Afraid to speak out about universities

CultureShock A letter from a senior academic, who cannot be named, reveals the extent to which our third-level institutions …

CultureShockA letter from a senior academic, who cannot be named, reveals the extent to which our third-level institutions have ceased to be centres of free inquiry, writes Fintan O'Toole

Last month, after I wrote in this column about UCD's decision to end its degree in Old Irish and what it says about the narrowing of minds in our universities, I received a long letter from a very senior Irish academic. He is in many ways an exemplary figure: a hugely popular teacher but also a prodigious writer and researcher who regularly publishes work of the highest quality. But I can't tell you who he is. The saddest and most startling line in his letter is one in which he says that, although he would be quite happy to speak out for his own sake, he fears that doing so would have adverse consequences for his department.

It is possible, of course, that such fears are unfounded. But my correspondent is a calm, amiable man, not given to obvious paranoia. His anxieties are ones that I have heard expressed by a number of academics in a number of institutions. And the very fact that such fears exist within our universities is itself a cause for deep concern. Universities are supposed to be centres of free inquiry and of intellectual curiosity. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the radical restructuring that is currently affecting most of them, there is something utterly askew when even very senior academics feel that they cannot engage in an open and honest discussion of what is happening around them.

My correspondent's letter is about what he calls the "managerialist" culture, "which is running riot in our university system, particularly in the two largest universities, Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin". His view of this process is worth detailing, especially since it involves subjects other than his own, and cannot therefore be dismissed as the mere product of academic amour propre.

READ MORE

"Classical languages," he writes, "once a distinguished tradition in UCD, scarcely are known any more. Ireland used to produce distinguished classicists; nowadays we import them from Britain and elsewhere. Medieval studies in UCD, once a jewel in the intellectual crown, is being let die; again, we used to produce medievalists of world stature, now we import them. Similar and equally scandalous assaults on the teaching of modern languages have gone unnoticed by Irish journalism. Again, the attempts to force shotgun marriages on subjects that are dissimilar have been ignored. History, sociology and political science have been forced together in Trinity in a way that threatens the identity of all three. At one stage UCD proposed a shotgun marriage between classics and philosophy, betraying a ludicrous ignorance of the nature and content of both intellectual areas."

His argument for the intellectual autonomy of different subjects is not, however, an argument against "intellectual synergy". On the contrary, he argues from his own experience the relevance of a broad, open-minded education, even to specialised areas of research such as his own: "The social sciences and the humanities depend on each other intellectually: you cannot become an adept in my subject without some background in philosophy and a reading knowledge of several languages other than English. My old-fashioned classical secondary education is a boon to my present-day teaching of the subject. In the United States, a PhD in the subject from a good university usually requires a testing in at least two foreign languages."

THE OLD IRISH system of broadly-based undergraduate degrees in the humanities, he argues, "has offered historically an extraordinarily rich variety of subject combinations to generations of undergraduate students. It has produced a large share of our writers, academics, public servants and political leaders, and Ireland would be much poorer intellectually and culturally without it. That richness is under threat . . . ".

I was thinking of this letter earlier this month when I was fortunate enough to hear the UCC medieval historian Donnchadh O'Corrain at the Burren Law School. He was engaged in something that most sane people would assume to be profoundly pointless: the exegesis of a number of early Gaelic legal texts. He is probably one of a tiny number of people in the world who can not just read these texts, but place them precisely in the context of European intellectual history. In the new "managerialist" culture of our universities, there will be little place for people like him. Of what economic utility is a professor who specialises in Brehon law? Yet his talk was both riveting and utterly contemporary, effortlessly connecting the old words with present-day concerns about the Iraq war and political corruption. It was a reminder that people who really know one subject actually understand a lot about most things.

There are particular ironies in the current narrowing of minds in our universities. It is happening at a time when there is a burgeoning interest in Irish culture abroad, so that we may eventually end up importing scholars of Old Irish from English or American universities. It is also happening at a time when the institutes of technology, supposedly more narrowly career-focused, are widening their remits (the Institute of Technology Tallaght, for example, hosts the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies) because they recognise that critical thinking is increasingly important in the real world of jobs and business. And it is happening at a time when the arts, as the huge increase in State funding recognises, are becoming increasingly central to national identity. If our institutions of learning are narrow and fearful, how can we sustain a vibrant, innovative culture?