What to do with all this dissent?

Last month the Irish Times published an article by Tom Garvin, a recently retired professor from University College Dublin, in which he suggested that Irish universities were being destroyed by an ‘indescribable grey philistinism’. He concluded:

‘An anti-intellectual and pseudo-commercial bullying has attempted to replace intellectual freedom, a freedom that the nation itself desperately needs, whether or not it realises it.’

Actually Professor Garvin had been down this road before, in an article published in the same newspaper two years ago. And he is clearly not alone, Both then and last month his pieces were followed by letters to the editor that largely agreed with his analysis.

Nor is this just an Irish phenomenon. The website Inside Higher Ed recently reported that a professor of Georgia Southern University had circulated an email to all faculty in which he described his university as dysfunctional and as being led by administrators disconnected from academics and students. I suspect that if I trawled a little more I would find other examples of such dissent.

What does all this tell us? Actually, that’s hard to say. A lecturer from University College Dublin recently told me that such views are, as he put it, the property of an older generation of academics who find it hard to adapt. He suggested that many of these dissidents are uncomfortable not just with new management practices, but also with new technology, and sometimes with the new practice of involving students in decision-making. They are, he suggested, out of touch with a younger generation of academics.

On the other hand, in my recent role as chair of the Scottish review of higher education governance I came across a good few examples of dissent from academics who would not fit into such a category. So what do we do? One of the key requirements of a successful academy is collegiality. This cannot be a substitute for strategy and action, but it should be an accompaniment to it. Universities cannot return to some allegedly golden age of the 1970s or earlier – there wasn’t such a golden age anyway; they must deal with the financial, quality and accountability issues that they now face. But university leaders must also remember that their plans and methods must carry consent, and they must find ways of harnessing that as effectively as possible.

I don’t agree with Professor Garvin. I think he has misunderstood a good deal of what universities now have to cope with. But I believe that he, and others who think like him, should be encouraged to take their case into the heart of the university, and should be allowed to stimulate discussion and, where appropriate, re-appraisal of policy. Universities would be strengthened by this.

Keeping it all in the family

Without necessarily wanting to go through all the arguments again, we might note that Tom Garvin’s Irish Times article of last Saturday has been strongly criticised (also in the Times) by two UCD professors, Mary Daly and Brigid Laffan. However like Professor Garvin, the two writers here also treat the issue as almost entirely UCD-specific, using the occasion to list all sorts of advances and achievements by their college over recent years. I hate to say this, but this particular debate should not be about UCD and various people’s views of it. Whether UCD’s modular teaching programme is good or bad, or whether its research culture has changed, is maybe a matter for the college’s PR department, but is not central to the debate on how universities should be run. There are, if I may whisper this, other universities out there.

Then again, maybe I am just impossible to please.

Assessing the state of the academy

This post comes to you, if you are to believe Professor Tom Garvin of UCD writing in yesterday’s Irish Times, from a ‘grey Philistine’, one of those ‘who imagine that books are obsolete, and presumably possess none themselves.’ OK, Professor Garvin doesn’t mention me by name, and for all I know he has never even heard of me, but that is how he describes the leaders of the Irish universities today. Oh well, I think I’ll have to invite him to my office and my home so that he can inspect my books, to establish the number and the content. The latter is important because he also asserts that all the university presidents have ‘narrow intellectual outlooks’.

Before you think I have been mortally offended or am responding in a childish sulk, let me say immediately that this is not so, and that I well understand that Tom Garvin’s piece was intended as a polemic; and in any case, as he only ever mentions UCD (and bless him, he may not even know that DCU exists, perhaps believing that the name is just an example of the illiterate new management lovers having problems trying to spell ‘UCD’), his guns may be trained rather more narrowly than the noise of the bombardment might suggest.

So, leaving all that aside, what is his argument? With no disrespect to him, it is not that easy to pick it out, because in the article his accusations are, shall we say, rather varied. But I think there is a theme, and I would suggest it is this: that the value of intellectual discourse is no longer recognised either by government or, more particularly, by university leaderships; that independent thinking is not encouraged or supported; and that the humanities have been asset stripped (though I doubt he’d use that expression) in order to fund applied research in the biosciences. And along the way he takes a few shots more specifically at university presidents, as we have seen.

I mean no disrespect to Tom Garvin when I say that the personal invective used by him in this piece won’t do much good; it will tend to persuade those reading it that this is all about some internal feud in UCD and that the rest of us should just ignore it. Furthermore, some of those whose views and actions are currently affecting higher education and who really should consider the arguments raised may be tempted to conclude that this is another example of the academic community finding it hard to come to terms with a changing world. And all of that would be a pity, because there is a real point in this that needs to be discussed.

Professor Garvin argues that ‘idle curiosity’ should be at the heart of academic endeavour, or ‘the free exercise of trained curiosity by independent-minded and well-educated people’. He argues that much of today’s research is funded only if the researchers are able in advance ‘to specify what they are going to discover before the money to do the research is made available’. Taken at face value this is a seriously misleading statement, as it suggests that researchers are being required to agree to research outcomes in return for money, which if it were true would be fraudulent. It is therefore worth stating categorically that it is not true of any serious state-funded research. So let us assume that his charge is that the subject-matter of the research has to be determined in return for funding. In other words, the charge may be that open-ended, unconditional research funding is not awarded.

And this is indeed a vital question: to what extent should the modern academy accommodate people who will pursue in their own work, and encourage students to pursue, the search for knowledge outside of national priorities or areas of strategic focus? Or put another way, can higher education encompass both the strrategic pursuit of knowledge and skills, and the general search for knowledge in an open-ended and open-minded process? Tom Garvin’s view appears to be that the former is always improper, and the latter is almost lost. He may be wrong on both counts – I believe he is – but it is an important question and it merits a proper debate.

The problem with this article is that it won’t stimulate debate at all (though I’d like to think I am helping him a little here). Throwing around personal insults and somewhat exaggerated invective is unlikely to open minds or change them. The argument presented by Tom Garvin deserves some attention, but to achieve that it needs to be formulated as a contribution to debate rather than as a playground catcall. It also needs to take account of the fact that society needs contributions from universities to address a number of burning issues, whether these are social, economic or technological. It is unlikely that the taxpayer will find it congenial under current conditions to fund research or teaching that is not allowed as a matter of principle to respond to specifically identified needs.

Right now higher education is under attack from many sides. We had better present a coherent argument to the outside world.