UCD’s first female president: ‘I kind of barged on through, not thinking that doors had ever even been closed’

On the day before Prof Orla Feely was named as UCD’s new president last February, her father — former Dublin Corporation manager Frank Feely — died.

It was, she says, an extraordinary week of very mixed emotions.

“I was able to tell him before he died that I was the candidate recommended to the governing authority following the interview,” she says. “Dad was over the moon ... he was overjoyed. It just meant so, so much to him. And it meant so much for me to be able to tell him that. It was just a moment that I’ll never forget.”

Her appointment marks another milestone for senior women academics in the traditionally male-dominated world of higher education leadership

It was a considerable feat for Feely who first stepped foot on the UCD campus as a 16-year-old student.

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Today, she officially takes charge of Ireland’s largest university with more than 35,000 students.

Her appointment marks another milestone for senior women academics in the traditionally male-dominated world of higher education leadership.

Three years ago there had been no female university president in 430 years of higher education in Ireland. Her appointment means seven of Ireland’s 13 universities and technological universities are now led by women.

[ Students must hear alternative views which they disagree with, new UCD president says ]

From Templeogue in Dublin, Feely was a bright student with a passion for maths, physics and science in school and decided to study engineering at UCD. While it was highly male-dominated (90 per cent of her class were men), she says she applied after being influenced by people such as Christina Murphy, education correspondent of The Irish Times, and UCD’s Prof John Kelly.

“I’m always very conscious of the fact that there were women who went before me who pushed that door open,” she says. “And then I kind of barged on through, not thinking that had ever even been closed.”

Despite economic gloom at the time, the mid-1980s felt like a time of possibility as a wave of younger people graduated with higher levels of qualifications and an international outlook.

An IDA “Young Europeans” advertising campaign at the time trumpeted the pool of young talent in Ireland. “The Irish: hire them before they hire you,” said one of the adverts. The students who featured were, as it happens, UCD engineering graduates in the year ahead of Feely.

It was, she says, a “Rolls-Royce” quality of education. Feely and her fellow graduates emerged with a level of qualification “way beyond” the needs of the engineering sector at the time.

Most of Feely’s class left Ireland to pursue work and study opportunities abroad. She went to the University of California, Berkeley, where she completed her Master’s and PhD and won awards for outstanding and innovative research in the area of non-linear circuits and systems.

“The opportunities in Silicon Valley were extraordinary at the time. But I was aware that there was something very exciting happening in Ireland. Every Christmas when I would come back, I would see Dublin transform ... I always loved higher education and research and felt that was ultimately where I’d want to build my career.”

She returned to Ireland to work as a lecturer in UCD’s engineering department in 1992 before later being appointed vice-president for research, innovation and impact.

Along the way, Feely became the first Irish woman elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and president of Engineers Ireland.

The male-dominated world of engineering — and higher education leadership generally — has been changing for some time, she says.

For years, she says, she was the only woman on the academic staff in engineering at UCD. Today, three of the five engineering schools are led by women, while a majority of the university’s senior management team are women.

She puts the transformation down to a combination of factors such as a pipeline of talented female graduates, a recognition within academia of the need to promote women and rigorous action plans aimed at boosting female participation at senior levels.

It is, she says, a model for other sectors of the economy where women are underrepresented at senior levels.

Feely, meanwhile, is taking the helm of UCD at a time when many are beginning to worry about the “student experience”.

A combination of rising living costs, scarce accommodation and hefty student registration fees are taking their toll. There is anecdotal evidence that more students are commuting longer and have less time to engage with student clubs and societies.

“We need to, to take that very, very seriously. It’s very high on my agenda to make sure that we give our students an outstanding student experience ... I‘m aware that over my 10 years as president, every student who comes into us directly from school will have had their education interrupted by Covid in a way that they will remember. And that will have left its mark on them,” she says.

The university is investing in mental health supports, she says, while it now has 4,000 student beds, many of which are ring-fenced for first-year students.

“Having said that, the student experience is still wonderful,” Feely adds, as she gestures outside.

It is a gloriously sunny early afternoon and hundreds of students are stretched out on the grass by the lakeside.

“Just look outside there. We have put so much work and so many resources in UCD into improving our student experience in all sorts of creative ways. So, it is still an outstanding environment for students.”

The campus — once a barren and windswept expanse — is changing. There are woodland walks following the planting of tens of thousands of trees, and a new sports and student amenities precinct and a student village that aims to boost the sense of community on campus.

Work is set to get under way on a host of new facilities such as a new Centre for Future Learning, to provide additional teaching and learning spaces, and an expanded science block is on the way.

Feely is plugged into the college experience personally: her twin 19-year-old sons are in their first year at UCD and Trinity.

“We’re an ecumenical household,” she laughs. “They are loving it. We talk about the difficulties associated with the student experience post-Covid and the late arrival, but you forget just how wonderful an experience that the university student experience is.”

Feely has little truck with the notion that we are sending too many students to university who might fare better in more hands-on areas (“I’m very comfortable with the level that we’re currently at in higher education) or that we have too many overqualified students (“back in the 1980s when I graduated, we were qualified way beyond the needs of the Irish engineering sector”).

To be the knowledge economy that we want to be, that we need to be, we need to have greater funding of our research and development capacity nationally

—  Prof Orla Feely

Feely is worried, however, about funding for research. It is, she says, vital not just for higher education but for the wider economy.

“We’re just not spending enough full stop,” she says. “And all the international comparators tell us that. To be the knowledge economy that we want to be, that we need to be, we need to have greater funding of our research and development capacity nationally.”

The last State strategy envisaged boosting spending on research and development to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2020 — yet we only hit 1.63 per cent by that stage.

“To be able to attract jobs into Ireland, to retain jobs in Ireland, advance jobs in Ireland, all of these things. You need a research-informed talent population,” she says.

“A lot of our postgraduate students would come from outside Ireland, and many of them will stay within the country and work within the country. It’s an attractor for a talented population ... everything is lifted when you have a strong research system within higher education. Conversely, if you start to erode the research base, then the higher education base starts to erode as well.”