A MAJOR Government-commissioned report on the third-level sector, due to be officially released this morning, is uninspiring and lacks authority, according to the main representative group for third-level academic staff.
The scathing criticism comes from the Irish Federation of University Teachers which says the Hunt report, detailing a 20-year strategy for the third-level sector, is “unlikely to have much influence on the future development of higher education in Ireland”.
It labels the report as “disappointing, often confused and a missed opportunity”.
The report also drew criticism from the president of Dublin City University. Prof Brian Mac Craith said last night that an overall vision of the future 10 years from now was missing. He also expressed surprise there was very little on the subject of e-learning and online education.
Although still not officially released, the report was published on The Irish Times website (irishtimes.com) last week. To date, it has drawn a lukewarm response from many educationalists.
The report’s key finding is that the sector needs a quantum leap in funding to allow it to deal with record levels of student demand and to play a pivotal role in economic recovery. The group, chaired by economist Dr Colin Hunt, says a new student contribution fee and a student loan programme should be introduced.
The university teachers federation said last night the report “singularly lacks any specific indicators of how any of its recommendations might be implemented against the opposition of vested interests.
“With a change of government in prospect, it seems that Colin Hunt and his team may well have created one of our all-time most expensive dust accumulators.”
Mike Jennings of the federation said: “It often reads like a document compiled by people who do not understand the Irish higher education system and how it works. This is almost an inevitable result of the narrow base of the strategy group’s membership.
“Incredibly, its 15 members did not include even one representative of academic staff. This weakness was compounded by the group’s failure to seek any realistic engagement with staff working in the higher education system.
“The sense in the report that its authors are out of touch with how higher education works, combined with the vagueness of many of its recommendations, leads one to believe that most of it will probably never be implemented.”
Irish Farmers Association president John Bryan said the inclusion of productive assets, such as farmland, in the assessment for grant eligibility would seriously discriminate against farm families and was totally unacceptable.
Mr Bryan said the association would resist any attempt to use productive assets as part of the qualifying criteria for maintenance grants.