PRESIDENT'S LOG:Universities have to be accountable to the taxpayer on many levels but the ground rules need to change, FERDINAND VON PRONDZYNSKI

ONE THING I certainly couldn’t complain about is a lack of media interest in universities. Over the past couple of weeks there have been news items and published comments on our higher education institutions, and all this has spilled over into social networking sites and blogs.

Good news for third level? No, I don’t think so, for reasons I’ll set out below. But first, let me reminisce a little.

As a student in Dublin in the 1970s, I was a member of an elite. At the time around 15 per cent of the age cohort went to college, and the social diversity of the student body wouldn’t impress anyone today. There were about 4,000 students and staff lived what was no doubt a congenial life: one lecturer told me that he never arranged meetings before 10am or after 4pm.

I don’t remember how many academic staff there were in my department, but it wasn’t more than eight; I believe only one of them had a PhD. A few did publish, most didn’t. I couldn’t say that the college was at the cutting edge of what we now call a knowledge society. Nor was any other Irish third level institution.

Between then and now everything has changed; but the key change has been this: numbers. It became rightly unacceptable that universities were institutions for a small elite, and so the drive began to achieve what we call the “massification” of higher education, whereby a much larger proportion of the population go on to third level.

Typically universities now have three times the number of students they would have had in the 1970s, and there are newer institutions (such as DCU) that didn’t exist back then. And with greater numbers came a much larger public investment – not as much perhaps as the we would have expected, but still very much greater than in the 1970s.

So the State, acting on behalf of the taxpayer, began to want to know how the money was being spent and some reassurance that third level institutions were supporting public policy priorities.

Performance monitoring, audits, quality reviews, accountability all became concepts the universities had to grapple with.

And now comes the next part of that particular game, which is where the authorities tell us that they don’t like the way we are structured as a system and that we had better change. The latest example of this was when the chief executive of the higher education authority, Tom Boland, told us there are too many universities and that we need to “merge to survive”.

This is a highly debatable point, as Ireland has fewer universities per head than the UK, Germany, France, Switzerland and the United States (to name just a few), and because mergers that have been attempted in other countries have on the whole been unsuccessful.

Furthermore, smaller rather than larger universities tend to do better in the global league tables: not one university in the Times Higher world rankings top 10 would be the largest university if it were in Ireland, and two of them are smaller than any Irish university.

We are not just facing some pretty unrealistic expectations from the state and its agencies, we are also under attack from within.

Last week, this newspaper published an opinion piece by Prof Tom Garvin of UCD, in which he launched a scathing attack on how universities are run. If I can try to summarise it, his argument was that the value of intellectual discourse is no longer recognised either by government or, more particularly, by university leaderships; that independent thinking is not encouraged or supported; and that the humanities have been asset stripped (though I doubt he’d use that expression) in order to fund applied research in the biosciences.

Along the way he took a few swipes more specifically at university presidents, calling them “grey philistines”.

I am not looking for sympathy for university presidents, but I am suggesting we all need a dose of realism. Universities cannot be places of intellectual leisure where people do only those things they feel like doing; but neither can they be an administrative extension of the state.

The world in 2010 is not the same world as in 1970, and you cannot expect that universities will still be exactly the same now as then. They need to engage more with national social, cultural and economic needs, and they need to do so strategically. But equally they cannot be treated like government agencies that can be restructured, cut, controlled and monitored without the benefit of a proper case being made based on real evidence.

It is time for this messing to stop. It is time to re-establish a community of purpose within the academic world, and time also for the universities to agree a social contract with the State re-establishing their autonomy but confirming a framework for accountability that is not administratively obtrusive but that allows the taxpayer to see how money is being spent.

Universities are being torn apart by conflicting and often unreasonable demands. Let’s bring that to an end.