LEFTFIELD:The Higher Education Authority has a key role to play should be reformed, not scrapped, writes FERDINAND VON PRONDZYNSKI

PUBLIC SECTOR agencies or quangos generally fall into three groups: (a) those with a high public profile and a reasonably good image – the Environmental Protection Agency; (b) those with a high public profile and a bad image – Nama; and (c) those nobody has ever heard of – the Local Government Computer Services Board.

So what about the Higher Education Authority (HEA)? For those of us working in higher education it is easy to think of the HEA as a high-profile, important agency that acts as a buffer between the Department of Education and us mere mortals But talk to the general public and, mostly, they’ve never heard of it. That doesn’t, of course, mean that it isn’t important, but just that there might not be much public sentiment invested in its future status and role.

Strictly speaking there is no such body as the HEA. It was established under the Higher Education Authority Act 1971, and section 2 of that Act provides for the establishment of a body referred to by its Irish name only, An tÚdarás um Ard-Oideachas. The English-language translation of the name has crept into popular use, but there is no official basis for it.

The HEA was given five key functions: furthering the development of higher education; assisting in the co-ordination of State investment in higher education and preparing proposals for such investment; promoting an appreciation of the value of higher education and research; promoting the attainment of equality of opportunity in higher education; and promoting the democratisation of the structure of higher education.

From a university perspective, the most visible function of the HEA has been the allocation of public money to the individual institutions, through the recurrent grant and the “grant in lieu of fees” under which the State pays fees for the students at the rate laid down by the Government.

This resource-allocation role is exercised in hugely frustrating ways for the universities – though it is not the HEA’s fault.

In the December Budget the Government declares how much money is to be given to higher education, and it is then the HEA’s job to distribute it.

Doing so takes another few weeks, and as a result the universities discover in about February or so their annual budget for what, by then, is already a four-month-old financial year.

It makes rational planning all but impossible.

So what about the HEA’s other roles? The authority certainly addresses them, but the main impact of this attention for the universities is a heightened bureaucracy, as often the key requirement is a set of additional reports, some of these requiring the employment of specific people in each institution to collate and submit the information. There is occasionally some money to act as incentive, but usually this is minor in the scheme of things.

So is this a role that the system needs? I suspect most university presidents and senior officers would say that they prefer to have the HEA than not have it, as it is run by people who know about and understand higher education and can advise the department.

But that is not everyone’s view. In 2008 An Bord Snip Nua recommended its abolition, and the then education spokesman for Fine Gael, Brian Hayes, suggested to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Education and Science that the best option for the HEA was to “go away”.

But that was before the recent Hunt report, and indeed before the controversy surrounding the bizarre Employment Control Framework (ECF), which enforced daft new controls on recruitment.

The Hunt proposals envisage the HEA co-ordinating the strategic direction of the various universities and colleges, and ensuring that public funding is used to incentivise programmes that align with government priorities. Under the ECF the HEA’s task is to restrain university recruitment and promotions and, where specified, to act as the arbiter of what appointments can and cannot be made.

This is really a relic – still popular in Ireland – of the old assumptions of government and public service: that they are there to command and restrain.

In other countries the emphasis has changed, with names now more commonly referring to an “agency” or “service”. The staff of the HEA are not the problem, but the context into which they have been placed is.

It is time to reform this set-up, and to ensure that the HEA is geared towards facilitation and support rather than command and control. This will better serve a country that now needs to be enterprising and innovative, and that needs higher education to lead that drive.

Ferdinand von Prondzynski, the former president of DCU, is vice-chancellor of Robert Gordon University, in Scotland