Under the Microscope/Prof William Reville: The OECD recently reviewed Irish higher education and recommended how it can better meet Ireland's strategic objectives for the sector.
The report, published in September 2004, was generally well received. Surprisingly, little public mention was made of the fact that the report deals only with the role of higher education in boosting the economy through the application of science and technology.
There is general consensus that the Celtic Tiger would never have roared in the absence of our well-educated young people. Third-level education in Ireland has grown hugely over the last few decades and Ireland was one of the first European countries to grasp the economic importance of education. In 1965 only 11 percent of those completing second-level education entered third-level, whereas in 2003 this figure had risen to 57 per cent.
While the recent growth of third-level education has been accompanied by a 2.5 fold improvement in average material living standards, we now have a high-wage economy and it is clear that if we are to retain our new-found wealth we must develop into an innovation-driven knowledge-based economy. Hence the heavy government investment in science and technology since the mid 1990s and the commitment to ongoing investment.
The OECD report makes 51 recommendations, so I can only discuss some of the more important ones.
Higher education in Ireland is divided into two broad sectors - the university sector and the institute of technology (IT) sector. The university sector is long established in Ireland - TCD was founded in 1592 and UCD, UCC and UCG in the mid 1800s. The IT sector began in 1970 and the individual colleges were originally called regional technical colleges.
As this original name implies, the IT sector was intended to cater specifically for the unique technical/technological requirements of the various regions in Ireland. The universities are funded through the Higher Education Authority and the IT sector is funded through the Department of Education and Science.
Over the years there has been some mission-drift, with the universities and the IT sectors each taking on work more appropriate to the other.
The report recommends that both sectors should concentrate on their defined functions. The role of the IT sector was defined above and it is the university's role to carry out the major Irish research in addition to teaching. The report recommends that the third-level funding system be unified under a new Tertiary Education Authority, which would prevent mission-drift in either direction through a funding approach based on individual institutional contracts.
If Ireland is to become a world player as an innovation-driven knowledge-based economy, we will have to greatly increase our output of doctorate graduates. The OECD Report recommends that we should double our output by 2010. Funding must be made available to achieve this and the report further recommends that doctorate-awarding powers should be confined to the universities.
Insofar as it goes, I would agree with much of this report but the report doesn't go nearly far enough. Its title - Review of Higher Education in Ireland - is a misnomer. It should be entitled - Review of Science and Technology in Higher Education and its Implications for the Irish Economy. Almost no mention is made of the humanities in higher education.
Why were the humanities excluded from consideration? Why did the humanities sector at third level make no significant protest about this? Do the humanities make no contribution to the economy?
Taken on its own, this report would reduce third-level education to an arm of the State used exclusively to boost the economy. One recommendation is particularly revealing. This concerns reform of university governance. It sensibly recommends that membership of the governing body should be reduced from its present unwieldy 36 down to 20. However, it then recommends that a "large majority" of the membership should be laypersons.
It is clear that what is intended here is a governing body composed mainly of business people. This makes no more sense to me than to recommend that the board of a major bank contain a clear majority of academics. It also ignores the fact that the two most successful universities in the UK, Oxford and Cambridge, and a credible contender for the most successful university in Ireland, TCD, have none or very few non-academic members on their governing bodies.
Many American universities have governing bodies largely composed of non-academics, but the American tradition is different to the European. America is able to take the position enunciated by President Calvin Coolidge, who said, "The business of American is business," while still retaining other cultural values.
We have no practice at this art in Europe. By all means let the Irish third-level system contribute to the economy but let it also continue to contribute to the full spectrum of culture and scholarship.
William Reville is associate professor of biochemistry and director of microscopy at UCC