UCD has experienced corporate model of governance being imposed and last vestiges of academic self-management removed, writes Kieran Allen
Vincent Browne is one of the most articulate critics of the current neo-liberal orthodoxy. All the more surprising then that his recent article ("It's Time for UCD Reforms") made scant reference to that same corporate agenda.
UCD academics are not opposed to reforms. It's a question of which ones. We support the broadening of the curriculum, so that students in science subjects can take arts subjects and vice versa, and we also welcome lifelong learning.
Some of us would go farther: if it was up to us, we would end tomorrow the absurd situation whereby evening students cannot transfer to daytime courses to benefit from the free-fees scheme, and we would also advocate a system of study-leave, whereby workers build up credits for paid time off to enter third-level education.
Our complaint then is not against reform but against particular reforms.
A new policy context has emerged since the Skilbeck and OECD reports: there are to be greater links between university and business and a new culture of competition is being created through pseudo-markets.
In UCD we have experienced the corporate model of governance being imposed on us at great speed and the last vestiges of academic self-management swiftly removed.
Let's look at each item in turn.
Staff at UCD and other universities are repeatedly told that there are no known cases of funding affecting the outcomes of research. This is obviously false as Jennifer Washburn demonstrates in her recent book, University Inc.
Among the more celebrated cases she cites is the Harvard Electricity Policy Group, which churned out some 31 reports advocating the deregulation of energy markets in California - while receiving funds from Enron and other energy firms that stood to benefit from precisely such a policy.
Another example from her book is the analysis of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found that studies of cancer drugs funded by the pharmaceutical industry were nearly eight times less likely to reach unfavourable conclusions about the drugs than similar studies funded by non-profit organisations.
It is not just a matter of a few celebrated cases but the wider ethos. Universities traditionally operated according to Albert Einstein's dictum: "The right to search for the truth implies also a duty: one must not conceal any part of what one has recognised to be true."
The conservative sociologist Robert Merton likened the culture of science to the ideals of communism - knowledge was to be freely shared and held in common, while the individual academic benefited only in the status of being the first discoverer.
Hence the emphasis on peer-reviewed articles, full disclosure of data, conference papers which aimed at a "republic of letters". (I don't mean to romanticise the status-obsessive behaviour that sometimes developed but only to stress that, warts and all, it brought an extension in scientific knowledge.)
The giant corporations want ever more profits and it has occurred to some of them to look to universities. Research is expensive, so smart people in big companies have seen that they can get their research subsidised by getting the universities to do it for them.
However, this has consequences: they obviously want to appropriate knowledge for themselves and withhold it from rivals. So they insist on "time-limited options to negotiate royalty-bearing exclusive licences" - to quote from a recent case study on university-industry partnership presented to the American Chamber of Commerce/Ibec conference on the commercialisation of research.
In the past year, the sponsorship of research in Irish universities by pharmaceutical companies has grown enormously, but there has been no transparency about the exact nature of the agreements. There has been no discussion on the institutional guarantees to stop suppression of negative results, to disclose when researchers have commercial interests or to provide full access to data for all scientists.
Vincent, however, wants to berate "discomfited academics" who are "baying for the retention of privileges". If the issue is really self-interest, I suspect he has got the wrong target.
The second element of the neo-liberal agenda is the encouragement of competition between and within universities and Vincent has, unfortunately, been taken in by some recent headlines.
Just as private companies occasionally form "strategic alliances" for competitive advantage, some universities do the same. This, however, does not suppress the wider tendency to intensify competition.
In the words of UCD's own Governing Authority chair, we now have to "embody a version of the 'win or die' philosophy or we will lose". So pseudo-markets are being created in most universities through new "cost-centres" which compete for funding - just like in the big corporations.
There are to be "benchmarks" and "performance indicators" for teaching and research so that "product delivery" can be assessed. There are even "space audits" in which the cost of each unit of space is calculated.
Unfortunately for this kind of thinking, some things are inherently unquantifiable. A good teacher, at primary school or university, is not the person who fills out their forms most efficiently or files them in the neatest way. Similarly, one book or article may be worth 10 others.
Research assessment exercises, which claim to measure "outputs" in prestigious journals, have about as much relevance to intellectual inquiry as Soviet-style five-year plans had to the real economy.
As the British educational system demonstrates, an audit culture can be severely dysfunctional as it creates more stress, worse research, and inadequate teaching. But lots more paperwork.
The key to good research and good teaching is more democracy, more co-operation and a supportive atmosphere that assumes that most employees are not shirkers but want to do a good job.
This brings us to the issue of governance. Vincent is wrong to assume that academics were solely responsible to elected deans in the past.
They answered to heads of departments, who were sometimes imposed and sometimes elected. Ultimately, the president and the Governing Authority had the power of veto.
The point about elected deans was that they were seen as an important support for academic freedom. They held regular faculty meetings that provided a space for the open scrutiny of funding, the academic credentials of new courses and general direction of the college.
It was by no means perfect and sometimes much pompous nonsense was spoken. Nevertheless, with the curtailment of this relatively minor form of democracy, the space to reward people on the basis of cronyism has grown.
Whole new hierarchies of bureaucrats have been invented. We have entered a new era where the central management of universities is being reconstituted around a core of appointed vice-presidents, who have imbibed the business ethic.
There is already talk of "superstars", who do little or no teaching, negotiate their own very high salaries and who seek to commercialise their work. There is endless discussion of business "philanthropy".
Academics are not stupid. They know there is no such thing as a free lunch, especially from big business. We understand the opportunities are being made for some individuals to become very wealthy from taxpayers' money.
We need to increase the number of taxpayers (cut the tax-exile shelters for the rich, increase taxes on corporations), not rip off the present ones. That way we can get a high-quality public service, without the return of fees.
Kieran Allen is the head of the School of Sociology in UCD and author of The Celtic Tiger: The Myth of Social Partnership