Diarmaid Ferriter: So, what is a university for?

There will be some debate this year about the impact and legacy of minister for education Donogh O’Malley, who, this time 50 years ago, was adamant he would see through the introduction of the scheme for free secondary school education he had announced with a flourish in 1966. He had insisted the lack of access to secondary education was a “dark stain on the national conscience”.

It came at a time when only 10 per cent of working class teenagers in the 15-19 age bracket were in full-time education compared to 46.5 per cent for those from professional backgrounds. O’Malley’s initiative had a remarkable impact: even in the short term, there was an increase from 148,000 pupils in post-primary schools in 1967 to 239,000 by 1974.

O'Malley was less successful when it came to some of his proposals for third level. He worked closely with his fellow engineer Noel Mulcahy, future vice-president of UL, and others, to build on the promises of Paddy Hillery by getting the Regional Technical Colleges off the ground, creating a parallel third-level system. But his plan, announced in 1967, to merge UCD and TCD was defeated; both institutions feared absorption by the other and the idea petered out after O'Malley's death in 1968. At the time, O'Malley described the merger idea as a "wrestle with history" to end an "insidious partition". In the capital city of a small country there were "to all intents and purposes two separate and very differently constituted university institutions, each endowed in major part by the state, but each ploughing its own furrow". O'Malley's move did, however, lead to greater co-operation and rationalisation between the rivals.

What was not mentioned at that time was rankings. Fifty years on, however, the preoccupation with league tables and international rankings borders on the obsessive. There are different criteria for a number of different league tables and we are constantly told there is a need to have as many Irish universities as possible as highly placed as possible, accompanied by a language defined by performance, impact, market forces and so-called “Quality Assessment” (QA). The question of whether it is feasible or desirable for a country of this size to have numerous universities highly placed in the world rankings is not debated enough; instead we are drowned in management directives about the utilitarian needs of our customers and potential customers – those who used to be called students.

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It is also made clear to those working in the humanities that their research areas are in the halfpenny place when it comes to research and funding priorities, which are science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem). There is little doubt, as recently pointed out by Oxford vice-chancellor Louise Richardson, that Irish universities are greatly damaged by under funding, but the way this is measured is in relation to "the recent slide in the world rankings". That loses sight of so much else and prompts, for me, this very old-fashioned question: can a university have a soul and be driven by priorities other than ranking? Can the funding question – an urgent one – be underpinned by a broader sense of what third level education should be about?

My ideal academic job would be at the University of St Chinian in the Languedoc region of France. In recent times, its humanistic president, the medieval historian Guy Boulanger, had to deal with a hostile external committee which was sent to conduct a QA and value for money review. The head of the QA committee insisted, "The University of the future can no longer be an intellectual ivory tower. It is an institution of the market and must see itself as a merchant offering services." Boulanger pulled no punches in his distaste for such a crude, soulless characterisation and derided those running the QA system as pedalling "pretentious hogwash devised by half-educated MBAs and international agency freeloaders".

The university community rallied to try and thwart the QA process and defend the university on the grounds that it was a pleasant place to work and study, with a self-made identity that generated pride. In rejecting the damning conclusions of the QA committee, Boulanger insisted, “If a university has no intrinsic substance, no essential nature, it can have no inherent quality to evaluate”. He defended the idea of a university as an institution characterised by its triple functions of conserving, transmitting and creating knowledge.

Unfortunately, St Chinian and Boulanger are fictional creations, the product of the adroit mind of the 80-year-old philosopher and former president of UCD Paddy Masterson whose debut novel Quality Time at St Chinian has just appeared. It is timely, and in Masterson's words, "beneath all the fun there lurks a serious issue". It brings us back to a fundamental question that John Henry Newman began to address in lectures in Dublin city 165 years ago, and which far too many have lost sight of: what is a university for?