Sir, - In her examination of the controversial measuring exercises of the vice-chancellor of Queen's University, your reporter Yvonne Healy wrote: "It's all tough and challenging stuff and prompts the question will universities in the Republic have the courage to display such openness and clear thinking" (Education & Living, September 15th). I support the subsequent contributions on these pages from Dr William Reville, Prof Edna Longley and Mr John Clarke on the considerable problems caused by such exercises. They should not be adopted here. Universities in the Republic produce world-class graduates at about half the UK cost. They do so without the encumbrance of a British system which is based on Thatcherism, neglects students, demoralises staff, destroys the community of learning and produces paper mountains measuring what cannot be measured. It is dominated by bureaucrats who don't teach, don't meet students and don't do research, but are assumed to be experts in each of these.
Laurie Taylor describes the UK system in the Times Higher Education Supplement of October 2nd in the words of an "esteemed vice chancellor":
"We've had a number of notable successes. We managed to hire 12 leading research mercenaries in time for the last assessment and were rewarded with increased ratings for nine departments. We also anticipated the new emphasis on first-class degrees and successfully raised the number we are awarding by 22 per cent as a result of our systematic policy of recruiting under-qualified and compliant external examiners. These strategies alone lifted Popleton University five places in the Times league table."
Taylor's research mercenaries will have very large salaries. Shorn of its outdated managerialist jargon, the exercise is the means by which a very small number of university staff award themselves very large salaries at the expense of their colleagues and taxpayers. Such high earners could not possibly be expected to mingle with students. They will leave undergraduate teaching to junior staff.
Some university staff hope to become very wealthy from the UK system. The majority, I believe, loathe it. They do not speak out, as Dr Reville requests, because the managerial university is a controlled society which punishes dissidents. The loss of the university as a liberal voice in society and the dumbing down of undergraduate teaching are among the many costs of the UK system which are not considered by the bean-counters.
The system has a life of its own because many senior university officers do little or no research or teaching but live in the quango interface between politicians and bureaucrats. In that company disparaging remarks about ivory towers are commonplace. Senior university figures in the Republic fell over themselves to support the statist educational policies of the last government long after the dogs in the streets knew that those very policies would propel that government out of office. I hope that our universities will learn from that experience and that this Government will reverse the mistakes of its predecessor.
Universities in the Republic should decline Prof Bain's invitation to emulate him but make a counter offer. When the shallowness of current British policy towards higher education becomes even more obvious, we should offer to assist in the restoration of universities in the United Kingdom as communities of scholars run on collegiate rather than on outdated managerialist lines. - Yours, etc., Sean D. Barrett,
FTCD,
Trinity College,
Dublin 2.