This year’s students, next year’s fees?

As readers of this blog will know, I believe that a well thought out framework for higher education tuition fees is something we actually need to introduce, and I applaud the courage and determination of the Minister for Education, Batt O’Keeffe TD, in moving this along. However, I am still disturbed that while there must by now be a detailed proposal that has been the subject of discussions amongst Ministers, the universities have not seen anything and are not being consulted about it.

In addition, the Irish Times reported during the past week (correctly) that universities and colleges are being told to alert this year’s incoming first year students that, next year, they may become liable for fees. I believe that it is important to maintain a principle of no retroactivity, and a new framework should only affect those who knew about it when they applied for a third level course. In fact, when this year’s new intake were filling in their CAO forms there were statements assuring them that when fees were introduced they would not apply to existing students.

I think that the new framework, whatever form it takes (and in the end, I hope it will be discussed with universities before it is finalised), should be introduced in such a way as to minimise alarm and discontent. I don’t think that the statement we are being asked to pass on to new students, and the steps that it implies may be taken, are a good idea.

Wondering about H1N1

I suppose that many people are just now waiting anxiously to see how aggressively the so-called ‘swine flu’ will spread over the autumn and winter months, and what the effect of that will be. And I am sure that some are concerned about whether they or their families will be specially at risk, and how dangerous the disease could be to them or others.

First of all, some bits of background. Maybe you are well ahead of me, but I have been somewhat confused about the exact identity of this disease. At first it was described as ‘swine flu’ and while I cannot remember exactly what the early reports from Mexico said, I had kind of assumed that this had been passed to humans from pigs. This is not however the case. It was called ‘swine flu’ because it was a strain of influenza that looked genetically like a form of influenza common in pigs. I gather now, however, that further research has shown that this is not the case, so ‘swine flu’ may be a popular name but is totally inaccurate as a description of the disease.

So what about ‘H1N1′? Not really a catchy name, but the H stands for ‘hemagglutinin’ and the N for ‘neuraminidase’. Both are viral proteins, and the structure of these proteins determines what strain of influenza is involved. So I understand, at least. H1N1 is the particular strain that was at the heart of the ‘Spanish flu’ of 1918. Unlike the latter, however, its symptoms have been mild on the whole. There have been deaths (including two in Ireland as we know), but that is perhaps frightening us more than it should. I don’t know what the figures are in Ireland, but in the United States some 36,000 people die annually from what is called ‘seasonal flu’. H1N1 has made no statistical difference to that number, and I suspect this is true worldwide. There is no evidence that H1N1 (‘swine flu’) is a more serious killer than anything that has already been around annually. The special attention it is geting is perhaps based on the fear that it could mutate and have an effect similar to that of the 1918 outbreak, but so far there is no evidence of that; and in any case we should remember that general health conditions were very different in 1918, just at the end of the First World War.

But none of that is an argument for complacency. H1N1 does seem to be very contagious, and in some countries in particular has spread very fast (the UK has been badly hit). We do not yet know whether the disease will change as it spreads, and we need to be vigilant. But it is always sensible to prepare oneself on the basis of a realistic assessment, and to avoid the spread of general alarm and panic.

DCU has, like other universities and organisations, developed an action plan that will allow us to take swift measures as needed should H1N1 affect a significant number of people, and having such plans is an appropriate response. A major part of any plan must be to encourage people to take obvious and easy precautions, chief of which is the encouragement of basic hygiene rules: wash your hands regularly, particularly before and after significant gatherings or visits, and don’t cough or sneeze into the air. Otherwise, get on with your life, and don’t get too worried.

Time to re-think prisons

Exactly 57 years ago today, the notorious French penal colony of Devil’s Island off South America was finally closed, and the remaining prisoners were either repatriated to France or were released to live in French Guiana. It is estimated that over the 100 years of its existence the prison housed some 80,000 convicts. Some of them were what we would now call political prisoners, some were serious and hardened criminals, but some just repeat offenders guilty of minor crimes; some, including the famous Captain Alfred Dreyfus, were wholly innocent. Many of the convicts never left the island, which was notorious for its terrible climate and disease-infested conditions.

During its later years as a prison, Devil’s Island was the subject both of Hollywood movies (the most famous was probably Papillon) and of highly critical commentary, in France and elsewhere, and by the time the prison closed it, and the penal principles under-pinning it, had been wholly discredited. The idea that prison should be a place of horror and deprivation and total isolation from society of convicted persons had been accepted as wrong, indeed reprehensible.

And yet, we need to ask ourselves from time to time how much we have really learned. Do we really have a more enlightened view now? Do we really understand the importance of rehabilitation as a way of reducing crime, while also of course caring for and protecting the victims? In fact, do we have any serious understanding of crime and the penal system at all? We have been hearing over the past week or two of the growth of the Irish prison population – a doubling over the past two decades – and the inclusion amongst inmates of some who are manifestly no threat to society, and to further issues to do with prison conditions and over-crowding.

Right now, Ireland still has a relatively low prison population by international standards, but on the other hand we attach little priority to organising a penal system that works and provides a benefit for society. The Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform is currently working on a white paper. This should look at criminology in a radical way, and should aim to wean us off the idea that we can brush away our social problems by containing offenders in prisons. That is not a project that has ever worked, anywhere. It’s time to have something better.

Research, economics and trench warfare

There has been a bit of a battle this week in the pages of the Irish Times. On Tuesday Professor Luke O’Neill of Trinity College Dublin wrote an opinion piece in the paper defending state funding of science research, arguing that it allows us to keep the brightest and best in Ireland and that through it we can as a country take part in adventure and discovery that will allow us to improve lives. He also argued that it was not reasonable to expect an immediate economic pay-back for the investment by the state.

Two days later the paper printed a response by Michael Hennigan, the owner of the website Finfacts (and an economics graduate). He suggested that investment in research yielded inadequate commercial returns and that the calls for maintaining research funding were really just pleas by those with vested interests.

I have to say that I am finding the public debate, such as it is, on research funding to be hugely irritating, not because it is taking place but because of the way it is being conducted. For a start, as I have noted before, there appears to be a new economics orthodoxy about the impact of research (on the whole, that there isn’t one). Various economists either argue that there is no evidence that R&D produces a commercial benefit, or even claim there is evidence that it does not. In fact there is evidence of such benefits by the truckload, but maybe it is not being presented well, or maybe we are in a situation where prejudice is trumping facts.

What annoys me is that this debate is often being conducted around the idea that research should create jobs, meaning that there should be immediate spin-offs that generate large-scale employment. Trinity College and UCD fell into this particular trap in the announcement of their Innovation Alliance, promising the creation of 30,000 jobs (which is an unattainable goal and is in any case a completely unnecessary one). Luke O’Neill is quite right in pointing out that investment in research, and in life sciences in particular, will need to be given some time before it creates direct commercial activities and employment. But that is actually neither very interesting nor very relevant in the context of current needs. The economic and trading case for R&D investment now is not direct job creation, but rather the creation of an environment in which others will create businesses and jobs.

For example, the IDA (Ireland’s inward investment agency) has stated several times that its recent successes in generating foreign direct investment have overwhelmingly depended on and been based on our research investment and the existence of a serious research community in Ireland, as this was a vital factor for the companies contemplating Ireland as a location. Similarly, indigenous start-ups increasingly tap into our research capacity. In that sense, the complaint noted by Michael Hennigan that post-doctoral researchers don’t go into business but move on to other research projects is of no significance, in that researchers are rarely the right people to go into business – but they need to go on to help create further discovery that can then be used by those who have the business skills.

Hennigan also cites US professor Amar Bhidé (though he places him in the wrong university and the wrong discipline), who has suggested that the US should not worry about whether it is producing research, but should instead exploit research commercially, wherever in the world it has been generated. The problem however is that even if Bhidé were right, the US is a rather different country from Ireland, not least because it has a very large population and a huge market, so that economic activity can in theory be generated through such an approach. But in any case, he is wrong: the US became the world’s dominant economy precisely at the moment when it decided that it needed to be the global home of research and development, which was perhaps the most far-reaching decision taken there in several generations. And to focus in on a region, when the Research Triangle was created in North Carolina it transformed that state from a rural backwater into an industrial, commercial and financial power house.

The evidence is clear and is well known. It is time to stop pretending that we don’t have the facts. It’s time to be focused and determined, and to show consistency of purpose. Unless we like the idea of going back to the 1980s.

An untidy mind

Recently I was visiting an old colleague in another university, whom I had not seen for perhaps eight years. I knocked on his office door. ‘Come in,’ he said, and as I entered I could hear his voice greeting me, but I could not see him. To be fair, I couldn’t see anything else either, because everywhere, all round the room, were stacks of papers and folders, newspapers and journals, books and other things. They were piled on the desk (well, I presume there was a desk, I couldn’t really see it), on the floor, on the window ledges, on shelves. He had kept open a little passageway through the piles, perhaps 18 inches wide, so that you kind of had to walk sideways to make your way. And as I turned the corner I saw my friend, sitting on a chair behind what I still presumed was the desk; or rather, he was sitting on a pile of papers placed on a chair.

‘Don’t you find that your office is, well, a little … er, full?’ I asked. ‘I suppose so,’ he conceded. ‘In fact’, he added, ‘the other day a student who came in to ask me something had to leave, saying she was claustrophobic.’

My friend is retiring in two years, and I am certain that when they clear his office – which will be an industrial job carried out by men in construction-type protective clothing – they will, behind all the rubble, find the remains of a student or two who never made it out. But it may be a worthwhile job: ‘Somewhere in all this,’ my friend said, ‘ is a cheque for £5,000 which I cannot find.’

My own office, which heaven knows is big enough, is also not a model of tidiness, though I hasten to add that it is nothing like the one just described, and it can be entered without any appreciable risk to health or personal security. But like many academics, I am a hoarder, and keep all sorts of stuff that really just belongs in the trash, but which I am convinced will ‘come in handy’ one day. But I don’t lose things. On the whole. I know where everything is.

But why not just file it all neatly and efficiently? It has always appeared to me that there is something so terribly anti-intellectual about filing, a kind of assertion that knowledge is strictly coded and arranged and cross-referenced. It is anti-intuitive, and Aristotelian in the worst sense. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself and anyone who comes in here and looks critically at my office arrangements.

Still, if I’m honest I have to admit that I have just written this post because I cannot find the article I cut out earlier today and which I was going to use for a different contribution to this blog tonight. Oh well.

A German lesson?

In the discussion on a recent post here there was a brief exchange on German universities. In this I suggested that German universities under-perform in international terms. Indeed if you look at the world rankings issued by the journal Times Higher Education, German universities are not prominent. In fact, Germany’s number 1 institution is Heidelberg University, which comes in at number 57 (actually Ireland’s top university is ranked higher, though I forget which one that is). And the only other German university in the top 100 is the Technical University of Munich at number 78.

There are a number of interesting questions one could ask about this. Why does a country that has the world’s fourth largest economy not score more highly in higher education? Why is the country that arguably produced the model for modern higher education in the Humboldt framework not a torchbearer for excellence? What is it that they are doing wrong, and what do they need to do to correct it? 

I also wonder whether this casts some doubt on one German institutional structure which is sometimes thought to have been a progressive and imaginative initiative – the Wissenschaftsrat (translated on its own web page as the rather clunky ‘German Council of Science and Humanities’). This body is supposed to review and monitor higher education policy and propose improvements and reform. It has a ‘Scientific Committee’ and an ‘Administrative Committee’ – the former looks at broad educational and research issues, but the latter proposes actual measures; and this latter committee is composed not of academics but officials.

Perhaps the lesson is this – or at any rate this is what I am wondering, subject to correction: that Germany has not hit upon the idea of university autonomy, but rather has a centralised system of public and political control (though admittedly devolved to state governments, or Länder). And maybe this underscores again that global excellence cannot be achieved on that model. The chairman of the Wissenschaftsrat recently suggested in an interview that individual universities should find their own niche and specialisms so as to excel; but if that is the answer, it is only achievable by allowing each institution to develop its own special strategy on an autonomous basis, subject obviously to proper accountability.

But as we struggle in Ireland with questions about the appropriate level of monitoring and control, the German lesson may be a valuable one. We have an opportunity to continue to develop our higher education system so that it may punch above its weight internationally and attract both knowledge and investment to Ireland. We should not put that at risk; the German model does not work.

Just being there

When I started as a student in Trinity College Dublin 35 years ago, one of the endearing practices at our lectures (at least in the first year) was that the lecturer would do a roll call. As some of the names on the list were not easy (well, there was mine for a start…), this could take a little while. And when your name came up, you answered ‘yes’ or something similar (or in some cases, something actually rather dissimilar).

In those days, attendance at both lectures and tutorials was compulsory, so if you missed a certain number (and I forget now what the number was) you became ineligible to sit the examinations. This was a serious issue in one subject in particular. I’m going to be discreet now and mention no names, but Trinity law students of my generation will know who I am talking about: one lecturer was really boring; and I don’t just mean a bit boring, I mean “I’m not sure if my vital life signs will not shut down during this lecture” kind of boring. It would have been medically dangerous to sit through more than one of his lectures at a time, that kind of boring. There was an understanding in the class that you could not be expected to attend more than one in every four of his lectures, and that those whose turn it was to attend (suitably fortified in advance) would answer ‘yes’ for anyone not there, as well as for themselves. As this was not necessarily coordinated in advance, it was not uncommon for 3-4 people together to say ‘yes’ for a particular absentee. Anyway, my point is that the rules notwithstanding, attendance was not achieved here, and the lecturer knew it but did nothing.

However, back in those days it was still the norm to attend, and on the whole absenteeism was not a problem. But now, all that is changed utterly. Colleagues from a variety of institutions keep telling me that for much of the time they do not expect to see more than 30 per cent or so of students at a lecture. In part this is because many students now have part-time (in some cases, pretty nearly full-time) jobs and need to attend to these; in part it is because course materials are distributed in advance or are available online and cover pretty much everything that is said; and also, it probably has to be said, students increasingly simply don’t believe that their attendance or non-attendance matters.

Academics, on the other hand, generally believe that those not attending regularly are much more likely to fail or to drop out. And so over recent years, in a number of institutions, there has been some soul-searching over whether the issue of attendance should receive more attention, and indeed whether we should consider making it compulsory again, with mechanisms for monitoring and enforcement. The experience of colleagues in some areas where, for professional reasons, compulsory attendance is already being implemented (as in nursing programmes), is being watched with some interest.

On the other hand, for some time now some academics have questioned whether there is a discernible link between class attendance and student achievement. They point out that empirical research on this has not produced conclusive findings (or rather, some research has purported to show there is a link, and other research has apparently failed to find one). In one interesting analysis, the author – a professor from an American university – concluded that performance and achievement were linked to motivation, so that attendance helped when it was what the student felt inclined to do, but did nothing when it was forced upon an unwilling student. She concluded that compulsory attendance policies were unlikely to help.

At a time when student engagement sometimes seems low, for whatever reason, and drop-out rates are high, it is right for us to debate what should be done to improve this. But we must also be careful that the measures we take are assessed properly and that our policies are evidence-based. And the ultimate successful policy for student achievement is, as the study suggests, a high level of motivation. That is what we must work on.

The future for men – a PS

Following my recent blog post on the issues raised by under-achieving young men, today’s Guardian newspaper has a report which reveals that, in the UK, women are also more likely to find employment quickly after graduating from university, with a higher percentage in employment within six months. Admittedly, the percentage of those in full-time employment is about the same for men and women, but when you also factor in part-time and other kinds of employment, more women than men have jobs. The percentage of men who are unemployed – i.e. who have no job and don’t go on to take a higher degree – is greater than that of women.

However, the Guardian also reveals that more men than women go on to do postgraduate work. I am not absolutely sure what to read into that, but it is possible that it could indicate that the imbalance between men and women in senior posts will not be redressed as quickly as it should be. At any rate all the figures we have seen over the past week indicate that urgent attention needs to be given to gender issues in education.

Are we over-paid?

One of the questions to have been raised in recent public debate about the Irish higher education system has been whether Irish academics are paid too generously. It is pointed out occasionally that academic pay in Ireland is on average much higher than that elsewhere. Broadly speaking, pay in Irish universities (for those in full-time permanent jobs) is in a range from €42,000 for a junior lecturer at the start of their career to a maximum of perhaps €145,000 for a full professor. In the United Kingdom the range is from about €37,000 to a maximum of €82,000 (though in fact some professors are able to negotiate rather higher pay), in the United States €58,000 to €98,000, and Germany €25,000 to €35,000.

There is no doubt that this looks generous, though one might add that many of the students taught by these lecturers and professors will not take long, after graduation, to earn even more in other professions, with lower qualifications. However, it is a question that we must be willing to address, and we must be able to demonstrate that the pay scales provide good value. Of course, this country has the ambition to be a knowledge economy, and it could be argued that universities need to provide attractive employment for those with the greatest talents and the best qualifications.

To date we have not been good at marshalling the points and providing persuasive arguments. So what should we be saying? Or are we really all just over-paid? And I am not even mentioning the pay of presidents…

PowerPoint, with neither power nor a point – better to be naked?

Nearly a year ago in this blog I wrote a piece about the use of PowerPoint, Microsoft’s presentation software, and argued that it was too often being used badly, and was certainly being over-used more generally. I was reminded of this recently when I turned up for a public event to which I had been invited that was to consist of a major lecture. As I entered the room I was handed a print-out of the PowerPoint slides the speaker intended to work from; I stopped for a moment and glanced through the 64 slides (!), concluded immediately that this lecture held no interest for me whatsoever, and left again immediately (though taking the hand-out with me, just in case). Instead I repaired to a rather nice coffee shop where I had a cappuccino and a rather good pastry and read an article in an academic journal I had with me. Damn it, I thought as I left the cafe, I was wrong, PowerPoint has its uses.

But if it does have its uses, it increasingly has to battle with the sceptics. It seems that more and more doubts are being expressed about whether PowerPoint has a useful place in the university classroom, where it has become totally ubiquitous. These days it is almost impossible to go to a university lecture in which there isn’t a PowerPoint presentation that takes the student through every point the lecturer is making. Admittedly I have seen this done rather well, but have also experienced occasions when the lecturer seems to be merely reading off the words from the screen, sometimes sounding as if he or she were encountering them for the first time.

But now, according to the US journal Chronicle of Higher Education, there are the beginnings of a campaign to bring this to an end. One US college, the Southern Methodist University, is removing all computers from classrooms; and a survey undertaken in England by the University of Central Lancashire found that 59 per cent of students found lectures were becoming dull and that this was connected with the use of PowerPoint. So what is increasingly being proposed is that lecturers should get used to ‘teaching naked’, which I hasten to add is the practice of not using technological props, but to return to the concept of a university class as a forum for intellectual interaction between faculty and students; this, it is felt, has been inhibited by the use of PowerPoint.

I suspect there is room here for questions about babies and bath water, but it does seem right that we should remind ourselves that technology, including PowerPoint, is not an end in itself but at best a tool. Its use has probably had some positive effects, such as persuading lecturers to structure what they are saying, but on the other hand it has become so much the expected thing that too many teachers no longer think properly about what value it is adding, and have allowed it to stifle debate rather clarify content. I had already reached this conclusion ten years ago, as I was embarking upon my last year as a lecturer: back then I decided to ensure that in every second lecture I used no technology at all and focused instead on interactive discussion. So maybe I was ahead of my time…