Madam, - Articles in The Irish Timeson successive Fridays have highlight the crisis in Irish higher education today. Paul Tansey (February 29th) described the €3.5 billion "earmarked for world-class research in the Irish higher education sector" as a "big bet on a highly uncertain outcome". In a market economy innovation is market-led, not science-based. The main output of the €3.5 billion research programme to date is ever shriller claims for ever bigger subsidies.
The real cost of these programmes far exceeds €3.5 billion. Paul Tansey alerts us to a vital excess cost: "There is a serious danger that the new emphasis on fourth-level education - including the commitment to double the number of PhDs - will be achieved at the expense of starving third-level education of resources."
In addition to the neglect of undergraduates as a whole and all students in subject areas not designated by bureaucrats as "strategic" (that is all arts, humanities, social science departments and many non-designated departments in the sciences), further costs include the growth of expensive managerialism, the proliferation of set-aside academics who don't want to lecture any more, and a generation of university staff seeking as little academic contact as possible with the student body.
At best the programmes address less than 3 per cent of the Irish labour force employed in the "high tech" sector. Recent research by Declan Jordan and Eoin O'Leary of UCC undermines the case that even this limited target is being met. Ireland has a knowledge economy programme that is bereft of economic content and neglects 97 per cent of employment and virtually all of the knowledge found in good universities. Subject areas and departments which have come under the cosh in Irish universities in the recent past include English, Irish, Classics, Mathematics, Modern Languages, Music, Economics, History and Geography. There is not the slightest evidence that graduates in these subjects did not participate in the recent growth of the Irish economy.
The neglect and relegation of these subjects by the current university heads will pose huge problems for second-level education in Ireland before long. The statement in your edition of March 7th that "there is not a huge amount of opportunities for advancement in the humanities" reflects the prejudices of the present university heads rather than the needs of Irish society and its economy or, indeed, the preferences of students.
The claim by Irish university heads in their submission to the higher remuneration body last year that they are no longer academics came as no surprise to anybody in the sector. That it was the basis for a large pay award was surprising, however, and the costs are now seen throughout the sector. As self-styled practitioners in corporate governance, the heads have surrounded themselves with an expensive army of officers and bureaucrats and distanced themselves from both the academic and student communities. The higher remuneration body declined to examine the costs of this managerialism despite the request from the Department of Education to do so.
The Universities Act removed most of the checks and balances in university governance and the policies described here are easily pushed through compliant, rubber-stamping boards. By the time the other checks and balances - such as the Department of Finance expenditure reviews, the Oireachtas and the Comptroller and Auditor General - analyse resource allocation in Irish universities, it will be far too late. The present system will be embedded.
The university heads are not alone in dropping their academic role. Research funds are used by senior highly paid staff to "buy out" undergraduate lecturing by reallocating it to junior staff on as little as a quarter of their pay. Many senior staff no longer see it as their duty to lecture to large classes of freshmen. Lectures appear to be a minority activity among academic staff. Your report of March 7th notes that in one case "research staff account for almost half of the total academic staff in the university".
With a €516 million shortfall in tax revenues and a 24 per cent increase in day-to-day Government spending, the fears expressed in the National Development Plan about the "Strategic Innovation Fund" grow more urgent every day. Class sizes are growing in primary schools and for students in their undergraduate years. Meanwhile the much clichéd innovation, strategic, world-class, cutting edge-innovation juggernaut lumbers on with huge budgets, non-lecturing academics, and lots of bureaucrats on board. Irish universities are storing up problems for the future. They cannot say that no one shouted stop. - Yours, etc,
Dr SEAN D BARRETT, Economics Department, Trinity College, Dublin 2.