The first in a series of new presidency seminars will focus on issues facing young people including education, emigration and mental health, the President Michael D Higgins has announced.
In accepting a Doctorate of Laws from the National University of Ireland today, Mr Higgins said he was very conscious that - for the first time in many years - young people now graduating from college are faced with very uncertain futures.
The new seminars, he said, will hopefully throw light on how our country has made choices spiritually, morally, ethically since the turn of the century.
Reflecting on his teaching career at UCG, Mr Higgins said universities needed to address the intellectual crisis facing society; this crisis was far more serious than the economic one which receives so much prominence in the media, he said.
Decades of Keynesianism, he said, have given way to decades of unrestrained market dominance.
“A new dominant paradigm emerged. That paradigm has consequences for all institutions including universities. It is a paradigm that makes assumptions and demands as to the connection between scholarship, politics, economy and society,” he said.
“It has fed off and encouraged, I suggest, an individualism without responsibility. It not only asserts a rationality for markets, but in policy terms has delivered markets without regulation.”
Intellectuals are challenged, he said, “to a moral choice, to drift into, be part of, a consensus that accepts a failed paradigm of life and economy or to offer, or seek to recover, the possibility of alternative futures.
“And were universities not special places, the citizens of the future may ask, for the generation of alternatives in science, culture and philosophy? The universities have a great challenge in the questions that are posed now, questions that are beyond ones of a narrow utility.”
He asked: “Are the universities to be allowed and will they seek the space, the capacity, the community of scholarship, the quiet moments of reflection necessary to challenge, for example paradigms of the connection between economy and society, ethics and morality, democratic discourse and authoritarian imposition that have failed, and drawing on their rich university tradition, at its best moments of disputation and discourse, offer alternatives that offer a stable present and a democratic, liberating and sustainable future.
Mr Higgins said that European social capital - the strongest in the world- has been monetized; this signalled how we have arrived at such a crisis now as great, or greater than, that faced by the previous generation or political and social theorists at the end of the 19th century.
