OPINION:The Minister for Education, Batt O'Keeffe, placed great store on the need for greater rationalisation among third-level colleges when launching the new national strategy for higher education recently, writes FERDINAND VON PRONDZYNSKI.

The message is that rationalisation is the main challenge and the key objective for third level right now. This would also have been a message coming from the Government’s document published in December 2008, Building Ireland’s Smart Economy. This states: “Ireland has a relatively large number of third-level institutions.

“International research shows that the concentration of investment in research and development is important in advancing research innovation.

“In successfully advancing our knowledge capacity, there is now a need to re-examine the roles and relationships of higher education institutions across the Irish system.”

The structure of the sector is, of course, an important issue, but it should always be seen as secondary to its quality. If our higher education is to be admired internationally and to be effective as a magnet for both domestic and foreign investment, then it needs to be characterised mainly by its excellence, and excellence alone should be the basis for all decisions on funding.

However, the likelihood of such excellence emerging is, of course, influenced by the way universities are organised and structured, and so rationalisation is a legitimate topic for debate, particularly during times of difficult economic conditions.

Broadly speaking, rationalisation could be a reference to two objectives; and while they are related, they are not necessarily the same thing. The first type of “rationalisation” is the kind of thing implied in the Smart Economy document: the idea that there are too many universities in Ireland, and that we should be considering mergers or other measures to reduce the number. The second is not about the number of universities, but how subject specialisms are distributed between them. Let us take each separately.

Whether there are too many universities in Ireland is a difficult question to answer, because there is no easy way of determining what is ideal. There are, for example, some US states with a population that may be similar to Ireland’s, but with far fewer universities. Arizona would be an example, where there are two universities, each of them very large and with more than one campus. But on the other hand, Scotland’s population is also similar to Ireland’s, and yet it has almost twice the number of universities than we do. And the universities in both Arizona and Scotland are seen as highly effective and as providing an important support for their respective societies and economies.

It also has to be pointed out that if you have a very small number of universities, the logic will be that they will be multi-campus institutions, and such arrangements can be complex and confusing and sometimes financially costly. It has worked in Arizona, but attempts to create such structures in the UK have sometimes failed, with the universities concerned having to close down campuses as a result.

It is therefore difficult to argue that the number of universities is necessarily a determining factor in their effectiveness. Nor is there much evidence that larger universities tend to score more highly in international league tables; some of the highest-ranked universities are in fact quite small.

However, the second type of rationalisation may be more important. While most universities will want to have in their own institution a number of disciplines which they believe provide a grounding for their education and research, there may be specific and specialist areas which do not need to be duplicated across the sector, particularly if student demand is not large. So for example, there may be minority languages that should be available for students and researchers in Ireland, but where it is not obvious that it makes sense for them to be offered in more than one institution. There may even be specialisms within subjects that could be clustered in one university, to ensure critical mass and proper support.

The Irish universities are aware of the need to assess this kind of rationalisation and are, I believe, open to a discussion around this and early action.

There is, however, one other kind of rationalisation, which may also be in evidence (at least by stealth) in Ireland: this is a “clustering” of institutions in strategic links that maintain individual autonomy while pooling resources and coordinating strategy. The announcement just made by Trinity College and UCD may fall under this heading, and while I believe that the way in which the news of this development was managed may be regrettable, it would be hard to argue that the initiative itself is anything other than welcome.

The advantages of what I shall call “strategic clustering” are the following: the partner institutions can coordinate their strategic priorities; they can ensure that there is investment across the partner institutions that plays to their strategic strengths; they can more easily engage non-university partners, including industry and state agencies, but also institutes of technology; they can share support services; they can act as important voices in economic and social development and regeneration. The main risk is that they could produce a splintering of the higher education sector into competing interest groups.

Ireland is too small to have a hierarchy of universities, and the sector must work together to ensure that what we do is in the country’s best interests and is effective, and we need to have powerful Government support for the sector as a whole.

There is an expectation in the country right now that universities must play a key role in allowing Ireland to escape from recession and return to growth and success. Universities will both need and want to accept that challenge, and will need to accept that change must follow. We need to lead this development, rather than just react to external pressures.

And we need to do all that now.

Ferdinand von Prondzynski is president of Dublin City University