Madam, - Your Editorial "Fresh thinking on education" (February 2nd) reports with some glee the proposal from the HEA that Irish universities be privatised. While fresh thinking should of course always be welcomed, privatisation seems too stale an idea to get too excited about, all the more so as its less than happy consequences are plain for all to see. (Remember the bright new future which the privatisation of Eircom or British Rail was meant to deliver?)
As Paddy O'Flynn showed in his letter of February 6th, the privatisation of universities rests on the "Harvard fallacy". What matters is wealth, not whether an institution is public or private. The chairman of the HEA, Dr Don Thornhill, would seem to acknowledge as much when he says (The Irish Times, February 2nd) that "of the top 20 third-level colleges in the US almost none are public institutions". In other words, some are. Opting for privatisation, therefore, would seem to be an ideological, not a rational choice.
In that case it is perhaps no surprise that Mr Noel Dempsey, presumably speaking for the Government, should have no problem with the choice (The Irish Times, February 3rd). The one (sic!) caveat he would have is that there "be systems in place to ensure that people from disadvantaged backgrounds would be able to get into" privatised universities. That surely is another fallacy. There would of course be some token students from poor backgrounds in these new Harvard-style universities, but would the reality not be that fees would get higher and higher, so that before long most of the country would be disadvantaged in that respect and very few of our young people (let alone older people, who surely have a right to education too) could afford to go to university?
The irony of the proposal is that it comes in the wake of the Celtic Tiger which, we were told again and again, was born of the success of Irish universities in supplying well educated graduates to the economy.
Before we mortgage our future to the "bottom line" and "winner takes all" need and greed of the marketplace, we would do well to ponder all the possible fallacies on which the dream, or nightmare, of a privatised third-level sector is built.
For instance, what precisely is it that private institutions can do which public ones cannot? Would short-termism and a drop in standards not be the inevitable consequences of a system in which major "contracts" for educational services would be subject to the immediate necessities of companies intent on achieving the highest profit margins?
Is it desirable that research be dictated by narrow commercial interests, as would inevitably happen if the Government considered itself let off the hook in that regard? And should third-level education not be the democratic right of all citizens rather than the exclusive privilege of a super-rich élite?
If public ownership has not succeeded in making it so (yet), private ownership will never succeed or want to make it so. That is for sure. - Yours, etc.,
ERIC HAYWOOD, UCD Italian Department., KIERAN ALLEN,
UCD Sociology Department, (For UCD section committee of SIPTU).