THE EDUCATIONAL PROFILE:The formidable task of restructuring a 400-year-old university was a brave job to take on. Seven years after Dr John Hegarty became provost of Trinity College, the university has risen in the international rankings, but a few academic feathers have been ruffled
THE ACADEMIC fortress of College Green must be something of a hard station for Dr John Hegarty. As provost of Trinity College since 2001 his work has been difficult and thankless. Much of the support that propelled him into office evaporated when the real work began. The formidable job of restructuring a 400-year-old university has left him isolated and increasingly absent from public view.
Hegarty took office at an unsettled period in third-level education. Since the abolition of fees in 1995, universities have been under increasing financial pressure. There have been calls from industry and Government for third-level institutions to abandon isolationist policies and embrace buzzwords - knowledge economy, globalisation, accountability.
The quest to obey the State and pay the bills has seen every university in the country rethink its approach.
Trinity, with its ancient statutes, peculiar administration and democratic traditions has proved the toughest nut to crack.
Hegarty's mission has been to round up all the academic fiefdoms of the university and remodel them into units of greater scale. The process has been brutal at times; departments have been forced into distasteful alliances or axed altogether. The management structures of Trinity College have traditionally bestowed considerable power on academics, giving them unusual clout in administration. Hegarty has sought to decouple academia and administration, with the creation of new managerial posts. He has focused his efforts on attracting large-scale investment into sweetheart disciplines deemed central to the national economic effort.
His work has drawn unprecedented levels of research funding to Trinity and has secured the college a place in the top 50 universities in the world (see panel). It's testament to his ability, say supporters, that Hegarty has done all this against the grain.
"Trinity has the most democratic and participatory structures of any university in the country. It is very challenging to make changes," says one advocate. "Decisions are taken in a consensual way and academic fellows have to be prepared to go along with them. Hegarty has got a superb personal style and has succeeded in bringing many people on board with his changes. He's an extremely decent and humane person for someone in high level leadership. The ranking results speak for themselves. He has completed the restructuring with no blood on the carpet."
But give the floor to the opposition and you hear a very different story. It's not hard to find Hegarty's detractors, on or off campus. Some of his staunchest early supporters have since turned against him. One academic believes Hegarty has shown "contempt for my subject". Another says that he has never seen Trinity College so demoralised. The restructuring has left many academics in shock, as they feel that their disciplines have been utterly devalued. The arts and humanities are a locus of dissent.
"His focus is entirely on science, engineering and technology - he has been running arts down," says one academic. "He has crushed some of the most popular subjects in TCD. He and [Hugh] Brady are corporate governors, not academics."
The comparison with UCD president Hugh Brady is telling. Brady took on the UCD challenge at a time when the Belfield campus was in the doldrums. He has taken the US approach to running a university - business models, professional management, high-profile research centres with star academics in economically palatable subjects. While his approach has been unloved, everyone agreed that UCD was ripe for reform.
At Trinity, however, there was no such consensus. As far as many insiders and outsiders were concerned, Trinity College was a well-oiled machine that simply needed a little 21st-century priming. "Hegarty set actions in train without understanding the systems at Trinity," says one former member of staff. "He undermined the educational capital of the university. He did nothing for two years and then Brady started to make dramatic changes at UCD and he felt he had to do the same. He didn't realise what he was taking on.
" AT TCD, the academic contract is so vague it needs collegiality to make it work. He didn't fully appreciate that."
The notion persists, among some critics, that Hegarty has undermined collegiality at Trinity. Those who resent his approach say that academics at the college get no real hearing anymore.
"There's no liberal voice here anymore. This is a disastrous decade for Trinity," says one critic, who is particularly angry about what he perceives as the abandonment of undergrads, especially in the arts.
One senior figure in education claims that there's a general wounding of arts egos in the country and it's not John Hegarty's fault. "Because of the economic focus of the State, and the high cost of science and engineering research, the money available for these areas is higher. This has been conflated into discrimination by some in the arts and humanities."
It's interesting to note the changing flavour of university presidency in the last decade. This tier was once peopled by old-fashioned academics from the humanities and letters. The current crop of university leaders, however, is drawn almost exclusively from the sciences. Of the seven current university presidents two are physicists, two are medics, one is an engineer and one is a statistician. This shift will not have assuaged the fears of some in the arts fraternity.
Professor Hegarty is from Claremorris, Co Mayo. He joined Trinity College in 1986 after nine years at the University of Wisconsin and at Bell Laboratories. He took on the role of head of the department of physics in 1992. His research speciality is in the area of laser technology and he co-founded the national research programme Optronics Ireland in 1989.
He was appointed Dean of Research from 1995 to 2000, during which he brought in almost IR£50 million in research funding from the Higher Education Authority's Programme for Research in Third-Level Institutions. He is a member of the Higher Education Authority, the Science Foundation Ireland Technical Advisory Panel on Information and Communications Technologies and the Royal Irish Academy.
His involvement with government and industry has been pivotal in his successful campaign to attract research funding, but those who oppose him say that he has turned Trinity College into an arm of the civil service.
He can't win. When he vaunts Trinity into international rankings he is accused of playing a numbers game - undermining the values of the college with bogus scales and management claptrap. When he consults with academics he is accused of taking a soft line by those who favour the Brady approach. When he doesn't talk, he's destroying the liberal spirit of the college.
Whatever side you talk to, most people agree that Trinity hasn't always been comfortable home for Hegarty. It's hard to wake up in the midst of resistance and hostility, even if you do live in a luxurious Dublin landmark in the Provost's House at 1 Grafton Street.
Tough at the top: Life as Trinity provost
John Hegarty took office in August 2001 for a 10-year term. During his tenure the world ranking of TCD has improved significantly in the prestigious tables compiled by The Times Higher Education Supplement.
In the most recent rankings, Trinity (ranked 49) became the first Irish third-level institution to make it into the elite top-50 group.
Trinity College is a top-ranking university in all five discipline categories: arts and humanities (32), social sciences (59), natural sciences (66), life sciences and biomedicine (97), engineering and IT (135) Trinity and UCD (ranked 108 ) are the only Irish third-level colleges in the top 200.
Dr Hegarty said Trinity's success had "been achieved in the context of a very competitive international environment against much better resourced world leading
universities . . . The fact that Trinity is ranked so highly, relative to the resources available, is a reflection of the very high calibre of our students, the excellence of our research and the strong culture amongst our academic, administrative and support staff to achieve and perform beyond the norm.
"The challenge will be to sustain our top-ranking position and the quality for which we are renowned with increasingly deficient levels of funding."
For the purpose of compiling the rankings, 5,100 academics and almost 1,500 employers were surveyed.
