Madam, - As president of UCD Students' Union I read with interest your Editorial of November 3rd celebrating the 150th anniversary of UCD's founding. I have to say I disagree with your assessment of Dr Hugh Brady's vision for a new UCD.
I agree that in very many ways the life of University College Dublin mirrors the life of the modern Irish state. In Ireland today we see a struggle between people who see the State as having a minimal role in providing services to its citizens and those who want to see properly funded health, transport and education services. This struggle is alive and well in UCD.
Education is threatened by creeping privatisation. The Government, the Higher Education Authority, the OECD and Dr Hugh Brady have joined together to push for a reliance on corporate funding. They base their vision for Irish universities on American colleges such as Harvard and Yale, both of which charge tens of thousands of dollars a year.
Students and academics are fearful of the university that Dr Hugh Brady envisages. His vision takes Newman's idea of a university where learning and knowledge are ends in themselves and twists it around to one where learning and knowledge are worthwhile only if you can offer something to the corporate world.
In Dr Brady's view, this university is now to be one where research for private companies takes priority over everything else. His is a university where teaching and students take a back seat. Evidence of this lies in the fact that of the seven new pathways to professorship that Dr Brady published recently, none has anything to do with an academic's ability to teach or give interesting, engaging lectures.
I was personally proud to be asked to join in the Newman anniversary celebrations but found that events were sadly lacking for either the general staff or ordinary students. This fact adds legitimacy to students' fears that they are seen as merely incidental to the running of a university.
This is why students and many staff in UCD don't support Dr Brady's new vision for UCD and wish for a university more like the one Cardinal John Henry Newman envisaged where knowledge is an end in itself. We wish to see a university that is for the benefit of all the people of Ireland, not a university that is solely for the benefit of business.
As Cardinal Newman himself put it when speaking of what is good for a university: "Pursuits, which issue in nothing, and still maintain their ground for ages, which are regarded as admirable, though they have not as yet proved themselves to be useful, must have their sufficient end in themselves, whatever it turn out to be". - Yours, etc.,
FERGAL SCULLY,
President,
UCD Students' Union,
Belfield,
Dublin 4.