A chara, – Cloaked in a language of "accountability", the Government's new approach to higher education might be an easy sell to the public in general ("Universities face sweeping changes in oversight and governance under new Bill", News, January 3rd).
It is certainly true that good management and transparency are not necessarily detrimental to academic excellence.
However, I fear that the promised “shake-up” of higher education masks the ideological ethos at the heart of the proposed legislative changes and may serve to shrink long-established academic freedoms.
Put another way, I fear that these legislative changes are overreach on the part of the Government and may end up undermining the independence that is so key to the ethos of universities.
Though chronically underfunded by successive administrations, I am also not sure that universities are all that badly managed in the first place, although this largely depends on the metric. – Yours, etc,
Dr JOE WHELAN,
School of Social Work
and Social Policy,
Trinity College
Dublin,
Dublin 2.