Madam, – I want to congratulate Tom Garvin on his article (Opinion, May 1st) regarding anti-intellectuals running Irish universities while falsely claiming to be businessmen running enterprises. It goes to the heart of the malaise that is now affecting the country.
I worked in the bank in the 1970s and 1980s and witnessed the change in policy when profit became the only game in town and the customer suddenly became a target. Anything could be justified in the name of profit and growth.
Anyone who challenged this belief was sidelined. The frontline staff along with the customer became the enemy. In this new philosophy, efficiency meant cost-efficiency, nothing else. The staff’s social skills in understanding the customers and their needs were no longer required as the customers’ needs were surplus to requirements. Members of staff who complied were promoted and given a bonus each year.
This same failed business model is being pushed through the public sector at the moment. Cost-efficiency is the only requirement and members of the frontline staff are now the enemy. Impossible targets are used for measurement. There has been a build-up in middle management and all they seem to do is measure what the frontline staff does and go to meetings to talk about it. The selected few receive a bonus for the cost-efficiencies they have achieved in reducing the frontline staff to a skeleton service.
Research has shown that the most profitable companies are the ones that do not focus on profit solely but take the wider view. As Tom Garvin states, the narrow intellectual outlook is going to cost us. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – I wish to applaud the accuracy and vigour of the assessment by Tom Garvin, professor emeritus of Politics (UCD, RIA), of the collateral damage done to the intellectual and cultural agenda of UCD in the course of the past six years (Opinion, May 1st). By coincidence, the same issue of the paper carries an analysis by Garret FitzGerald (former chancellor of the former NUI) of the current plight of Irish universities following the enactment of the Universities Act (1997).
The cost of institutional promotion in university “world ranking tables” has led to recruitment of absentee Nobel prize-winners and the explosion of contractual (ie income-generating) research to the detriment both of the academic spectrum available to incoming Irish undergraduates and of adequate staff support. Adding to these difficulties, central Government has refused any, or most, bench-marking allowances to academic staff.
As a matter of record, the skilfully managed abolition of the arts faculty in UCD in 2004 engineered the disappearance of all departments of European languages (French, German, Spanish, and Italian) and Near-Eastern languages, now subsumed into a school of languages and culture (which itself has changed its name since its invention). As a consequence, the foundation chairs of these subjects, dating from the creation of the National University in 1908, will not necessarily ever be advertised again: they have been virtually abolished. My own chair, for a healthy department of 300 students, has been vacant since 2004. This is a sorry, shameful, response to (and perhaps an illegal infringement of) the aspirational cultural ideals propagated by all European treaties since Maastricht. Convocation, the appeal court of NUI alumni, has suffered a similar fate, thus precluding intervention, or even dialogue, with past students of languages at UCD (who include Garret FitzGerald). What price national tradition, active indigenous and conceptual research, or European heritage, when confronted by a fat cheque from a pharmaceutical company? – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Tom Garvin’s exposé (Opinion, May 1st) of the systematic dismantling of university education through management by philistine, utilitarian mediocrities is devastating and apt. It is by no means confined to UCD. That research and education are valuable for their own sake is beyond the comprehension of university managers, the Higher Education Authority and Government. It is, however, well understood by researchers and teachers, especially, but by no means solely, in the humanities and social sciences, and by many students. They have no desire to see our universities turned into pseudo-corporations.
Rejection of the “Croke Park deal”, recommended by the Irish Federation of University Teachers and by those Siptu and Unite branches that represent university teachers, affords the opportunity to begin a fight-back. Among many reprehensible aspects of the “deal” is the imposition of further academically useless and time- wasting “workload management” and “economic costing” procedures. Academic tenure will be dispensed with in favour of fixed-term contracts, inevitably ending academic freedom of expression. Tenure and academic freedom are not the private luxuries of “ivory tower” academics. They are an indispensable underpinning of democracy in a civilised society. The stakes are indeed high. As Tom Garvin remarks, if the process he so eloquently describes continues, “it’s going to cost us”. All is not lost yet, however. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Tom Garvin (May 1st) wants our universities to return to the days before Ireland's scientific revolution. He should re-read Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change". – Yours, etc,
Madam, – In response to the Garret FitzGerald’s article, Tom Garvin’s article (May 1st) and in preparation for my Leaving Cert, I find myself asking, what is the point? It seems as if all my struggling, desperation and hard work are being made redundant.
Why am I toiling to get into a university which will be underfunded, “anti-intellectual” and suppress every original thought I might possess? Can somebody fix this by September please? And also buy new books for the library in UCD. – Yours, etc,