BOOK OF THE DAY: Margaret Mac Curtainreviews The National University of Ireland 1908 - 2008 Centenary EssaysEdited by Tom Dunne University College Dublin Press, 370 pp; price €50
FEW ENTERPRISES in the history of 20th-century Ireland had such fair winds at their backs as the establishment of the National University of Ireland by the 1908 Irish Universities Act. A handsome centenary volume puts into context and recounts the history of the NUI. Dr Garret FitzGerald, its current chancellor, says it is "closely linked with and to an extent mirrors the evolution of the State in the 20th century".
The federal arrangement, which included the Queen's Colleges at Cork and Galway, the Royal University of Ireland and St Patrick's, Maynooth, was part of a deal that gave Trinity College Dublin and Queen's College Belfast independent status.
The range of subjects in this lavishly-illustrated book offers an overview of the NUI's functions and responsibilities. John Coolahan opens with a survey of the Machiavellian politics that delayed resolution of the Irish university problem until the 1908 Westminster Act.
John A Murphy, Séamus Mac Mathúna, Donal McCartney and Séamus Smyth trace the histories of the colleges at Cork, Galway, Earlsfort Terrace/Belfield and Maynooth.
Displeased with the federal arrangement, Cork and Dublin wanted independent status, resenting the restraints of the NUI in appointments of presidents, professors and statutory lecturers in each college and the NUI's supervision of course standards and degrees.
University politics are second only to parliamentary politics in the proliferation of committees, cabals, cries of "treachery" and, in relation to the NUI, mutterings that its senate, elected by the graduates of the colleges through convocation, provided University College Dublin with a majority.
Yet the NUI remained the central unifying governing body with its elected chancellors, skilled permanent registrars and senate rulings. The Report on Higher Education in 1967 raised serious issues for the NUI. The abandonment of the matriculation examination, the changing fortunes of the Irish language, which Gearóid Ó Thuathaigh analyses, and in 1989 the upgrading to university status of the national institutes for higher education in Limerick and Dublin, weakened the NUI.
In 1997, the Irish Universities Act conferred full university powers on the constituent colleges of the NUI. In the final essay, editor Tom Dunne estimates that the Act "hollowed out the practical and functional jurisdiction of the NUI vis-a-vis the constituent universities, while leaving it in place as an institution".
Women now make up half of undergraduate and postgraduate students. Senia Pašeta in her contribution, Achieving Equality: Women and the Foundation of the University, suggests they are sparsely represented in senior positions. In the 21st century, university presidents have management teams. Tom Dunne believes universities "should not be all - or even primarily - about managing".
For over a century, the NUI put before its colleges the primary goals of its founding mission, the importance of undergraduate teaching, the promotion of scholarship and research and the role of a national university in identity formation.
Implicit in some of the essays and the profiles of four of its chancellors - Dáire Keogh on archbishop William Walsh, the first chancellor; John Walsh on Éamon de Valera, the longest serving, Ronan Fanning on
TK Whitaker, an experienced negotiator and Maurice Manning on Garret FitzGerald, passionate believer in the NUI ideal - is the conviction that the NUI has been a keystone in the formation of a national identity.
For more than 100 years, men and women of great intellect and wisdom have applied themselves to the enterprise of establishing a university system that shaped and reflected back to Irish society its academic values. Will the NUI survive? This is a book that broadens our understanding of the connections between culture, economics and identity as we face the challenges of a new century.
Margaret Mac Curtain is a former lecturer in Irish history at UCD. Her book, Ariadne's Thread: Writing Women into Irish History was published in March