Garret FitzGerald: In its recent submission to the current OECD review of Irish third-level education the Higher Education Authority (HEA) made clear its view that both parts of our two-tier higher education system - the universities and the institutes of technology (ITs) - should be subject to broadly similar resource allocation, governance and quality assurance provisions.
and that the funding system should provide incentives for inter-institutional co-operation, both within each sector and between. To this end the HEA proposed the transfer to it of funding responsibilities for the ITs.
By thus bringing the whole third-level sector under its ambit, the long-overdue granting of greater autonomy to the ITs would be facilitated,
Such a move could also provide a means of ensuring comparability between the Quality Assurance system recently established by the universities and a parallel system which the ITs are considering.
As the HEA is already engaged with the universities in validating their new quality assurance system, bringing the ITs within its remit for this purpose, as well as funding, would provide an assurance that these fears are unjustified.
A controversial part of the HEA's submission to the OECD team has been its suggestion that such changes would provide the financial and strategic framework for a process allowing individual institutions to evolve into private institutions, where appropriate.
This would involve contractual arrangements with the State along the same lines as some of the leading research-linked universities in the US and elsewhere.
The stated rationale for this proposal is that such a change "will significantly enhance their flexibility and capacity in carrying out their core functions of teaching, research and service to the community".
However, it is not clear, to me at least, why our research-linked public universities, enjoying as they do an autonomy recently reiterated most explicitly by the Universities Act, 1997, could not in their present form be funded in future through such contractual arrangements with the State.
The obstacle to this seems to lie in a contradictory approach to universities that seems to exist within our government system.
One part of government clearly sees our economic future as depending upon a leap forward by the universities in relation to research. The objective is to have universities become research-intensive institutions, comparable to private universities in the US, where strong presidents may offer substantial incentives to some professors and lecturers - rather than standard across-the-board pay arrangements for all.
Salaries and promotions, the opportunity to teach graduates, the availability of research assistants, as well as space, all being based on merit.
But there seems to exist another mindset which has a totally different, clearly somewhat negative view of our universities. One authoritative voice within the public policy area has recently warned that "not all influential policy-makers are satisfied that universities are fully accountable", adding that "national policy-makers and administrators need to be persuaded to see academic freedom and institutional autonomy as necessary features of the higher education system".
That the HEA, recently an advocate of higher levels of institutional autonomy, is so pessimistic about this being achievable within existing structures as to have felt it necessary to float the controversial idea of privatisation to secure such an outcome, shows how potentially damaging is this ambivalent approach at government level.
The simple fact is that if the State wished to do so, it could exempt public universities from bureaucratic controls such as those that may at present inhibit them from rewarding merit, and which make it difficult for them to recruit from elsewhere on special terms distinguished professors who would establish and develop new "centres of excellence".
If administrators and political leaders want to ensure our economic future by promoting research in our universities - as some have stated with great eloquence - they already have the power to do so, without driving these public institutions out into the private sector where they would find it difficult to fulfil their duties to society as well as to the economy.
What is clearly needed now is an unambiguous political decision as to the future role the government sees for Irish higher education; a decision that both wills the end and also accepts responsibility for providing the means.
It may well be that part of any such policy will involve a contribution by some parents/students to the financing of higher education by means of income-contingent repayable loans rather than by fees. But, if such a scheme were to serve both our economic and our social needs, it would be necessary for it to divert funding towards two distinct but parallel objectives.
The first would be a major expansion of the present pilot scheme with a view to facilitating access to higher education on the part of able children of the disadvantaged, whose talents are currently being lost to our economy because of the minimal scale of existing access provision.
Secondly, if our universities are to become serious contenders in the international academic marketplace, we would also have to introduce an attractive, large-scale scholarship scheme matching the efforts of some leading British universities which are already starting to recruit students from here.
For, if the Government is serious about developing the economy through the establishment of high-level university research facilities, it must accept the corollary that this process will take off only if our universities attract brilliant students from both home and abroad.
Other students, outside these two categories, for whom the private benefits of higher education in terms of increased earnings power would be disproportionate to the social benefits accruing to the community, would need to be offered income-contingent loans to help them to pay a proportion of the cost of their university education.
For, in a world in which public opinion is increasingly resistant to taxation, our universities would not survive as serious competitors in the absence of such fee income to supplement State funding.
In the absence of a strategy incorporating these elements, the Government's aspirations for higher education are unlikely to be realised.