Madam, – The vituperation expressed by some members of the emeritus professoriate of UCD seems as misplaced as it is intemperate. The encouragement to aspire to international standards and the revision of outmoded organisational structures is in the interests of students and faculty, be they interested in Ur, Urdu or urodynamics.
Applications to UCD from within and outside Ireland have risen, its academic output has increased dramatically and its physical plant has been improved under the leadership of Hugh Brady. Rather than smear that accomplishment as “anti-intellectual”, his critics might consider the dispassionate analysis, broad consultation, mature consideration and bold action that has been necessary to raise standards and broaden opportunity for the student body.
Their concerns might be more appropriate to the recently highlighted need for Government investment to sustain the viability of our third-level institutions. Meantime, a thought for them from that musical philosopher, Rosanne Cash, “the key to change . . . is to let go of fear”. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Tom Garvin displays the very ignorance and intellectual barbarism he rants about in his article about UCD (Opinion, May 1st), when he dismisses the excellent Confucius Institute in the college as being an agent of tyranny.
I recently attended Mandarin courses there, as well as lectures on Chinese culture, and found that body one of the best innovations introduced in many years, not least because it gave me considerable enthusiasm for a very challenging language. Indeed, at a time when the global balance of power is shifting towards Asia, an understanding of China, and Chinese culture is critical. For an “intellectual” to dismiss such an initiative as involved in the “dissemination of post communist rubbish” shows not just ignorance, but a stultifying provincialism that would pose a real threat to our advancement if it were allowed to flourish. The very provincialism, let it be underlined, he accused others of displaying. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Next year will see the opening of the new Student Centre in UCD, incorporating a purpose-built debating chamber to house the two debating societies of the university, the Law Society and the Literary Historical Society. These societies have long been among the leading student organisations of the country, and far from “going into eclipse” through “a lack of official sympathy” (Tom Garvin, Opinion, May 1st), they are now finally going to enjoy a permanent home and associated facilities on the campus, as well as the continuing financial and organisational support of the university.
With regard to the “Rolls of Auditors” to which I assume Prof Garvin is referring, most of these boards are now full, or close to being full, and will be updated and re-housed, along with new extended boards, as part of the Student Centre development.
Financial support for student events and activities has in real terms increased in the past 15 years, while administrative and organisational support for student extra-curricular activity enjoys a level of support and interest at the highest levels of the current administration far exceeding that offered by the officers of the university in the last administration. Society activity in UCD is alive and well, and is not suffering in any way disproportionately from the same financial forces affecting all of us.
Prof Garvin extols the principle of appetite for knowledge being a good in itself. What a pity his own appetite for knowledge on these points did not extend to a phone or e-mail inquiry to this office to check his facts. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – It is surely ironic that in attempting to refute Prof Tom Garvin’s criticisms of our higher education system in general, and of UCD in particular, Professors Mary Daly and Brigid Laffan (Opinion, May 6th) may in effect end up endorsing Prof Garvin’s view by supplying ample illustration of what exactly is wrong with our universities’ teaching procedures.
To stick with the question of teaching only, and that in an area in which I feel most at home, English literature: much is made in their article of the “UCD Horizons” initiative, but some of the examples given with reference to English can only make the more sensitive and caring among us shudder. We are told “today’s first-year English students can find themselves working in a group to devise a marketing plan for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre”. That one example fully bears out Prof Garvin’s criticism of a third-level managerial administration which, without any academic sensitivity to the specific subject in question, presides over and endorses courses that are simply wide of the mark.
The Globe Theatre exercise may indeed help to give the students some (limited) knowledge of “the plays, the actors and the wider culture”, but it certainly will not help them to engage with the actual “words on the page” (as we used to say with far greater frequency), the extraordinary stylistic richness in Shakespeare’s texts; and it is in large part on those words, and the trained reader’s alertness to their many nuances and multidimensionality, that the significance of Shakespeare depends.
My wife tells me that when she studied Home Economics she learnt about Jacobean embroidery; and I am happy to report that she has never claimed any expertise in Jacobean culture, nor attempted to correct my own views of Jacobean tragedy. But, alas, our third-level English departments have themselves connived in this lamentable shift of emphasis from text to (historical and cultural) context; and the virus of barbarism released by the “New Historicism”, cultural materialism, colonial and post-colonial studies, etc, etc, has become an epidemic in English departments and indeed a pandemic reaching into all of the humanities.
Many recently retired academics, especially those in the humanities, will be glad to have removed themselves from academe, not least because they had heard the wings of many -isms (looking perhaps like vultures) beating above their heads, waiting for their final destructive descent.
One example may suffice. We had in NUIM a course which dealt with feminist criticism of Paradise Lost; I was left in no doubt that our students read, and read assiduously, the feminist critiques distributed to them, but I take leave to doubt that they read much or indeed any of Milton’s masterpiece.
So I am intrigued by the prospect of those poor would-be lawyers, with no critical expertise or educated sense of literary form and style, confronting, under the auspices of the “UCD Horizons” scheme, some of the most difficult works in the English language – those of James Joyce. As for first-year psychology students analysing “the impact of video games on mental health” or “cheating in sport”, I cannot be alone in wondering what useful social contribution such students might make at the coalface of psychotherapy. – Yours, etc,