Sir, – I note your report (News, July 6th) that the Irish Universities Association (IUA) has made a submission to the Government for an increase of €130 million in core funding and €104 million in “essential capital upgrades” for 2019, and with further increases in subsequent years. The IUA also links the recent “fall in international standing” of Irish universities to the paucity of state support.
I am not so sure. As my colleague John O’Hagan pointed out in your pages (September 7th, 2016), the world university rankings exercises are far from perfect, and for serious policy purposes their outcomes require careful analysis which the IUA could not possibly undertake for fear of antagonising its individual members.
Furthermore, the rankings processes can be “gamed” by universities – indeed, my own institution was rightly penalised by one rankings group for a gormless attempt to solicit good reviews from academic alumni – making the data upon which rankings are calculated problematic.
The rankings processes have other shortcomings. They appear to be indifferent to the protection of freedom of inquiry and discourse within institutions.
Among the top 100 universities in the 2019 QS rankings, there are various universities where it would be career suicide for academics even to propose to carry out research when their findings might threaten their states’ prevailing historical, political or demographic orthodoxies. Perhaps the IUA could take this matter up with the Shanghai, QS, THES and other rankings agencies, so as to develop a robust academic freedom metric for inclusion in their calculations.
Furthermore – and this is just as well for Ireland – rankings take little account of how individual universities treat their academic staff. In Ireland, particularly in the arts and social sciences, universities have used the various employment and salary controls imposed by the government since 2008 to reduce the career prospects of young academics.
It is in this context that the IUA’s deplorable request that universities be allowed to pay super-salaries to individual academics in strategic disciplines should be judged: money should instead be invested in making academic employment fairer by nurturing the cohorts of young scholars whom Irish universities still seek to employ on cheap, insecure and exploitative terms. It is upon those younger colleagues, not upon bought-in purported superstars who will most likely declare themselves too busy to teach, that the future reputations of all our universities depend. – Yours, etc,
EUNAN
O’HALPIN, MRIA, FTCD
Professor of Contemporary
Irish History,
Trinity College Dublin,
Dublin 2.