Madam - It is disconcerting, to say the least, that the University of Limerick's President Emeritus should have such a crude, reductionist view of education and the function of universities. In Edward Walsh's narrow, utilitarian world-view (Opinion, August 22nd), education is evidently synonymous with economy, in particular an economy dominated by profit-driven corporations (inaccurately termed "free market").
In this debased view, universities function primarily to churn out workers fit for high-tech companies. What of other fields of human knowledge and endeavours to improve social and environmental conditions?
The prominence of such IT-orientated universities in the US is actually an indictment of the type of education system we would end up with if dictated to by corporate profit, as Prof Walsh endorses.
And anyway, with the continuing Nasdaq slump and bubble-bursting performance of these IT corporations, Walsh's faith in the much-vaunted "knowledge economy" doesn't seem such a wise idea.
He might like to recall that education derives from the Latin educere, meaning "to lead out from". This implies broadening knowledge of the world we live in - not reducing it to a kind of specialised function for an economy which is throwing workers out of jobs and immiserating more and more of the planet in a destructive, profit-driven race to the bottom. - Yours, etc.,
FINIAN CUNNINGHAM,
Whitestown,
Co Louth.