LEFTFIELD:PAUL MOONEY'S "Inside third level" article caused quite a stir, and no wonder. His unique exposé took readers so far inside third level that small details – such as mentioning any actual educational institutions – ceased to matter, and revealed a truth so profound it didn't require the production of a single fact.
Several responses in The Irish Times’ letters page documented the degrees of fiction and fantasy in Mooney’s claims that “lecturers have light workloads, research pet projects that have no benefit for Ireland Inc, and management is poor”.
Mooney generalises from his experience in one, very particular institution, (the National College of Ireland), to make sweeping claims about every university and third-level institution. It would have been useful if he provided metrics on NCI’s contribution to “Ireland Inc” during his tenure. Given that none are provided, we can only presume that none exist, or that if they do, they are not useful to his argument.
To sustain the accusation that academics are generally unaccountable, Mooney ignores mandatory quality review processes, systems of external examination, and the vast array of departmental, faculty and peer assessment processes. To assert that academics are failing something called “Ireland Inc”, he ignores analyses of third-level education in Ireland, such as the 2009 OECD report and the 2011 Hunt report, that emphasise the cost-effective and efficient performance of a sector noted to be seriously under-funded. And to establish a problem with the quality of lecturing, he reminisces that “when at college myself, we had one lecturer who worked through a single book with us”.
Given that this was the most-read piece on The Irish Times online last Tuesday, it is necessary to draw attention to the poverty of its analysis. However there is no point in rebutting every post-factual accusation made in the article. It is more useful to question the politics of such a declaration, and, given its manifest flaws, the editorial motivation involved in publishing it in that form. Stereotyping a sector and proposing top-down solutions for its “problems” is not done in the interests of better management, but to further managerialism.
This is a crucial distinction. Universities can always improve what they do, including how they are managed. But managerialism is not interested in improving what universities do; it is interested in controlling and transforming it, in the interests of a very narrow understanding of education, research, and ultimately human activity.
By assuming that people only work, create and craft if they are under surveillance and disciplined by incentives and punishments, managerialism is profoundly anti-social and anti-human. Its success comes from reducing all work and creativity to forms of productivity that can be immediately measured, no matter how arbitrary the measurements may prove to be.
In a political context such as that of contemporary Ireland, where austerity economics has left all public expenditure open to exaggerated suspicion and political opportunism, there is an audience for even Mooney’s flawed analysis.
Yet such superficial kinds of rationality predictably result in irrational systems and processes. Thomas Docherty, in a recent and acclaimed article in the Times Higher Education supplement, noted how important research in UK universities is “now done in a clandestine and unofficial manner, despite the official criteria, and going beyond the mediocrities that conformity with official criteria necessarily brings”.
Using mythic ideas such as “Ireland Inc” to restrict the right of academics to conduct research is a deliberate attack on academic freedom, and the social and public role of the university. There is much to debate about the future of third level, but academics must be less timid in naming and criticising the ideologies that are also in play.
Dr Gavan Titley is lecturer in the School of English, Media and Theatre Studies, NUI Maynooth.
