Judge IT crowd by the same standards

LEFTFIELD:IF YOU have visited Waterford in the past 10 years or so you will not have been able to avoid having your ear bent about the importance of having a university in the southeast. WIT is an excellent institution. It has demonstrated its ability to compete in the research agenda, and its buildings and infrastructure are impressive.

DIT has also been pushing for university status, and has had an application turned down. Other institutes, including Cork Institute of Technology, have also indicated a desire for a change of status. Together they have suggested that they might collectively become a “technological university of Ireland”.

The report on a National Strategy for Higher Education – the Hunt report – has set out a framework for converting clusters of institutes of technology (but not individual institutes) into “technological universities”. It suggests “there may be a case for facilitating the evolution of some existing institutes, following a process of consolidation, into a form of university that is different in mission from the existing Irish universities.”

The idea is that technological universities would be different from “normal” universities, but would also be different from existing institutes of technology. This would maintain a binary divide in Irish higher education, but apparently one that is qualitatively different, even if that difference is ill-defined.

The Higher Education Authority has published possible criteria for this process. It is difficult to see how these are materially different from those that apply to existing universities. They include scale (“an institution large enough to be comparable with existing universities in Ireland”), international standing (“developed international collaborations such as joint projects, student and staff exchange and combined provision of programmes”), industry links (“curricula that are developed in close consultation with business, professional and occupational organisations”), research (“a research strategy that foregrounds the applied research mission, links to enterprises and the contribution to innovation and knowledge transfer”), governance (“a governing body that includes representatives of enterprises, occupations, professions and local communities”) and so on. These are things that all universities have or do at least some of the time. The difference appears to be mainly that the technological universities will also offer programmes below honours degree level (as well as honours and postgraduate programmes).

Recently the Minister for Jobs and Enterprise, Richard Bruton, suggested in the aftermath of significant job losses in the Waterford area that the establishment of a technological university should be “expedited”. DIT has now joined with IT Tallaght and IT Blanchardstown to seek this status.

I don’t see a compelling reason for having different criteria for other institutions also to be called universities. The credibility of Ireland’s university system depends on its academic integrity. There isn’t an internationally accepted category of “technological university” that is qualitatively different from any other kind of university. The best-known technological universities, such as MIT and Caltech in the US, maintain the same principles and standards as any other university, and in fact exceed them. I am in favour of having universities with a technological mission. I believe the case for university status of WIT and DIT should be sympathetically tested. But the criteria applied should be as rigorous as they have been historically. That is in everyone’s interests, including those of the institutions themselves.