Research is a vital adjunct to the teaching role, but no more than that, writes Prof John Kelly
In the current debate about the future of university education, it is surprising that there has been almost no serious analysis or discussion about the prime role of the university in contemporary Ireland.
No one has asked if the role of the Irish university is primarily to educate students and turn out graduates or to do research or simply to provide well-paid employment for academics.
Why indeed do we need universities at all? There has been no formal consideration of the quantity and effectiveness of the output from our universities and how they measure up to international standards.
Quality of any system cannot be assessed or major reform proposed, without some evaluation of the output. To move forward, it is said, you must first know where you're standing.
The contribution of the universities to the society we live in today can be measured under two main headings - (1) graduates and (2) research.
The million or so graduates over these past 50 years have largely been responsible for the successful economy which we enjoy in Ireland today, as well as for providing the many physical, political, moral and intellectual services which we now take for granted in our everyday lives.
A whole host of successful industries, both native and multinational, were launched throughout Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s with the confidence that there were great resources of well-educated graduates across all disciplines.
It is a well-documented success story which has provided the blueprint for similar developments in other countries.
Looking then at the research output over those years, it is difficult to identify a body of research output from the universities which has had a major impact on the Irish economy. In general, with basic research as is normal in universities worldwide, very few projects result directly in a major breakthrough in the commercial world, so that this comment is not a criticism of university research in Ireland.
In Ireland, the benefit of that research to the economy and to the social and cultural developments has been through the many graduates from our universities for whom research was a vital part of their third-level education.
The prime role of the university has always been and should always remain in education and in the production of graduates at bachelor, master and doctoral levels.
Research is a vital adjunct to this role, but no more than that, and this should be clearly recognised in its funding and administration by government and within the university.
The traditional ethos of our universities would appear to be under threat by the emphasis in a number of recent public pronouncements urging them to go down the road of the research universities of the US; what is sometimes referred to as the "Harvardisation" route.
This would be a big mistake. Such a philosophy would be inappropriate for the Irish situation. Who cares if some agency in Shanghai rates none of the Irish universities in the world's top 200, as seemed to be a major concern of Dr Edward Walsh in his Irish Times article on universities and the economy?
Surely it must be appreciated that such ratings are nonsense. The function and ethos of universities vary from one country to another and indeed within any one country, so that scoring numbers out of 10 for the quality of degree programmes, graduate research and other academic criteria can have little validity.
There is no one universal model of what a university should look like. Our universities have performed magnificently over the years through their graduates in the creation of the society we now enjoy; perhaps Dr Walsh should tell his friends in Shanghai that.
The best research is often done in the library alone, in the solitude of one's mind or in the intellectual exchange of ideas with colleagues, not necessarily in expensive laboratories working in a multi-discipline team.
The Greek Archimedes with a cry of "Eureka!" (I found it!) made his great discovery of flotation while having a bath and, in more recent times the Nobel prizewinning scientists, Crick and Watson, credited their discovery of the structure of DNA in part ". . . to the long uneventful periods when we walked among the colleges or unobtrusively read the new books that came into Heffer's bookstore".
John Henry Newman, first rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, later in 1883 to become University College Dublin, had some interesting things to say about research in the university in his celebrated book, The Idea Of A University, which he wrote in Dublin in 1854.
He said: "If its [the university's\] object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a university should have students."
This is often mistakenly interpreted as suggesting that Newman was hostile to having research in the university.
However, this statement must be taken in the context of the difficult political situation in which he found himself in relation to the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland, and also because of his fear that his determination that the "great object" of the university must be education might be frustrated.
The concept of the research university would not, however, conform to his "idea"; it would indeed be the very opposite. University College Dublin will soon be celebrating the 150th anniversary of the admission of its first students which took place on November 3rd, 1854.
Perhaps at that time these thoughts on Newman's idea of a university will be revisited.
John Kelly is Professor Emeritus and former registrar in University College Dublin