Madam, - While there are many persuasive arguments for raising the salaries of the academic staff and presidents in Irish universities, it is strange that Dr Edward Walsh (Education Today, January 16th) relies almost entirely on the need for our Irish universities to get into the top hundred in the international ranking of universities.
The criteria for these rankings - counting of the number of Nobel Prize winners on the university staff, the listings in the Science Citation indices, etc, with scant reference to the humanities or other disciplines apart from science and technology (S&T) - are not those by which Irish, or indeed our European, universities should be evaluated.
The single criterion by which any university anywhere should be judged is the excellence of its graduates and their contribution to the well-being and development of the societies in which they live. Nobel prizes and international publications may be useful yardsticks to judge the research activity in a university, but they do not relate to the educational standards for its students or the excellence of its graduates.
Dr Walsh, like myself, is a product of our Irish universities in the period which he refers to as having "80 years of neglect". I presume, again like me, being an engineer in the university scene in those years, he co-operated hand in glove with the Industrial Development Authority in meeting US, German, Japanese and other multinational companies, convincing them of the excellence and availability of our graduates, and persuading them, with some success, to establish their operations in Ireland.
In parallel with this invasion of major multinationals at that time, our own native-born Irish industries also took off, and in both these regimes, it was our graduates who were, and still are, the architects of our country's successful economic development.
It is worth noting too that while our engineers and scientists provided the technical backbone for the multinational S&T industries in Ireland, the CEOs and senior managers of the leading Irish industries today are largely graduates from the humanities, law, business studies and other non-S&T disciplines.
The role of our universities then in all disciplines was to educate our students, to stretch and liberate their minds, and not to fit them into slots in the employment market, and I think we didn't do a bad job.
With respect to the proper criteria by which our Irish universities should be evaluated, they are certainly excellent and substantially ahead of the majority of universities in the United States. And while they must change and adapt to the evolving needs of our society, it would be a completely wrong strategy for them to look to the Harvards or MITs as models for their future development. Our graduates, whether at home or abroad, are simply second to none and are a great credit to those, like Dr Walsh, who worked at the coalface of Irish academe in those many years of "neglect". - Is mise,
JOHN KELLY, Professor and Registrar Emeritus, UCD, Dublin 4.
Madam, - I note Dr Ed Walsh's strongly expressed view that an annual salary in the €300,000 range is required to attract people with the necessary talent to the position of university president.
Since the present incumbents of these posts were attracted by salaries reaching only €206,000 a year, will they become surplus to requirements if the universities are permitted to recruit the €300,000-a-year talent? - Yours, etc,
MICHAEL COUNAHAN, Glenageary, Co Dublin.