, while serious, deflects attention from the policy imperative of having an agreed comprehensive statement of commitment to collaboration across the sector and an agreed template for such collaboration. We are advised that the proposed protocol provisions conform to competition and other legislation and we believe that recruitment procedures in the university sector must be - and must be seen to be - open, efficient and transparent.
The proposed collaboration protocol is premised on shared understandings and high levels of inter-personal trust among all seven university heads on recruitment practices and other issues, and it is very much to be hoped that an agreed protocol underlining those understandings, and confirming those levels of trust, will be agreed in the coming weeks. Ní neart go cur le chéile.
Dr Iggy Ó Muircheartaigh is president of NUI Galway and president of the Irish Universities' Association