Important questions still remain unanswered over the proposed reform model at UCD, writes Andreas Hess.
While the good UCD ship is out at sea and is being rebuilt as part of what can be regarded as a European-wide attempt at university reform, flashing warning signals from academic university presses are indicating that not all is well in the republic of knowledge.
As two outspoken critics reminded the audience at a recent conference in UCD on the future of academic publishing, the problematic state of academic publishing can't be fully explained by just looking at the publishing industry. Instead, the crisis hints at a much larger threat that now seems to be imminent - that of transforming institutions of higher education into commercial enterprises, or "University Inc".
As John Thompson, sociologist at Cambridge and author of a pioneering comparative study of academic publishing in the US and in the UK,Books in the Digital Age, has pointed out, the current crisis had its origins in the stranglehold that international publishers of scientific journals had gained over library budgets since the 1970s.
Universities had gullibly agreed or been pressured to pay exorbitant prices for journals, and this has had the general effect of drastically reducing libraries' funds for the purchase of ordinary books. This in turn led to a situation where, in order to survive, book publishers now have to look at ordinary trade publishing rather than just publishing the traditional scientific or academic non-commercial monograph. The world's universities - including UCD - have been caught in a multinational financial trap.
But not all is bad news. While it remains regrettably true that the market for journals is dominated by a few big players holding an oligopoly, the publishing of trade books, textbook or course material - together with new technological advances which permit economies in production costs - seem to offer new hope, even for smaller and mid-sized academic publishing houses.
Lindsay Waters, executive editor of the humanities at Harvard University Press and author of a thought-provoking study of a slightly different kind (Enemies of Promise) spoke less about resources but more about mindsets and mentalities when he referred to his American experience in the academic publishing industry. Referring specifically to the difficult relationship that exists between hiring procedures, promotion procedures and academic publishing, Waters pointed out that in recent years the academic community has increasingly avoided critical assessment of its peers. In effect, universities are funking the intellectual assessment of their own staff and are asking the university presses to do the job for them - a daft situation.
What has all this seemingly obscure publishers' quarrel got to do with university reform, and how does it relate to the recent regime change at UCD?
Thompson's and Waters' critical comments are indicative of two major problems that every university administration will encounter while embarking on the project of radical institutional reform: one has to do with mindsets or mentalities, the other one has to do with scarce resources.
After years of stagnation and defending the status quo at UCD anybody interested in the future of higher education must welcome the radical reform agenda of the university's new leaders. However, change has also led to a clash of cultures that is rarely talked about openly. The outgoing administration had been dominated by people from the humanities, but the current president and his team clearly stem from a medical and natural science background.
These different cultures explain the different understandings or models of what it means to be working in the academic field held by successive administrations in UCD.
The humanities clearly prefer the old-fashioned model of the "scholarly people": a community of learned individuals who see academic work and life as a calling. In contrast, the natural sciences - and this includes the medics - clearly prefer the new-style team-based academic worker who prefers to publish short, mainly empirically researched articles, usually co-authored by several researchers.
A third group, derived mainly from the social sciences, is located somewhere between the scholarly preference for writing books and the natural science model which favours the appearance in a peer-reviewed and highly specialised journals.
These two different cultures usually co-exist fairly happily. However, when it comes to publishing and promotion under the new UCD regime the culture clash comes to the forefront - particularly when the natural science model is superimposed and becomes the model for everybody and everything else: one size fits all. From thereon it is but a small step to merely counting and outsourcing judgment altogether - just as Waters has described it so poignantly in his book.
While the good scholar usually just needs a decent library, a good archive and to be left alone, the new science-style researcher can hardly function without an expensive apparatus, be it a laboratory, a team of technicians or a research budget. Under the new rules and regulations that usually come with regime change in universities the struggle for scarce resources intensifies. Thus, the scholar calls for the best of all possible libraries while the new-style researcher demands increased research funding and better infrastructure, usually in the form of research institutes.
Applied to UCD after regime change this means the library continues to be neglected and remains dangerously underfunded while the new researcher and his team get to see sustained funding and cash flows, in short a much higher throughput, in order to fill the numerous buildings on campus with content after the builders have left the scene.
These conflicts will not just go away and important questions still remain unanswered. What nobody has explained so far is that the proposed UCD reform model is virtually unheard of anywhere in the world of top-class universities. No top-class university has successfully managed to merge mass undergraduate teaching with increased research intensity and output at postgraduate and staff level.
UCD cannot be all things to all people and necessarily there will be preferences and tough choices along the way. A "UCD Inc" or "UCD Ltd" is a possible scenario as a consequence of insufficient government funding and the refusal by government to sanction student fees. Whether the better argument and quality will prevail or whether the mere quantitative evidence of the accumulation of research grants and funds will count - as the UCD example demonstrates, the republic of knowledge has reached the crossroads. It is now up to the citizens of that republic to stand up and be counted.
Andreas Hess is senior lecturer at UCD's Sociology Department. Together with Tom Garvin he is co-editor of Gustave de Beaumont's 1839 classic Ireland - social, political, and religious (to be published by Harvard University Press, Spring 2006)