Madam, - I am very happy for Trinity College Dublin, which in Jane Ohlmeyer's estimation (Letters, June 1st,) is a managerialism-free zone. I write, alas, from a very different experience in UCD, and in full support of the points made in Fintan O'Toole's article "Afraid to speak out about universities" (May 26th). Unlike Fintan O'Toole's informant, who was afraid that identifying himself would have "adverse consequences for his department", I have less to fear in that respect. For my home department (French) no longer exists as such, having been forced into one of the shotgun unions deplored by that informant. Within this new structure, my subject is being "downsized" and has seen its academic integrity and its morale deeply compromised.
Against this background, why would I be afraid to state that academic freedom and collegiality - the two sine qua non conditions for the input of critical and reflective thinking into the university's decision-making, and thus for its ethos and civic stature - are being squashed by my own university's enthusiastic adoption of the globally fashionable, thoroughly malignant managerialist stranglehold described in Fintan O'Toole's article?
How could I deny that the university's programme of change based on supposedly new structures, which have now become ends in themselves (but what's new about bureaucracy?), has proved to be - often disastrously - subject like all such programmes to the "law of unintended consequences", runaway consequences that generate in turn an intensification of micro-management and crisis management responses?
Cui malo? Your readers will answer that question for themselves, for I most certainly would be afraid to spell out in public the full extent of the intellectually neutering effects of an entirely inappropriate managerialist administration on the institutional health of a university where I still love to work and to which I wish to remain, however quixotically, loyal.
I would be afraid, not of being contradicted, nor - as happened in the early days of protest against the bureaucratic takeover - of being ridiculed as speaking for a self-serving minority of academics bleating for vested interests.
Au contraire, I would be afraid of the charge of selling out, the charge of betraying - quisling-like - my role as an academic, committed to serving human society (not an apparat and not an economy, not even a "knowledge economy") through my passion for my subject and for the value of critical freedom. - Yours, etc,
Prof MARY GALLAGHER, MRIA, School of Languages, Literatures, and Film, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4.