Is an election the best way to fill Trinity's top job?

LEFTFIELD: Electing the provost is one of Trinity College's oldest traditions, but it's increasingly not the favoured way internationally because it limits the candidate pool, writes FERDINAND VON PRONDZYNSKI

IT’S ELECTION time. No, not that election, something more exotic. The campaign is under way to elect the next provost of Trinity College Dublin. This will culminate on April 2nd, when the staff of the college and the members of the board and council – in all, 694 people – will meet to cast their votes.

Last week, the college announced the list of six formally approved candidates. Four are internal candidates, and two come from outside the college. What is more, the two external candidates have, as far as I can tell, no previous connections with the college. If either of them were to be elected, it would mark a significant departure for Trinity.

Until recently, the provosts would always have been both graduates of TCD and members of the college’s academic staff. The last two to hold the office – Tom Mitchell, and current provost John Hegarty – though both senior members of staff in the college at the time of their election, were the first in a long time not to have been undergraduate students there. Will Trinity now go even further and elect an entirely external candidate? Alternatively, it could do something equally radical and elect a woman for the first time, as there is a female internal candidate. Indeed if elected, Jane Ohlmeyer would be the first woman to head an Irish university.

Since the election in 2001 of John Hegarty, who at the time was professor of laser physics and had been TCD’s dean of research, there has been ongoing speculation and debate as to whether Trinity would continue with the practice of electing, rather than appointing, its chief officer.

In Ireland, it is the only university to hold an election (UCD having abandoned the practice most recently), and it has been criticised in that elections tend to produce internal outcomes. In the event, the college decided to stick with an election, but with a revised process under which candidates were first interviewed by a panel to determine whether they would be eligible for election.

It might of course be said that the new process has worked, in that for the first time there is a genuine possibility that an external candidate may be elected. On the other hand, Trinity as an internationally renowned university should have picked up a much larger number of leading academics and scholars from around the world wanting to be considered for the post.

So what are the arguments for and against elections as a process for choosing a university head?

The main argument in favour is based on the ideal of a democracy that involves the whole community of scholars, exercising self-government and independence. A person elected can, one must assume, benefit from a sense of legitimacy and consent, and can engage with government, other universities and external stakeholders supported by an explicit mandate from his or her colleagues. These colleagues in turn will have had an opportunity to become familiar with and assess their leader’s manifesto at the time of the election, and will have a real sense of the strategic direction on which they are about to embark.

And the arguments against? Generally speaking the electorate consists of academic staff. This means that, typically, half of the institution’s employees are disenfranchised and will be seen to be second-class citizens.

Secondly, even the academic electorate may be divided, in the assumption that not all of them voted for the successful candidate, and the new leader must now give them a sense of belonging without straying from the manifesto that got him or her elected. Universities can be somewhat introverted communities, and the heat of an election does not particularly help in that context.

Thirdly, an argument against is that an election does not necessarily test candidates in relation to the skills they will require to do the job successfully.

Finally and crucially, elections are public processes, and very few leading academics and scholars from outside the institution would be brave – or maybe even foolish – enough to make their interest publicly known when, if they are unsuccessful, they will then have to return to an employer and to colleagues who now know they wanted to leave. Very few will ever take that gamble, which is why elections so strongly favour an international appointment.

In many ways, TCD is a unique institution in this country. It has the history, the standing and the traditions to do whatever it thinks right, and this in turn explains why it has been able to resist governance forms that are now standard in all other universities. If it wants an elected provost, nobody is really going to step in and force them to do otherwise. But it will probably increasingly ask itself the question whether, if it fell into line with normal international practice at least in the Anglo-American higher education world, it would be able to increase its global impact and recognition. If it maintains its current practice, it will be following the model of European and Asian (in particular Japanese) universities, most of whom seriously underperform in the global rankings.

For all that, a little bit of me is somehow pleased that Trinity has maintained this tradition against the international trend. As a college, it was very good to me when I worked there for 10 years, and whatever the outcome may be, I wish the new provost every good fortune and success, both at home and on the global stage.

Ferdinand von Prondzynski is a former president of DCU