Madam, - It is a shame that Dr Danny O'Hare's "change agenda" in the universities focuses mainly on the need to sack "underperforming academics" (Teaching Matters, October 25th).
That the universities require reform, few would doubt. New types of knowledge, larger numbers of students of different ages and different nationalities, poor participation rates from lower socio-economic groups and proportionally smaller amounts of Government investment are but a few of the reasons why reform is required.
To see lecturers as the main barrier to the development of our universities, however, is both inaccurate and misleading.
One recent report puts the contribution from Irish education to GNP over the last 10 years at 10 per cent. Equally, the share of 23 to 35-year-olds completing tertiary education amounts to well above the OECD average. This might well lead one to conclude that the work Irish lecturers do is not all that bad.
Indeed, no one who has set foot in Irish universities in the last five years could deny that enormous changes are under way already. New technologies, interactive learning outside lecture time, the acute need to keep student numbers constant and high, greater availability and accountability to student have literally revolutionised what we do in universities. However, if you were to believe Dr O'Hare, lecturers have done nothing but stick their heads in the sand.
But the question is a wider one. Seeing performance measurement schemes as the panacea is symptomatic of a fashionable, knee-jerk approach that may just create more problems than it solves.
Dr O'Hare appears to base his remedy on a number of premises which are not at all given. For example, is the private sector the appropriate model for education? Is third-level education amenable to be quantified primarily in business or industry performance terms? Should it be? Why?
While it may be tempting to find a scapegoat for the problems that face higher education, simply advocating performance measurement for academics is not itself unproblematic. What is good academic performance? In teaching, the question is not straightforward. Student evaluation of teaching is obviously a key component, but is it the only one? Is there one model for teaching? Can courses be evaluated solely on the basis of uptake? Dr O'Hare fails to enter the discussion of these difficult questions. For all his lofty vision of change, the bottom line seems to be the need to reward "exceptional talent" outside the pay norm, which seems a somewhat narrower version of reward than that experienced by most lecturers.
It could also become the means by which the structures of fixed salary scales available to public scrutiny unravels, thereby depriving the universities of their accountability to the taxpayer.
DCU, where Danny O'Hare, was the former president and where we are present members of the academic staff, is proposing a new academic research assessment of its own output.
Dr O'Hare sees some lecturers as "nay-sayers" of the system and "sowers of dissent among more positive people". No doubt this is why he quotes approvingly Queen's University Belfast, which was given €37 million to help rid the university of its unwanted lecturers. There is nothing like agreement among leading educators here and in Britain that what happened in Queen's produced a better university or that the impact of the British research assessment exercise is universally beneficial. Perhaps his sharp criticism of entrenched positions should be redirected back to the neo-liberal, free market view of things that he so unthinkingly advocates.
Perhaps, too, there should be much more discussion with academic staff about what ethos, what content, and what social aspirations our universities should be fostering, rather than simplistically calling for lecturers' jobs to go. - Yours, etc,
FARRELL CORCORAN,
EAMONN CUNNINGHAM,
CHARLES DALY,
MAGGIE GIBBON,
MARNIE HOLBOROW,
EDDIE HOLT,
JEAN-PAUL MOSNIER,
HELENA SHEEHAN,
JENNY WILLIAMS,
Dublin City University,
Dublin 9.