How many years for a degree?

When I last lived in Germany, in the early 1970s (yes, I am that old!), I knew a man who was a student in a southern German university. I could never work out what he was studying, because when I asked him his answers were always very vague. But I did know how long he had been studying, at that time: 12 years and counting. He was an almost permanent student with indulgent parents and a set of personal priorities which, on the whole, didn’t include studying. When I left Germany in 1974 I lost track of him, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to discover that he is still at university.

In the meantime, and across the Atlantic in the United States, Senator Lamar Alexander (Republican) has suggested that in America the standard 4-year undergraduate Bachelor’s degree programme might be reduced to three years. That, of course, is the length of most degree programmes in these islands, though not as it happens in DCU: our standard programmes are 4-year ones.

And moving even further away from the my long-term student friend in Germany, when I was in my last job in the University of Hull, we regularly had some colleagues proposing that we should go for a ‘three-semester year’ (oh, I do hate the ignorance of the classics evident in such a concept) and offer programmes that could be there and gone within two years.

This, however, is another one of those issues that cannot be addressed unless and until we have a shared understanding of the demands and the nature of a university degree programme. DCU’s four years are justified by us in part because this includes a six month or more work placement, which is counted towards the final degree result. But could it be said that a 2-year programme could convey the same knowledge and understanding as a three- or four-year course? Equally, does there come a point at which a student’s results-free academic longevity undermines the academic purposes of the institution? Is there a need for all universities to have the same pattern of degree programmes, or could some have 3-year degree programmes while others have four?

For myself, I welcome at least some flexibility in this matter, as this provides an opportunity to develop and maintain some diversity of mission. Equally the question of affordability will have to be faced. But in order to conduct intelligently whatever debate may take place on this matter, I would suggest that we start by assembling the arguments for our chosen degree length, and asking ourselves whether these still stand up to scrutiny.

The spirit in which we should conduct this analysis should be one of respect for intellectual rigour, diversity of mission and affordability.

Can’t pay, so off to prison?

You probably though that the debtors’ prison was a Victorian concept popularised by Charles Dickens in his novel Little Dorrit, and that it is of historical interest only. Well, yes and no. If you owe me a hundred Euro I cannot get you sent to Mountjoy prison. But if you owe €100 to the state because you have not paid a fine for a minor criminal offence, then you can indeed be imprisoned. Not only can you be, you probably will be. According to a report in the Irish Times, the number of people sent to prison for this reason this year will reach 4,000 – which, to put it in perspective, will be a quarter of all those sent to prison in 2009.

This state of affairs is appalling, and is unacceptable in today’s society. Though the figure of 4,000 may include some who are simply refusing to obey the law, the overwhelming majority will be people from lower income groups for whom the fine is a financial problem. But in any case, using prison for these purposes is simply stupid in terms of criminology – prisons should house those (and only those) who are a danger to society.

The news that we are imprisoning people in this way should spark outrage. The only bit of good news is that the practice may fall off with the enactment shortly of the Fines Bill 2009, under which other means will be prioritised for addressing the non-payment of fines. But even then, some will be sent to prison. And as long as this happens, our whole system of addressing non-payment of fines is a disgrace. As a society, we should not tolerate it.

More and more students, less and less money, tighter controls

A perfect storm is beginning to form around Irish higher education, and conditions are such that the sector  will be in very serious trouble over the coming year. According to an article in the Sunday Tribune, figures to be released by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) this week will show a significant increase in student intake across the sector. If this turns out to be the case, then the income that each student brings to his or her institution will (without any funding cut) decline, as even before any cuts the resources are taken from a finite pool of money. But given that we are also being told to expect a cut in funding (10 per cent has been mentioned), the drop in funding per student (known as the ‘unit of resource’) could be very significant. In addition, universities and colleges will not be able to recruit staff to teach the additional students, which will add to the internal pressures.

One possible method for addressing the funding issues – tuition fees – has been very unwisely taken off the agenda. But not only has the prospect of this diversification of income been abandoned for now, in addition we face the real possibility that the new government commitment to additional schoolteachers will put further pressure on the education budget, and that higher education will be targeted as a result.

While all this is going on, we are also being warned to expect more monitoring and control, so that alongside the growing student numbers and the resulting resourcing issues we will find that initiative and flexibility will come under threat through centralised bureaucratic controls.

If left unchecked this development would lead to a catastrophe in the sector. However, in order to avoid this, the university (and third level) sector will need to set out its own positive agenda, showing how Irish universities can provide high value support for our current national needs and aspirations. We need to recognise that our case has not so far been accepted, and that therefore we may not have been good at putting it. It is time to set out our own vision of a higher education strategy that will deliver high quality teaching, research that will transform both industry and society, and civic engagement that will produce stability and equity. Universities hold the key to national regeneration – we need to ensure that this is understood and that the perfect storm is averted.

The fallen Wall and a search for history

One of my very earliest memories is of walking with my parents and older sister on the banks of the River Elbe near Dannenberg in what was then (in the mid-1950s) West Germany. At that point the Elbe marked the border between the Federal Republic of (West) Germany and the (East) German Democratic Republic. The river here is very wide, but as I walked with my parents they explained that the men I could just about see on the other side were armed border guards and that they would stop anyone who wanted to swim across the river. The idea of wanting to swim across this vast river seemed absurd to me, and so I quietly thought of the role of these guards as being one of wanting to help people do what was in their best interests. Probably they thought the same. When just a few weeks later my father explained that one such would-be swimmer had been shot by the guards on entering the water, I did think that their particular service of helping citizens had been taken beyond reasonable limits, and as a three-year-old I changed my views.

But right then, East Germany was haemorrhaging citizens. By the end of the 1950s over two million people had fled their republic to seek a new life in ours. And so in August 1961 the most porous part of the East-West frontier – the divided city of Berlin – was closed with the erection of a wall that surrounded the western enclave. Even then, there continued to be regular (and often ingenious, but also often fatal) attempts to flee from the East to the West, including continuing attempts at the River Elbe where I walked as a child.

Today, November 9, marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; or to put it more accurately, of the decision by the East German authorities (who were at that point in serious difficulty) to open the wall to informal transit in both directions. Not long afterwards the Wall did come down, and not long afterwards again East and West Germany were reunited. And as we know, the American political economist Francis Fukuyama declared at that time that we had reached ‘the end of history‘: the competition between ideologies was over for ever, and the West’s liberal capitalism had won.

Of course history didn’t end – and for the record and to be fair, Fukuyama has developed a much more nuanced view of international affairs since then, indeed last year he supported Barack Obama’s successful bid for the US presidency. There is, it is true, no longer a recognisable global ideological conflict between a capitalist and a socialist world view; but this has given way to lots of other conflicts, some of them very hard to contain in philosophical terms. The events of September 11, 2001, and what followed them were infinitely more alarming in many ways than the articulated and feared threats of the Cold War that, at least in Europe, never produced any actual conflict. Meanwhile in the states of the former East Germany, which often have had to suffer greater economic and social problems than the former West, a significant minority have started to feel some nostalgia for the old times, a condition that has been called ‘Ostalgie’ (a contraction of ‘East Nostalgia’).

Whatever may be the view of it now, the fall of the Berlin Wall was one of the very greatest iconic moments in history, unforgettable to all those who saw it, even if just on a television screen. Even if it made no clear statements about ideologies, it did declare that attempts by a state to suppress its own citizens could not work for ever. But it did not solve all of Germany’s problems for all time, never mind the world’s. Over the years, governments have increasingly failed to deliver a vision of where they think we should go. Economic boom conditions dulled some of the questions about vision, but they have now returned with a vengeance. So the right mood for the 20th anniversary celebrations of the fall of the Wall is not one of triumph and self-satisfaction, but one of re-appraisal of what western developed countries have been doing, and what they intend to do now.

That’s a job for all of us, and the time is right for it.

Higher education, and serving the public

In almost exactly one month we will all get a better idea of what our lives will be like over the coming years.  On December 9 the government will unveil its Budget and Book of Estimates for 2010, and this will tell us what money the government will spend and on what, and how funded, over the coming year. Of course as we also know, this event will be preceded by negotiations, days of action, protests, lobbying and all other methods of influencing known to humanity. But whatever may be the result of all this, we know without question that in 2010 we will have fewer resources in the public sector in Ireland, and that measures will be implemented in particular to ensure that over the years ahead the public service will shrink. And given the state of the public finances, there is no way of avoiding this.

Right now, I am for a moment less concerned about the financial implications for the university sector. I fear that we will be facing very serious resourcing problems, but difficult though it may be to believe that, our declining revenues from the taxpayer are not the most serious issue. Still far more of a problem is that the new outlook on public services threatens to impose on higher education an overall control framework that will remove institutional autonomy and seriously undermine institutional flexibility and initiative. As the government seeks to control its financial commitments, it may try to se the same mechanisms to reduce the expenditure of universities that it will use to control government departments and agencies. We already have one example of that in the form of the employment control framework, which if fully implemented imposes reduced staffing levels and case-by-case controls over staff recruitment. All this will happen at the same time as universities are encouraged or cajoled into increasing their student intake.

We cannot really argue that we should be allowed to spend more taxpayers’ money, as we know that it just isn’t there right now. But the current circumstances seriously reinforce the need to reconsider our status as (at least in part) public service institutions. Universities are not public bureaucracies, they are knowledge organisations with a mission to teach and develop and disseminate knowledge. They need to be able to operate with great flexibility and they should have a reduction (rather than increase) in controls from government in order to maximise their potential for meeting national needs. Universities need to be entrepreneurial, not to be bureaucratised. They should of course be accountable, but not controlled.

There is a major need for a wider discussion on the nature and purpose of the public service in Ireland. But separate from that, there is a need to re-design our understanding of what universities are. They are not corporate entities or private for-profit organisations; but equally they must not be seen as government agencies with the sole role of applying the latest policies under central control.  All the evidence is that the current trend is the other way, and that the imposition of tight controls is now public policy. It is a bad policy.

Remembering Uncle Joe

During the Second World War, after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and the configuration of the hostilities changed dramatically, the US media began to refer to the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as ‘Uncle Joe’, the image of an avuncular family member. Of course as we all know, Stalin was nothing of the kind, and while Russian resistance to the Nazi invaders was heroic and in some cases highly tragic, it was driven by a leadership which, in the metrics of death, rivalled that of the Third Reich. Though it is hard (and probably not hugely helpful) to try to calculate the number of victims of Stalin’s régime, most put it at upwards of 10 million.

And yet, of course, it is not easy to leave it at that. For many Russians, Stalin secured the position of the Soviet Union as a superpower and ensured that it held the balance of terror with the United States for at least four decades. He created order internally, and secured for Russia a padding of dependent states on the periphery of the country. And so, given the uncertainties and occasional humiliations of the post-Cold War period, it may be understandable that in Russia there is a certain amount of Stalin nostalgia. It’s more than nostalgia: a significant number of Russians now see Stalin as a role model and would welcome a government run on his principles. In December 2008 a poll in Russia revealed that he was seen by Russians as the third most popular figure in history.

How should we see all this? Is it really just misplaced nostalgia in a country that is still rediscovering its national dignity, or is there something more sinister? As has been observed, if there were a similar poll in Germany about Hitler, there would rightly be international outrage. Are these two cases totally different?

It is reassuring therefore that Russian President Dimitry Medvedev has emphasised the horror of the Stalin-era repression and has called for memorials to his victims. If we are to have a balanced European development in which we all have confidence in each other, a tendency to believe that Stalin was somehow right, or even just not totally wrong, would undermine such an aim. I have much sympathy for Russians who want to take something good from their history of the 20th century, but hero-worshipping Stalin should not be the way to do that. I hope that President Medvedev’s approach carries the day.

Letter from America

This post is coming to you from Washington DC, where I am on a very short visit in order to attend two meetings. As ever, it is fascinating to be here, as you get to see at first hand the trends and events that are influencing opinion in the United States.

As I arrived in the city yesterday, I came upon the tail end of what was apparently a major demonstration, aimed at persuading Congress that the planned healthcare reforms were unacceptable. As you may have guessed, the demonstrators were overwhelmingly of a conservative Republican persuasion, and some of the posters they were carrying displayed a depth of opposition to the reforms that, to me at least, was baffling. One poster carried the message that the reforms were likely to ‘bury for all time the principles of the American constitution’. Really? Another still much more alarming poster suggested that the proposed reforms justified a call for ‘waterboarding Congress’, a rather chilling reference to the alleged torture applied against terror suspects during the years of the Bush administration.

I confess that I find it very hard to understand this depth of passion, bordering on fanaticism, about something that may be right or wrong (right in my view) but which really should not draw out this kind of response. Social reforms should always be discussed rationally, not hysterically. But healthcare has become the touchstone of the Obama administration, and the ability of Congress to adopt the measure (planned for Saturday) will tell us a great deal about the capacity of Barack Obama to chart a reforming course.

The other thing that struck me forcefully was an article about last year’s Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. She has never quite left the news since the election, though the coverage of her oscillates between support and ridicule. Conservative film critic Michael Medved, in commenting on Palin and her forthcoming book Going Rogue, suggested in an article in USA Today:

‘A nation that proudly offers fresh starts and open doors regardless of old world titles or family connections should reject snobbery based on either academic attainment or aristocratic ancestry.’

Leaving aside entirely the matter of Sarah Palin’s personality or achievements, it struck me as very significant that the writer was equating academic qualifications with feudal concepts of society. Is he right? Are academic institutions the purveyors of social elitism? Is knowledge divisive if celebrated? The aristocracy of intellectual performance is perhaps a feature of the academic world. Do we need to re-think this, and find a way of valuing knowledge while avoiding any suggestion that it elevates the holder? Are attempts to open up access to knowledge to everyone doomed, so that we will always be left with a privileged elite? These are genuine questions which, perhaps, we do need to answer. And our lack of skill to date in answering them may explain some of the reservations about academic institutions, in Ireland as much as in the United States.

Assessing the value of research

I was at a function recently when I was accosted  by one of the other persons attending. How, she wanted to know, could I justify all that ‘useless research’ that was going on in my university?  She wasn’t against research – not at all, in fact: she wanted us to find the cure for cancer, the answer to Dublin’s traffic problems, and a solution to all those under-funded pension schemes. And instead, what were we working on? Well, she had heard someone say that research was being funded by the taxpayer to analyse the ’syntax of Wordsworth’s poetry’! I mean, can you imagine?

My first response when she paused to draw breath was that DCU was working on the three topics she mentioned (well actually, I don’t think we’re working on Dublin’s traffic, but I wasn’t going to admit that). But, I pointed out, it was important for society that there would be some researchers who were not working to a particular practical agenda, because they might well discover things that nobody had yet anticipated but which would change our lives. OK, she conceded, but Wordsworth’s syntax? I had no idea who if anyone really was working on this, but I pointed out that such research might produce valuable insights into the effectiveness of communication (well, I had to think of something quickly…).

But even if I found this conversation a little annoying, she was raising an issue with which we do need to come to grips: what is university research for? Why do we do it, and why should it be funded? And how many strings should be attached to the funding? And how do we measure whether it has all been worthwhile? A good friend of mine, a very respected academic who is one of the global leaders in his discipline, argues from time to time that the only worthwhile research is useless research; once we are subjecting it to an impact assessment, he suggests, we are cheapening it.

All of this is at the heart of the new system to be introduced in Britain for evaluating research, the Research Excellence Framework (REF). This will be used (as a successor to the Research Assessment Exercise) to evaluate a university’s research performance and determine how much general research funding it should receive. One of the key criteria to be used will be ‘impact’. This is explained as follows: ’significant … recognition will be given where researchers build on excellent research to deliver demonstrable benefits to the economy, society, public policy, culture and quality of life.’ In other words, this will assess whether the research can satisfy my friend at the function. And this has drawn some strong criticism from the academic community, as has been reported in the most recent issue of Times Higher Education. Academics have not been persuaded that the ‘impact’ of their research is always a relevant or fair criterion, not least because it may not be known when a research project is first planned.

I have some sympathy with this resistance. And yet, as society (and other funders) are being asked to provide the resources for research, it is not unreasonable that they should ask what it is for. So maybe we should resist a little less, and just get better at explaining the purpose of research, even research that is at first sight functionally ‘useless’. We are probably no longer in an era where we can answer ‘mind your own business’ to such questions and still hope to get resources, but equally we should be able to explain convincingly that, sometimes, research is justified because it will engage an intellectual agenda and because the pursuit of such an agenda is right for a civilised society, and for a society that wants to train the best minds to do the best they can. And sometimes it is justified because it cures cancer and makes the traffic flow.

The economic impact of universities

For those who are sceptical about the capacity of universities to make a difference to the economy, a study has just been published that, in the British context, puts this into figures. The report, The Impact of Universities on the UK Economy, is published by Universities UK and is based on research conducted by a team working in the University of Strathclyde.

The key finding of the study is that universities annually contribute £59 billion to the UK economy; that would be the equivalent of £7 billion in Ireland, if the contribution of Irish universities were on average the same as that of British ones. The study also shows the contribution universities make as employers and investors on local communities, and their contribution to exports.

There are still people who claim not to have evidence of the significance of universities to the national well-being and to trade and business. This report gives strong (if UK-based) support to the idea that the existence of strong universities is one of the key mechanisms for securing sustainable economic growth. In Ireland, we need to develop a similar mindset, and fast.

The audacity of governing

One year after the election that gave Barack Obama the US presidency on a wave of hope and enthusiasm, the signs of normal business being resumed are there: the disillusioned liberals are voicing their disappointment, the more rightwing Republicans are doing what they do, the Taliban are busy helping them in Afghanistan, the coalition of voters who elected him aren’t coming out to ensure his guys get in where there are regional elections.

Maybe reality has caught up with the Obama concept, and so the old and new doubters have come out to play. Government is in part about principle, but in part also about tactics and compromise. What keeps it all together is the articulation of a vision, and this us what Obama must not lose. But it’s early days still, and if he gets health reform through, successfully exits from Iraq and contains Afghanistan, the audacity of hope can survive and prosper. We all depend on it.