Campaigners for a university for Waterford have rejected a suggestion that the city should instead aspire to have the best possible institute of technology.
Many blame the lack of a university in the south-east for the region's relative failure to attract large-scale, high-tech industry and fully capitalise on the jobs boom.
When Dr Danny O'Hare, a former director of the then Waterford Regional Technical College, returned to the city last week it was expected he would row in behind the campaign to have the facility - now Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) - upgraded.
However, Dr O'Hare told guests at the Waterford Chamber of Commerce annual dinner that instead of seeking university status, locals should focus on developing WIT's full potential. "There is no reason at all why, given the right conditions, universities and institutes of technology should not be recognised equally as centres of excellence - each pre-eminent in its own distinctive field, but not competing with each other on status."
Dr O'Hare, who also served as president of Dublin City University, said examples from other countries supported his point. "I assure you that none of the academics who toil at MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology - lie awake at night thinking wistfully of how much better off they'd be if their institute had `university status'. They have all the status they want or could ever need as an institute of technology."
"Instead of Waterford aspiring to have `another' university, let it aspire instead to have Ireland's best institute of technology." He also suggested WIT should lobby with other institutes of technology to ensure resources allocated to the sector were "as great as possible".
"I see the desirable future as one in which our third level (education system) consists of two strong, separate sectors, each pursuing its own destiny and enjoying, to coin a phrase, `parity of esteem'," he said. One guest who was not impressed, however, was Mr Oliver Cleary, a Progressive Democrats candidate in the next general election and chairman of the Waterford University Action Group.
Waterford, he said, was the only county borough not to have a university and to have only one third-level institution. Local campaigners were aware it wasn't just a matter of "putting a sign up with a different name", but WIT should be given the resources to enable it to develop to the point where it could become a university.
Universities, he said, received far greater resources than institutes of technology. For example, of the £200 million allocated to third-level institutions for research and development last year, £184 million had gone to universities. Unlike institutes of technology, universities were also allowed to make independent decisions on expenditure.
Students in the south-east, he said, were as entitled to accessible university education as those in other regions.