Connect Last week Siptu, Ireland's largest union, held a protest in UCD, Ireland's largest university. The focus of the protest was what the union sees as the privatisation agenda of the university's president, Hugh Brady. This "public versus private" clash is potentially more explosive in higher education than even Liz O'Donnell's remarks on Catholic Church involvement in earlier schooling have been.
Union supporters fear Brady is selling out a public institution to private interests. The UCD president counters that the underfunded college - like the rest of the higher education sector - requires reorganising and refinancing for the 21st century. Anyway, the protest included what Siptu termed a "speak-out". The topic was titled "UCD - university or corporation?" The most alarming aspect of the speak-out was the level of fear perceived to surround the event. Speculation suggests many staff, allegedly fearing their contracts might not be renewed or that their attendance at the speak-out might jeopardise their promotion prospects, stayed away. Perhaps they back Brady's reforms, but their absence did suggest IBM more than UCD.
Nonetheless an estimated 150 staff members took part. Among their complaints was that university teaching is being greatly downgraded because research is more lucrative for the college and for the career prospects of academics. The point was made that it now pays to be a lousy teacher: few students will take your courses, leaving you with time to further your career through research.
Earlier, about 60 members of the college's Siptu education branch had protested at the main gates of the Belfield campus. A banner identified them and read simply: "Unity is Strength." Some protesters carried placards straplined "Inequality at UCD". These proclaimed sentiments such as "It's Not What You Know - It's Who You Know" and "Brady Bunch No Joke for College Workers".
The placards referred to contentious issues within UCD. Five out of seven college vice-presidents have, the union alleges, been appointed without a recruitment process. Management has also appointed three professors and an associate professor under what it terms a "competitive retention" programme. This, managers claim, prevents other institutions luring talent away from UCD.
Perhaps it does, but some academics argue that when it comes to preferment, cronyism is too often a more telling criterion than talent. Then again, the disappointed invariably make that charge. And yet, so ideological is the current split in UCD and higher education generally that academic politics, routinely spiteful, now seem ominously quiet. There may be trouble ahead.
The second placard referred to the fact that seven restaurant jobs will go at UCD, which is increasingly reliant on the casualisation of labour. The alarming levels of trepidation, or alleged trepidation, began to make sense. Dr Brady is intent on change and nobody can be sure of its outcome. It may work or it may not.
Certainly, more third level teaching is now being done by people on short-term contracts. Fearful for their futures, such people are less likely to oppose a dominant agenda. They - metaphorically (and perhaps literally too) - keep their heads down. With some honourable and some foolhardy exceptions, they do not get involved in strife. They remain silent because insecurity keeps them so.
Tellingly, that week an editorial in the college's student newspaper, The University Observer, was headlined "The sound of silence". The editorial said the paper's "ability to question and investigate has been greatly hampered in recent weeks". It continued: "Fewer and fewer staff members are willing to discuss matters that greatly affect both the staff and students of this university." The editorial proceeded to paint a picture of an increasingly hierarchical, PR-ised and on-message organisation in which "secretaries parroted eerily similar instructions". It's clear that, despite mass voice-mails and e-mails, power is progressively concentrated at the top. In that sense at least, UCD accurately reflects the corporate world of which it is increasingly a part.
The forces that are making UCD and the rest of Ireland's higher education institutions more corporate are global. That doesn't, of course, mean that they are irresistible, but they are formidable. The dilemma at the heart of this has to do with the rightful role of a university in society. Should it set itself at an angle to that society or ought it simply to reflect that society as fully as possible? Traditionally, many of the best academics have foregone the particularly large salaries they might have expected to make outside of a university for the greater degree of autonomy they enjoy within one. (Conversely, of course, many academics - especially in civilising if unprofitable humanities disciplines - have maximised their likely incomes through academic advancement.) But the new mechanistic agenda puts society - such as it is - at risk of greater corporate coarseness and bullying.
For the moment, UCD and the rest of Irish higher education is quietened. But is it through felicity or fear? To me, it sounds dangerously like a part of the "new feudalism" that's given fuller expression by Irish Ferries. There may, indeed, be trouble ahead. We'll see.