Those who care for our education system must insist qualitative criteria, not quantitative fixes, are to the forefront of debate, writes Ciaran Cosgrove.
The higher education sector in Ireland now awaits with trepidation or enthusiasm, depending on which side of the fence you are on, the implementation of the OECD report, commissioned by the former minister for education, on the state of third-level education in Ireland.
If recent contributions to The Irish Times are anything to go by, some commentators both within and without the sector, appear to be salivating at the prospect of a new dynamic order in which universities will be seamlessly harnessed, with or without State-funded assistance, to the driving engine of entrepreneurial zeal.
Enterprise Ireland here we come! "Performance-related" criteria for funding are unambiguously on the agenda, not quite for implementation yet, but near enough down the road.
Quite how economically unproductive areas of third level will survive is unclear. Lopping off such areas would be a clinically efficient solution. Then we could have sound and "relevant" degree programmes, untrammelled by anachronistic courses and departments.
At the moment, the proponents of the new order do not yet consider it decorous to talk about the irritant of the kind of research, particularly in the humanities, that does not contribute a damn euro to the national economy. But, as the fate of the department of classics at Queen's University Belfast showed in the near past, when harsh decisions need to be taken, they will be taken. In any case the near-disappearance of Latin and Greek from the school syllabus is proof, if any were needed, that we need to "think modern". Fuddy-duddy residues from a previous age should be expunged, painlessly, if possible, but painfully, if needs be.
All commentators agree that there is a "funding crisis" in third level, but this is often spoken about as though it were a calamitous act of nature, like a drought. According to this argument, the Government is powerless to act to save the situation. But the Government of the people must be the custodian of the education system and the values embedded therein. That responsibility will always entail a real cost to the Exchequer, but a cost that will always be repaid.
But let me return to the OECD, which has reported on the state of third level in Ireland. All organisations such as the OECD necessarily share some kind of ideological common ground. This is important to understand, lest readers of the report should think that a spirit of disinterested objectivity is what governs the process and underpins the review. The OECD was set up in the 1960s. Its avowed central aim is to build "strong economies in its member-states". The OECD website is instructively interesting. The OECD describes itself as "rich. Its members produce two-thirds of the world's goods and services". The website states proudly that the "Organisation has elements of a think- tank, a monitoring agency, a rich man's club and an unacademic university ". However, as if surprising itself in the act of using language unawares, it quickly asserts that "none of these descriptions captures the essence of the OECD". Now, looking at the membership of the OECD, you will not spot a single African country; there is one single representative from the Latin American continent, and with the exception of Japan and Korea, most of Asia is occluded. One might be forgiven for believing that the raison d'être of the OECD is primarily to serve the economic interests of the First World. It is interesting to note that references to "developing" countries in the OECD economic reports I have read carry an unthought-out implication that one day such countries will become developed like us.
A "vertical" or "critical" model of economic analysis might suggest that the so-called "developed" world has traditionally "needed" a Third World of underdevelopment for the ensured continuance of its economic and political dominance. It might be reasonable therefore to assume that the educational policy of the OECD in its reviews and reports will pre-eminently serve the interests of the leading players in the world economy. It is here that the whole question of research funding for the universities is key.
While research is admirably disinterested throughout the academy, there are areas where this is not the case. For example, the role of the military-industrial complex and indeed the role of pharmaceutical companies in steering university research have been well documented. The increasing development of "globalisation" studies and centres in Irish universities, usually privately financed, seems to me to fit well with a new model of the university that is being actively, and, perhaps, uncritically, championed within and without the academy. In any new third-level order, will it be the case that long-established academic disciplines might simply be considered to be obsolete?
For Voltaire in France, for Jefferson in America, the purpose of the academy was to exercise independent criticism of the forces of church or state. Nowadays, universities are often expected to serve the interests of the state. Criticism and analysis, for centuries the hallmark of intellectual thinking in the university, could be in for a torrid time where pragmatic goals and endeavours in the university are championed "in the national interest" over other less economically attractive or relevant goals. Those of us who care for the future of our higher-level education system must insist again and again that qualitative criteria and not quantitative fixes are to the forefront of debate.
Another new-fangled jargonistic term that we are all supposed to pay homage to is the "knowledge-based economy". Strange to say, but I have always thought of universities as "knowledge-based". Maybe the "economy" add-on is the giveaway. Could it be that only courses, departments and research that are "economically" productive will be worth maintaining in the post-OECD review world?
In 1850, William Wordsworth, in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, wrote, and how true his words seem today, two centuries later: "A multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor."
Dr Ciaran Cosgrove is head of Hispanic studies at TCD