At a conference that I attended last week in Bologna - where the first university was established nine centuries ago - the relationship between governments and universities was the principal focus of discussion, and it was clear that in recent times throughout all of Europe, west and east, an accumulation of new factors have been complicating this relationship, writes Garret FitzGerald
One reason for this has been the very rapid expansion of university education, to which in the past only a few students had access.
In Ireland as recently as the mid-1960s only 22 per cent of school students qualified for university entrance by successfully completing their secondary-school education. Less than a third of these - 7 per cent of each age cohort - whose parents could afford to pay fees that then covered about a third of the cost, entered a university.
The burden on the government of financing the remaining two-thirds of the bill for this small number was thus quite small.
But 40 years ago politicians and civil servants came to realise that education was the principal key to economic growth.
Over four decades, by expanding hugely both second-level and university education, and by also establishing many regional technical institutes, successive governments raised the numbers entering higher education almost tenfold, to almost 60 per cent of what is today a somewhat larger age cohort of school-leavers.
The very heavy financial commitment for the State in this process, substantially increased in 1995 by the decision to abolish university fees, has inevitably led governments to become much more directly engaged with the university system - 80 per cent of the current cost of which is now financed out of taxation.
Moreover, under international pressure to raise the very low proportion of national output that Ireland has hitherto invested in research - which the Department of Enterprise and Employment sees as the key to continuing expansion of jobs in high-tech industry - the Government has recently started to allocate very large sums to scientific research, to be carried out mainly in universities.
However, at the very same time, in a classic act of governmental incoherence, the Department of Education, which had become concerned for social reasons to divert resources to the under-financed primary education sector, chose to meet that need by cutting drastically the volume of current grants to universities. More recently, it is true, these cuts have been reversed - but the restored finance now being offered by the Government is being tied to the universities following Government priorities - as is also now true of much of the research funding. In all this process, teaching - previously the prime function of our universities - has been downgraded, in a way that could endanger its quality.
All of these changes have drastically transformed the Government/university relationship, and a reform of university structures had clearly become necessary. The universities have recently introduced a better organisation of the work of faculties and departments, and in some cases have also widened subject choices for students.
However, the Government, (urged on by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which has an economy-oriented approach to education), has also sought to impose on the universities a centralised business-type management structure.
The scale of all this intervention in the affairs of our universities does not readily fit with what the Council of Europe - a less economy-dominated body than the OECD and the European Commission - as well as most educationists see as the "still essential cultural and social role of the university".
Last June, the council's committee on culture, science and education told its parliamentary assembly that: "As testified by frequent assessments and evaluations carried out internationally, the academic mission to meet the requirements and needs of the modern world and contemporary societies can be best performed when universities are morally and intellectually independently of all political and religious power authority and economic power . . . Whilst the academic freedom of researchers, scholars and teachers and the institutional autonomy of universities need to be re-justified under present conditions, these principles should also be reaffirmed and legislatively, preferably constitutionally, guaranteed".
In 1997 a Universities Bill was passed here, the terms of which anticipated the Council of Europe by explicitly guaranteeing the autonomy of our universities.
But, in the light of the developments set out above, it cannot with any credibility be asserted that this guarantee of autonomy has been adequately safeguarded by our Government. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there is now room for some future government to adopt a more enlightened, coherent, and less arbitrary and economy-dominated approach to higher education.
Finally, I would like to assert here my own strong belief that neither governments nor parents are always wise in seeking to influence the choice of disciplines by students entering universities or ITs.
Thus, in their attempts to push one aspect of university studies as against another, eg research versus teaching, or business studies versus humanities - politicians and civil servants are too often influenced by short-term economic considerations, or even by transitory educational fashions, into distorting the system.
Parallel to that process, parents' concern that their children either enjoy future security or have an opportunity to earn "big money" later in life, sometimes leads them to seek to divert their children away from their own choice of studies that they would really enjoy - and from which they would therefore gain most in developing their personal talents.
For, at the formative moment when students are choosing what courses to pursue after leaving school, to follow their own personal interests would often be the most productive approach.
Whatever short-term benefit a person may gain by adopting at that point a vocational approach, often closely related to a particular career path, it may in the longer run be more than offset through their being deprived of the chance to develop to the full the interests and capacities that in their case would be most likely to develop their intellect.
In my first few days in college 63 years ago I chose to reject economics in favour of history and languages.
Then, for a dozen years after graduating I was deeply engaged in the task of maximising the efficiency of our national airline, and I do not believe that in that process either I, or the airline, was at any disadvantage because I had to invent for myself, rather than to recall my past studies, skills such as marginal costing and price economics.
It was the development in depth of my interests in the subjects that I had instead chosen to study at the university that gave me a real edge in my first career, and perhaps - admittedly after subsequently turning back to economics! - in later ones also.
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie