Summer Schools Local input seen as vital to Yeats school

Circumstances have changed greatly since the first Yeats Summer School43 years ago. Is there still a place for it? asks Carol Coulter.

The number of students at the Yeats Summer School was down to 60 this year, about half the number attending in recent years. If this were to continue, it would make the school unviable - though this is unlikely.

The organisers attribute the fall in numbers to the impact of September 11th on US students, and this is borne out by the fall in numbers attending other Irish literary summer schools, such as the Synge and Joyce schools, earlier this year.

A former director of the Yeats school, Prof Declan Kiberd, pointed out that the same thing happened the year President Reagan bombed Tripoli, only to have the numbers bounce back the following year.

However, it highlights the dependence of such schools on the US student market.

Irish Studies is now big academic business, especially in the US. The emergence of Irish Studies as a separate discipline, incorporating the Irish language, history and sociology as well as literature, is a relatively new development, and owes much to changes in the Irish diaspora.

A generation of Irish-Americans now has money to give to, and an interest in, academic exploration of the Irish experience. Benefactors include Brian Burns, who contributed to Irish Studies in Boston College; Loretta Brennan Glucksman, who funded Ireland House in New York, linked to New York University; and Donald Keough, who funds the Irish Studies programme in Notre Dame, Indiana.

These are among the US universities building links with Irish universities and offering programmes for their students which include travel-study options in Ireland. Notre Dame even has an Irish campus, in Newman House, part of which it has leased from UCD.

But all of this has an impact on the small, locally-organised summer schools, many of which would have hoped to attract such students. US universities encourage their students to study abroad, and the intensive Yeats school provided academic credits.

Such a system does not exist in Irish or British colleges, so attendance at the school, along with the cost of accommodation, was always a bit of luxury for their students, and this was reflected in the relatively few who attended.

Given that such students usually work during their summer holidays, this state of affairs is likely to continue.

So the Yeats Summer School has little alternative but to rely on US students, along with the usual sprinkling of Irish, British, European and Asian students, usually post-graduates.

The president of the Yeats Society, Mr Michael Keohane, is confident that this can be built on. "The strength of the school has always been its intellectual integrity and its academic excellence."

This had been maintained by a "hands-off" relationship between the society, which does the practical organisation on the ground, and the director, who organises the academic programme.

While not implying criticism of the past, he thinks the time has come for a new focus.

One of the proposals now under discussion is the setting up of an academic council, made up from contributors to the school and Irish academics and writers, which would oversee the academic content. It would also act as a network to encourage post-graduate students from English and Irish Studies departments in the various countries to attend.

The local input into the school is, according to its present director, Prof Bernard O'Donoghue, its strength. "It makes the archaeological references and the geographical references in the poetry a centre point. The more gatherings and extensions of education into the summer there are, the more original it is, the better.

"It should be a mixture of academic events with locally-designed, non-academic events. With some of the American universities here now the whole thing, including the bureaucracy, is jetted in. In Sligo people come with an academic input, and the locals bring in people who know about the locality. The attraction is to do with the slightly mystified presentation of Sligo by Yeats."