Dumbing down?

Earlier this month in Britain, the Leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, was reported as saying that students who would have failed A-level mathematics in the 1980s were now ‘easily passing’ because of dumbing down under the British Labour Government. At almost exactly the same time researchers from the Institute of Technology in Tralee who had conducted a [...]

Architecture: preservation vs innovation

To state the obvious, I am not an architect, nor do I have even a gifted amateur’s knowledge of architecture. But I have had a lot of dealings with architects, some quite brilliant, and some less so. Amongst the brilliant I would count Andrzej Wejchert, who designed the Helix performing arts centre in DCU. If you look at his firm’s [...]

Investing in high value knowledge

In this week’s State of the Union address by President Barack Obama, this is what he said right at the beginning of his speech: The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation.  The answers to our problems don’t lie beyond our reach.  They exist in our laboratories and universities; in [...]

Ireland’s struggle to be a centre for science and technology

For the past few years we have all known that Ireland has a problem: we need to be a centre of excellence in which research and development and high value investment can find a natural home; but our indigenous population has been turning away from the subjects – at school and university – that could [...]

Meeting my ancestor

It’s a very small world, in a sometimes strange sort of way. A year or two ago I was standing at a check-in counter in an American airport. Because the woman behind the counter had some difficulty saying my name (not an unusual occurrence for me), I said it for her. And as I did so, I noticed [...]

Concerns for the equality agenda in a recession

In the current recession, and with significant issues of funding hitting almost everything, new priorities quickly emerge and old ones can suffer. Monday’s edition of the London Times newspaper reported as follows: Plans to axe new laws that would increase costs for businesses, including enhanced maternity leave and tougher equality legislation, are threatening to blow open [...]

The rewards of teaching

The most recent issue of the UK journal Times Higher Education carries an interesting report on a survey carried out by the British Higher Education Academy (not to be confused with our own Higher Education Authority). In a nutshell, the results of this survey reveal that many British academics, including many in the most research intensive universities, [...]

The dangers of recession

I recently came across a political pamphlet which had been distributed at a mass rally. A key passage in the pamphlet ran as follows: “The end of capitalism is imminent. It has been caused by the natural greed of the owners of capital, and by the reckless behaviour of the banking system, pushing people and firms into [...]

Eat your heart out

Earlier this week there was a review of student dining at one of Ireland’s universities (not DCU). On the whole the reviewer was not complimentary, either about the quality or the price of the food on offer. For myself, I remember very little about the quality and quantity of food I ate as a student; [...]

The significance of governance

The UK journal Times Higher Education recently reported on a survey of governors and senior managers in 27 British universities, carried out by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education. This revealed that a ‘significant minority’ of both governors and senior managers felt that relations between them were only ‘sometimes’ or ‘rarely’ constructive, and in some [...]