Universities are becoming places of restricted learning

CultureShock:The current short-sighted trend of treating our third-level institutions as if they were businesses is causing a narrowing of intellectual diversity

One of the concepts that the environmental movement has successfully driven into our collective consciousness is biodiversity. The idea suggests that the health of the planet can be judged not simply by the amount of life it supports but also by the variety and multiplicity of that life. Since life is a system in which everything is connected, the extinction of any one life form, even if it is a toad or a gnat, has consequences for all the others. And we have to be humble enough to accept that we may not know what those consequences are.

We have had to grasp the simple truth that it is better to preserve a form of life than to regret the unpredicted costs of its loss.

There is also, however, a biodiversity of culture and of knowledge. Systems of thought and expression can be extinguished and their loss can impoverish the world. And this is happening right in front of us. The decision of the largest university in the State, UCD, to abolish its chair of Old Irish, making it effectively impossible for a student to pursue the subject to degree level, is but the starkest example of a process that has been under way since the turn of the century: a narrowing of intellectual diversity in our third-level institutions, the cultural consequences of which have barely been considered.

Like many other regressive changes, this process has its roots in the lassitude of an old ideal. The noble notion of the university as a centre of free intellectual inquiry undoubtedly became the justification for a great deal of laziness and mediocrity. Academic freedom was often used as an excuse for a lack of engagement with the outside world. It is perfectly proper for governments to demand from the institutions they fund the same standards of accountability and transparency that apply to themselves. But the mechanism that is being used to achieve this - treating universities as if they were businesses - is a cure that is in some respects worse then the disease.

What has been applied to Irish universities is the language of business: inputs and outputs, turnover, productivity, competition. Academics are judged on the number of their publications and on the frequency with which they are cited by others.

Departments are judged on their ability to function as productive units, attracting funding and processing students. These criteria should, of course, count for something. But they also miss a great deal. A historian who produces one great book every 15 years may be far more important than one who turns out a tidy monograph every year. Citations by other scholars may simply reflect the degree to which one conforms to the prevailing consensus, creating an in-built tendency towards conservatism.

Even in the sciences, a piece of work may only become important decades after it is produced. And the pursuit of seemingly obscure knowledge may have tangential but crucial side-effects: the worldwide web, for example, is a by-product of far-out research by physicists.

Even judging what universities do by strictly economic criteria, the current narrowing of the national mind is counter-productive. In the 21st century, companies are looking increasingly for what they call "soft skills": analytic intelligence, the capacity to communicate, problem-solving, creativity, intellectual flexibility. The bizarre paradox is that Fás, which is in the business of meeting the training needs of the economy, seems to know this better than our universities do. While the universities are belatedly adapting to a 1980s understanding of the nature of business, successful businesses have already moved on. They have grasped that what matters is not what you learn but how you learn. And how a student learns is ultimately dependent on the quality of the intellectual environment in a university.

That environment has to be one in which scholarship is valued for its cultural, as much as its narrowly economic, significance. Its impulses, whether in the humanities or the sciences, are not so far from those of art. Artists are driven by curiosity about the physical and human worlds, and they work by concentrating so hard on a given object that they come to grasp its inner shape. Good scholars do the same things. It makes as little sense to tell scholars to confine themselves to currently productive subjects as it does to tell painters to confine their palettes to a small range of currently popular colours.

Intellectual fashions, in any case, are as capricious as any other kind of fashion. Schools and universities decided a decade ago, for example, that nobody was interested in Latin and Greek any more and narrowed their curriculums accordingly. What happened? A massive upsurge in interest in classical antiquity, with popular culture reflecting new anxieties about the US's drift from republic to empire. Short-term judgments about what's interesting in any culture are almost always wrong.

Universities do need to reflect and serve the societies in which they work, but they also need to protect the intellectual ecology. If that means having a few nature preserves where hardly anyone goes and exotic scholarly beats root around in quiet obscurity, so be it.