Dangerous minds

Connect Eddie Holt It's been a dismal week for higher education

Connect Eddie HoltIt's been a dismal week for higher education. Newsweek published yet another fishy "international" ranking list of universities; Siptu decided on industrial action at University College Dublin (UCD) on September 11th; the media has focused on UCD's alleged

"poaching" of other universities' staff; the University of Limerick (UL) was found to have misled an engineering lecturer about his contract.

Newsweek's top 100 universities in the world are about 80 per cent English language-speaking. The first 15 places are filled by 13 American and two British institutions. Tokyo University, ranked 16th, is the sole non-English language institution in the top 20. Newsweek used a mix of the Times of London and the daft Shanghai Jiaotong University surveys to reach its rankings.

It all begs profound questions about the nature of education. Why, for instance, if the United States and Britain enjoy such academic - perhaps even intellectual - dominance, did these states lie about their belligerent intentions in Iraq? Does academic excellence require lying politicians, many of whom have presumably been formed by their country's higher education system? Is there no relationship between universities and the governing elite of the states in which they're situated? You find the truth through research and we'll do the lying - is that it?

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There are, of course, forces which can propel the most ostensibly civilised of states into barbarous behaviour. Nazi Germany is most often cited in this regard. Are we supposed to learn nothing from that?

A thriving educational system might be expected to produce relatively decent, benign-minded individuals. There's always ideology, of course, and people can be expected to differ in fundamental orientations. Clashes are inevitable. But what good is any education system if it leads to people living in fear because of lies about imminent threats from non-existent weapons of mass destruction?

Meanwhile, Chris Rowland, Siptu's branch organiser in UCD, said: "Staff at UCD are being denied job security and pension rights because the university is abusing the legislation covering fixed-term contract work. This policy is creating a two-tier workforce - one with security and provision for the future and the other without."

The union claims that about one-third of UCD's 3,000 staff - including lecturers, researchers, administrative and services staff - are on fixed-term contracts. "UCD is blatantly in breach of the legislation covering fixed-term contract work by not giving some contract staff a pension," added Rowland.

A large part of the problem is that UCD is increasingly attempting to become like a US university. The business model it's trying to emulate inevitably leads - as in business - to a tiered workforce. So, like chief executives and their favoured minions, you get a cluster of people at the top who reward themselves handsomely and a vast hoi polloi of casual workers without any security.

Perhaps such a strategy will propel UCD onto some future Newsweek top 100 international ranking of universities. But it's a deeply ideological position to adopt and cares little for those without any security of tenure. Indeed, it runs the risk of making Irish society still shallower - excessively aware of the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Then there's been the row about UCD's alleged "poaching" of certain academics. In refusing to sign a protocol drawn up by the Irish Universities Association, college president Hugh Brady warned that such a protocol could lead to the development of an anti-competitive cosy cartel. This sounds more like Ryanair's chief executive Michael O'Leary than the head of an Irish university.

As in media and other sought-after areas of work, academia always exploits casual workers. There is a kind of natural selection based on persistence, ability and luck - a permanent job becomes available - that operates, particularly in the early years, on young academics.

Medicine, though it has improved in recent years, has been notorious for abusing and exploiting junior doctors. Perhaps Dr Brady, who is a medical doctor, regards such exploitation as necessary and productive. Certainly, there are few careers in which there's no exploitation. Maybe, as in vaccination or homoeopathy, a sliver of poison can be beneficial, but there's got to be a limit.

The criteria by which universities enter such fishy ranking lists as Newsweek's are deeply ideological too.

Anyway, the Employment Appeals Tribunal awarded Duncan Martin €159,290 when it found as "credible" his claim that he was misled regarding his job as a senior lecturer in chemical engineering in UL. Martin was told by an outgoing professor that the job was permanent even though it was for a fixed-term period of three years only.

So UCD, it seems, is not the only serial abuser when it comes to short-term contracts. All of the universities do it in greater or lesser degree. With Irish universities due back teaching in a matter of weeks, it could be an, eh, "interesting" winter. We'll see.