Madam, - While I would prefer not to be battling it out with the distinguished chancellor of our National University, and my academic colleague for many years, in the letter columns of your paper, I believe that the issues which Dr Garret FitzGerald raises in his letter of October 7th, and in his article of September 20th, have a wide public interest and demand a reply.
Madam, - While I would prefer not to be battling it out with the distinguished chancellor of our National University, and my academic colleague for many years, in the letter columns of your paper, I believe that the issues which Dr Garret FitzGerald raises in his letter of October 7th, and in his article of September 20th, have a wide public interest and demand a reply.
Dr FitzGerald is correct in noting that academic degree quality may vary substantially from one university to the next, and it is essential, therefore, that all academic credit systems must be critically considered in the context of the university issuing them. This is a self-evident feature of the international academic marketplace so that European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) credits, like all others in international circulation, are not precise measurements of academic achievement. The ECTS is not the academic euro, though it goes a considerable distance in satisfying this description.
Graduate admission officers in universities everywhere are fully conversant with this situation and, for example, will differentiate between an applicant with 60 credits and a grade point average of say, 3.0, from the Bob Jones University and Stanford University. However, in his letter, Dr FitzGerald maintains his earlier criticism of the ECTS, saying that "it is hard to see how any serious academic could regard this system as an adequate comparability measure". Surely he must be aware that this system is now in use by over 1,000 universities throughout Europe, including the universities of the National University, and they cannot all be devoid of serious academics?
In regard to the British and Irish extern examiner system, he expresses astonishment at my criticisms because I was a member of the NUI Senate when this system was reformed. Please allow me to reciprocate my astonishment that Dr FitzGerald forgets my objections to these so-called reforms at the Senate meetings. I recall that the debate concentrated on the reform of this system so that my voice, admittedly a lone one, expressing my belief that the system should be abolished rather than reformed, was perhaps not taken seriously by Dr FitzGerald in the chair.
I repeat my criticisms that it is an archaic, out-of date system, a last remnant from British colonial times, which involves for the most part, British academics visiting our campuses annually at examination times to pronounce on the quality of our examinations and our graduates.
Conversely, some of our professors and lecturers visit UK universities, as indeed I have done over the years, for the same function over there. All very cosy and pleasant in earlier times, now an ineffective procedure and hardly appropriate for the international academic world in which we live. The new procedures for academic assurance and accreditation now in place in European universities, including the NUI,are much more effective in ensuring the international standards of our degrees and the academic quality of our graduates.
Finally let me concede that the EUA, the European University Association, is not an academics' representative body in the strict sense that the trade union, IFUT, the Irish Federation of University Teachers, is. But it is a extremely effective and vital forum in the greater European academic scene, where it represents the European higher education community on all matters relating to academic and institutional operations.
IFUT is represented in Brussels by the trade union conglomerate ETUCE, which has a higher education division, but I have not heard of it in any of the many debates of recent years, such as the Bologna Declaration. - Yours, etc.,
JOHN KELLY, Professor Emeritus, University College, Dublin 4.