Sir, - Lest there be any misunderstanding, the suggestion that the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) is a university in all but name is no trite aspiration. According to the international review team appointed by the Higher Education Authority at the request of the Minister for Education, the DIT has demonstrated a level of maturity which justifies a recommendation that it be granted authority to award its own degrees".
This same review body "strongly urged" that the Government policy as set out in the White Paper Charting our Education Future (1995) should be "implemented at the earliest possible date" viz. that the funding and oversight of the DIT should be transferred from the Department of Education to the Higher Education Authority. The review team also suggested that "key features of the proposed legislation" (Universities Bill, 1996) might be "extended to the DIT and its legislation be amended".
The Oireachtas has already recognised the unique status of the DIT with the passing of the DIT Act (1992) which empowers it to award its own qualifications. Degree-awarding at the DIT goes hack to 1903, when the first arrangements were made to award degrees through the University of London. In more recent times i.e. for the last 20 years, degrees have been awarded through the good offices of the University of Dublin.
DIT has 6,500 students at degree level, 4,500 of whom are at honours-degree level or higher. Finally, the facts that 22,500 students make the DIT the largest of our third-level institutions and that its history goes back to 1887, while not insignificant in their own right, are less important than the need to ensure that the DIT and its student body can, in future, compete on the same statutory basis as those universities that will operate under the new legislation. Anything short of this can only be construed as an attempt to disadvantage the DIT and all that it stands for. - Yours, etc.,
Director of external affairs, Dublin Institute of Technology, Fitzwilliam House, 30 Upper Pembroke Street, Dublin 2.