Budget cuts a pleasant surprise - they weren't as big as we feared

PRESIDENT'S LOG:LAST Wednesday afternoon in Dublin city centre I stopped, with a number of other passers-by, at a shop that had a television where we could see Brian Lenihan giving his Budget speech. As every new item was disclosed I was able to hear a number of choice expletives from my fellow watchers, no doubt as each of them contemplated their new financial circumstances. The man next to me said: "and I've just bought a new Mercedes." Yes, I felt really sorry for him. Totally, writes FERDINAND VON PRONDZYNSKI

Actually, I wasn’t at that moment trying to hear what had happened to my pay, taxes or benefits. I was hoping to catch something about higher education, or indeed anything about education at all. So I listened intently, but only heard one short reference, and this was in the specific context of using education programmes to get people back to work. Apart from that there was nothing at all. So I went on to my next meeting completely in the dark about what was happening to us, and all I had to go on was the repeated warning I had heard over recent months that we were going to be hit hard.

Later that evening I was able to read all the Budget documents, including the Book of Estimates, and was able to form a view. So my first conclusion was that Brian Lenihan had rather undersold his message, at least as far as education was concerned. Yes, there is to be a 4 per cent reduction in funding, but that is a smaller reduction than I was personally anticipating (with some dread), so my first reaction was to feel a sense of relief. Furthermore, although the research budget has been cut, it has survived, and in particular we now know that the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions will continue to be funded.

It’s clearly not all joy. A cut is a cut, and it comes in the wake of regular cuts in real terms to higher education funding over recent years. We will continue to struggle to maintain balanced budgets in universities and colleges across the sector, and we will have to economise on facilities and equipment where we cannot afford them, thereby putting quality in the firing line. Also, I cannot help feeling uneasy about the cut in the maintenance grant for poorer students, particularly as there have been huge issues this year about the grants being paid at all. But we also knew that cuts were going to be applied everywhere, and nobody in the universities ever argued that we should be excluded from that.

So if the Minister for Finance actually produced a Budget for higher education that, at any rate, was not as scary as we might have expected, why didn’t he make more of that in his speech? True, the Minister for Education, Batt O’Keeffe, did tell a Cork website that the Government had stayed true to its commitment to education and research – and fair play to him for obviously arguing the case well with the Department of Finance – but shouldn’t this be a loud message coming from the entire Government?

Shortly after I had read the Budget documents I went to my next engagement, in another Dublin university, where the host of the event gave a rather elegant and witty speech which began by pointing out that the room we were in looked to all intents and purposes like a concrete bombshelter (well, I told you it wasn’t DCU), and that this seemed highly appropriate on Budget day. But then again, I was also struck by the fact that this event was celebrating the publication of a number of books by staff there, and that the room was full of people who, despite all the gloom and the cuts, were getting on with their work and were continuing to do things that would bring great credit to the Irish university sector globally. Well, let me be a little partisan here, my spouse was amongst those being celebrated.

What we are missing right now is not quality of academic faculty, an absence of will, or even a shortage of money, but a sense of national purpose. For 2009 we have had a year of gloom; we have discovered (or re-discovered) that individuals in positions of trust abused those positions over the decades, whether in a financial setting or in the care of young or vulnerable people; we have seen our economic performance plummet; many of our traditional values have been called into question.

But 2009 is now pretty much over, and we can, I believe, re-discover in 2010 our sense of determination and can-do, and a sense of national self-respect. One of the things we need for that is a sense of direction in education and of pride in our universities. I am looking forward to 2010, and have a sense of confidence that it will be a good year for us. And it is this sense of confidence that I would hope will be experienced by all readers of this column over Christmas and the New Year.

Ferdinand von Prondzynski is president of Dublin City University