Ninth Level Ireland

“International students may be called plagiarists because of flawed thinking and naive use of software. If the new forms of detection software are to be believed, a sizeable proportion of students are plagiarists – and the worst culprits are international students. But when does poor referencing and an inability to better phrase an original source become cheating – and a reason for serious disciplinary action and the humiliation that goes along with it? An Australian study of Turnitin – a detection service that compares work submitted electronically with the 2.6 billion publicly available pages on the internet and with all the essays it has previously checked – found that 14 per cent of 1,925 essays examined contained examples of plagiarism …” (more)

[Niall Hayes, THE, 29 January]

“University lecturers and professors have vowed to resist attempts to impose pay cuts or changes to conditions by individual universities to help meet curtailed budgets.

As the heads of the three largest universities — University College Dublin (UCD), Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and University College Cork (UCC) — update staff on their financial difficulties this week, the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT) warned any changes to core pay and conditions of their members can only be negotiated nationally.

‘Whether it is attempts to withhold pay increments, non-filling of vacancies, or seeking not to renew contracts, nothing can be imposed by college managers but we will gladly sit down and negotiate with the Higher Education Authority or the Department of Education to deal with any of these questions on a national basis,’ said IFUT general secretary Mike Jennings.

He also rejected a suggestion, reportedly made by TCD provost Dr John Hegarty, that professors continue to forego an 8% pay increase, the first 5% of which was to have been added to their salaries in September 2007.

The increases have been withheld because of queries into whether allowances paid to a small number of professors at each university had been properly sanctioned, but it is claimed that Dr Hegarty suggested to around 80 professors on Tuesday that they should not accept the increase until they are all cleared to receive the increments on their salaries of around €110,000 to €150,000.

‘It’s one thing to impose collective punishment on people for almost 18 months but it is appalling to expect that kind of collective self-sacrifice,’ Mr Jennings said.

A TCD spokesperson said the unpaid increases were discussed on Tuesday but no decision was made and the issue is still being considered by management.

UCC president Dr Michael Murphy outlined to staff the need to find further spending cuts on Tuesday and UCD president Dr Hugh Brady will address staff today.

Efforts to find major savings by the colleges come ahead of Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe’s expected announcement on the formation of a group to devise a higher education strategy.

Its terms of reference are likely to include possible rationalisation of colleges or specialist courses, third-level access for minority groups and research structures.

The minister is separately examining third-level funding sources, including a consideration of reintroducing student fees. But college heads insist their funding is already inadequate even before the current cuts were being imposed.

At a meeting open to all staff, Dr Murphy made clear that every UCC department must find savings to help reduce its €17 million deficit, while national talks on public sector pay and spending could have a further impact. A small number of non-permanent contracts have not been renewed in recent months, but further cuts may have to be considered.

A UCC spokesperson said that students will always remain the top priority for management.

‘We’re trying to find savings as much as possible in every single department but ones which will have least impact on teaching and learning,’ he said.

As well as payroll budgets, college managers are reviewing spending on consultants, printing costs, and outside travel which is also being restricted.

UCC has around 2,000 employees, including a mix of permanent and non-permanent workers across academic and administration departments.”

[Niall Murray, Irish Examiner, 29 January]

“Postgraduate seeks supporters to sue Exeter for breach of contract. A disaffected student has set up an internet campaign in a bid to raise £20,000 to sue the university where he failed to obtain his PhD. Paul Jones, 26, who was a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Exeter Business School until last year, claims that unreasonable teaching demands were placed on him and that he received inadequate supervision after his tutor went on sabbatical and left him in charge of a specialist third-year undergraduate teaching module. His website, student4justice.com, aims to reveal the ‘darker, less well documented world of academia’. It is dedicated to students deemed to be ‘snotty and litigious’ by their universities …” (more)

[Rebecca Attwood, THE, 29 January]

“Every new year brings reports on the state of the humanities in higher education, so brace yourself anew. On 7 January, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences released its ‘Humanities Indicators’. This is a prototype collaborative project that aims to do what leaders in science and engineering have been doing for decades: provide policymakers with a systematic data resource. The indicators are many and varied, but discouraging all the same. Over the past 30 years, the budget of the National Endowment for the Humanities has fallen by one third, and 87 per cent of what remains goes to organisations other than colleges and universities …” (more)

[John Summers, THE, 29 January]

“The UK’s international higher education strategy is uncoordinated, a report commissioned by the think-tank Million+ has found. The study, Universities and International Higher Education Partnerships, describes a ‘lack of coherence’ between government departments, with ‘conflict between the policies of one Whitehall department and another’. It says the British Council’s role and international agenda ‘are not always transparent or well-aligned with other key government departments’ and that the council ‘can be in competition with institutions’ over the delivery of educational services. Countries such as Australia, which has a single agency for all international educational activity, and Germany follow a more ‘co-ordinated and strategic’ approach …” (more)

[Rebecca Attwood, THE, 29 January]

“On Monday evening this week the Societies Guild at UCC rejected an application, backed by over 100 student signatures, to set up a pro-choice student society. The ‘reason’ the Societies Guild gave for their disgraceful decision was: ‘Your society application was brought before the Guild last evening. Unfortunately status was not approved. It is a decision that was ultimately made by a previous Guild and is being upheld. A society already exists which caters for debate in the area of abortion and choice …’” (more)

[Alan Davis, Indymedia Ireland, 28 January]

“President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has infuriated a key part of the country’s higher-education establishment with the tone of a speech he delivered last Thursday on France’s national strategy for research and innovation. Calling the country’s higher-education system ill-adapted to the challenges of knowledge and growth in the 21st century, Mr. Sarkozy said France trailed other industrialized nations in research and innovation because ‘too often we have retreated from the necessity of reforming our universities and research institutions’. Mr. Sarkozy was unsparing in his description of a system his government has already done much to reform …” (more)

[Aisha Labi, Chronicle, 28 January]

“Funding for research in university science departments and medical schools is being safeguarded at the expense of arts, humanities and social sciences, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) announced today. Outlining spending plans for 2009-10 to vice-chancellors, the council said research funding would be as selective as in previous years. Overall, universities will share £8bn, up 3.8% in cash terms on last year. At present, 82% of funding goes to just 29 universities, but last December’s national research assessment exercise (RAE) to judge the quality of university research revealed excellence right across the sector …” (more)

[Anthea Lipsett, Guardian, 28 January]

“The British degree classification system is out of date, vice-chancellors admitted today, calling for more complete records of students’ skills and achievements. In evidence to the Commons universities select committee, university heads also conceded that not all degrees were of equal value, but defended standards overall. Doubt over degree standards peaked last summer when Buckingham University’s Professor Geoffrey Alderman suggested that lecturers were under pressure to inflate marks and ignore plagiarism. Professor Les Ebdon, vice-chancellor of Bedfordshire University and chair of the Million+ group, said the degree classification system was outmoded …” (more)

[Anthea Lipsett, Guardian, 28 January]

“Controversial right-wing figure David Irving is set to speak at NUI, Galway this March, after a large majority voted in favour of him delivering a lecture at the college. At the meeting of NUI, Galway’s Literary and Debating society, a packed 300-seat Kirwan theatre of Galway students debated and voted on the motion ‘That This House Would Allow David Irving to Speak at This House’. The majority sided with the proposition. The society had previously been in correspondence with this prominent right-wing figure, who spent three years in an Austrian prison under Holocaust Denial Legislation. Mr Irving had expressed an interest in visiting the longstanding society to speak on his theories about the Nazi Holocaust …” (more)

[Marie Madden, Galway Independent, 28 January]

“The president of University College Dublin (UCD), Dr Hugh Brady, has called staff to a special meeting tomorrow amid growing concerns about the college’s rising debt levels. But college sources stress there is no question of job losses among the 3,500 staff. Last year, UCD posted a record debt of more than €13 million. In an e-mail to staff yesterday, Dr Brady refers to the ‘unsustainable position’ in which the college now finds itself …” (more)

[Séan Flynn, Irish Times, 28 January]

“Staff at two universities have been called to urgent meetings to be told of severe cuts. They include pay restraint, a freeze on filling most vacancies, restrictions on travel to conferences abroad, reductions in funding for schools and departments, and higher charges. In Cork, UCC president Dr Michael Murphy addressed staff yesterday. It will be UCD’s turn tomorrow …” (more)

[John Walshe, Independent, 28 January]

“… Whether in the intention of the rankers or not, university rankings have followed a destiny of their own and are used by national policy makers to stimulate debates about national university systems and ultimately can lead to specific education policies orientations. At the same time, however, these rankings are subject to a plethora of criticism. They outline that the chosen indicators are mainly based on research performance with no attempt to take into account the others missions of universities (in particular teaching), and are biased towards large, English-speaking and hard-science institutions … The purpose of the JRC/Centre for Research on Lifelong Learning (CRELL) report is to fill in this gap by quantifying how much university rankings depend on the methodology and to reveal whether the Shanghai ranking serves the purposes it is used for, and if its immediate European alternative, the British THES, can do better …” (more)

[GlobalHigherEd, 27 January]

“As the debate about a revised disciplinary statute ends, of one thing we can be sure; the first attempt to use it on a staff member will result in a High court injunction, followed by a full hearing. The genie is out of the bottle; disciplinary procedures at UCC, DCU, and TCD have been found illegal in relevant state fora, and the idiots who drafted the 1997 act are going unpunished. Just whose lunatic and infantile idea was it to impose new disciplinary procedures on adults in any case? In the meantime, we staff can achieve some kind of equalisation of powers by insisting on our right to dismiss senior management and veto whatever incompetents the Irish state decide to foist on us …” (more)

[Seán O Nualláin, University Blog on
Academic Tenure in Ireland, 27 January]

“Yesterday I was engaged in a discussion with a number of colleagues from various universities, and the conversation turned to the disciplinary mix needed in a higher education institution to ensure that it can be a credible university. We agreed that it was possible to be a perfectly respectable university, and successful, while not having, say, a range of minority languages in the portfolio. But then someone suggested that any institution that wanted to be recognised as a bona fide member of the academy would have to have some subjects or disciplines; and the example given was history. Well, DCU does not have a history department … Once again, we are up against the problem that there is no consensus any more as to what constitutes a university. Almost nothing that defined universities in the past – from the required core disciplines to the teaching methods – are universally accepted now …” (more)

[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 27 January]

“Sharing research information via a more open access publishing model would bring millions of pounds worth of savings to the higher education sector as well as benefiting UK plc. This is one of the key findings from a new research project commissioned by JISC. Professor John Houghton from the Centre of Strategic Economic Studies at Melbourne’s Victoria University and Professor Charles Oppenheim at Loughborough University were asked to lead research that would throw light on the economic and social implications of new models for scholarly publishing. The research centred on three models …” (more)

[JISC, 27 January]

“Since writing my previous post, I have read a trenchant statement of the opposite view by Prof William Schabas, Director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at NUI Galway. His argument is twofold. First, he refers to the EU Framework Decision on racism and xenophobia. Second, he argues that, whatever about that Decision, Irving should not as a matter of principle be granted a prestigious platform by the Lit & Deb …” (more)

[Eoin O’Dell, Cearta, 27 January]

“The possibility of China going into recession poses a ‘cataclysmic’ threat to global higher education, Prof Malcolm Gillies, vice-chancellor of City University, London, warned today. He told a seminar on globalisation that the world of international higher education was going to get colder. ‘We’re in a world where we can see a whole lot of factors. It’s getting chillier and we don’t know what bits will get frozen out or who will take the competitive advantage and break through. But if China does go into recession, that’s more cataclysmic than anything else,’ he told a Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) seminar. UK universities have relied on income from overseas students’ fees up until now, but the seminar heard that the period of growth in international students was over. Gillies said that Australian universities, whose academic year starts in February, had reported huge numbers of international students from China, Korea and Japan deferring their places …” (more)

[Anthea Lipsett, Guardian, 27 January]

“At one time a faculty was viewed as more than just a group of teachers. Faculty members were the essence of a college or university. They set the intellectual tone of the school, and as a result, the institutional agenda was centered on ideas, learning, values and bringing students into the realm of the mind. A college education was once intended to bring about a comprehensive transformation of the entering high school graduate, yielding an incipient scholar four years later. Students at a college were expected to absorb its culture and attitude and identify, however subliminally, with its mission. Those majoring in a department established a sense of identity with the field, and professors exhibited a sense of responsibility for their welfare and progress. Even in larger institutions, majors were viewed as individuals, and sometime as colleagues, not just numbers. Full time faculty members became advisers, confidants, and sometimes, friends. It’s different now …” (more)

[Bernard Fryshman, Inside Higher Ed, 27 January]

“On Friday, I noted a letter to the Irish Times that was little more than Hamas apologetics, interesting more for its list of signers than its content. They had 23 names listed and the Irish Times said there were 126 more. The letter with the full list of signers is here (there are only 148 names rather than the 149 the Irish Times reports) … Some of the affiliations are vague, but the ‘wide variety of disciplines’ is exceedingly comic. Take a look at the list, and you overwhelmingly get humanities and soft social science. Almost all the signers at the University of Limerick, for example, come from one department …” (more)

[William Sjostrom, Atlantic Blog, 26 January]