Madam, - Many people will appreciate Dr Edward M. Walsh's appraisal (Opinion, September 13th) of the problems currently facing Irish universities as much as they will his signal achievement in fostering a new Irish third-level institution from conception to its attainment of international status as the University of Limerick.
All who have had dealings with Irish universities during his lifetime will understand, as he does, that the university system has given remarkably good service to the community, as well as to the students committed to its care, given the straitened circumstances under which it has had to function.
It is equally evident that significant improvement (particularly at the research level) will come only with a dramatic increase in the level of investment from private as well as public sources.
However, when this increase in investment comes (as I hope it will), it is essential that it is not at the price of abandoning the education of students as individuals, or at the expense of academic freedom which requires that the governance and supervision of academic matters rests in the hands of academics. These are among the basic principles that obtain in those universities that he ranks among the world's top 10, in three of which I have had the privilege to study.
The governing boards and chief executives of these institutions are, as Dr Walsh depicts it, primarily involved with strategic decisions concerning the future of their institutions. But they are also concerned with the management of investment portfolios which, in the case of each of the 10 universities he mentions, exceeds the Gross National Product of Ireland. To draw analogies between the management of these multi-million dollar corporations and Irish universities strikes me as entirely inappropriate - not least because it takes no account of the further fact that the academic governance of these institutions usually lies with a provost and a team of deans who will themselves have come from academic backgrounds and who reach decisions only after considerable discussion with all categories of staff and students.
These, like those who participate in the academic governance of Irish universities, seek to cultivate and reward excellence, but they are no more empowered, as Dr Walsh puts it, "to weed out mediocrity" than are Irish university authorities because tenure, once granted can be revoked only on grounds of serious misdemeanour.
There is everything to be said for tightening appointment procedures in Irish universities to ensure, as far as is humanly possible, that the best available person is appointed to each academic post, and for monitoring promotions perhaps more rigorously than before.
However, to grant executive officers the power to dismiss academic appointees they might consider mediocre would bring an end to the academic freedom that is so carefully cherished in those universities that Dr Walsh most admires but hardly understands. - Yours, etc.,
Prof NICHOLAS CANNY, Academic Director, Centre for the Study of Human Settlement and Historical Change, NUI, Galway.