Ninth Level Ireland

“I overhear, in the margins of events, one savant saying ‘We’re modelling 5% cuts’. Another intervenes: ‘5%, oh, we used to dream of 5%, we’re modelling 10%’; and then another, ‘10% – luxury! We’re modelling 15%’. And so it goes on, until someone says, without apparent irony, that they are modelling 25%. Of course, all this might be going on, but is it real and is it helpful to parade it? The cuts to the system in the 1980s were 15%, from a higher baseline of funding, and the consequences were devastating. It took a generation to recover, and the current government should still claim credit for its unprecedented investment in the research base and its courage in legislating for (but not quite introducing) variable fees. The pall of the 1980s cuts hung over the sector for two decades. So no one should imagine now that cutting the system by 15% again would have a markedly different effect …” (more)

[David Eastwood, Guardian, 29 September]

“Education shouldn’t be a debt sentence. UCD Free Education for Everyone are holding a protest against the arrival of pro-fees TD, Bertie Ahern on campus. Meet outside the library, today at 6:30pm. The man who helped build the Irish economy like a house of cards is coming to UCD to chair a LawSoc debate on the Lisbon Treaty. Ahern is still a TD and will get wheeled out to vote for the reintroduction of fees & a fresh set of cutbacks in this Decembers budget – and he’ll get away with it unless some pesky kids can stop him …” (more)

[FEE, 29 September]

“‘Ireland’s economic future depends critically on the supply of an increasing number of people qualified in science and engineering.’ Are these the words of Craig Barrett, former Intel boss, at the recent economic forum in Farmleigh? No. In fact they were the opening remarks of ex-DCU president Danny O’Hare in his introduction to the 2002 Task Force on Science. The task force’s report made six key proposals to boost student interest in science …” (more)

[Brian Mooney, Irish Times, 29 September]

“I can get a bit irritable at times, and one of the things that sets me off is when people ask me if DCU’s students have returned from their holidays and are back on the campus – the subtext being that this must be the time we also return from three months away and get back to work. So, yes, the students are back. And no, nobody here has had three months off. In fact, I’d be look slightly quizzically at anyone who has been away for more than three weeks. For all that, the return of the students is a pleasure. They liven up the place, and also make some noise at night. I hope it doesn’t deprive anyone of their sleep, but for me it’s a sign of life on the campus …” (more)

[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, Irish Times, 29 September]

“I am taking the unprecedented action of placing an advertisement to give a voice to those too afraid to speak out and to respond to the ‘Educated Elite’ of our University. For 55 members of Staff, including the President and Vice Presidents, to take out a one page advertisement, nine days before a referendum, entitled ‘Staff at NUI, Galway will vote yes for Lisbon’ is simply shocking and unacceptable for the following reasons …” (more)

[Catherine Connolly, 28 September]

“Fire services have extinguished a blaze in a college in Dublin’s Aungier Street. The alarm was raised after a fire broke out in the kitchen of the Dublin Institute of Technology earlier today …” (more)

[Irish Times, 28 September]

“Deliberations about the meanings and uses of higher education continue apace. The global economic crisis has exasperated the significance of this centuries old debate, in part because of serious fiscal pressures, but also because of the perception that higher education is now becoming the ‘railroad of the 21st century’. Why is the ‘railroad of the 21st century’ perception emerging, rightly or wrongly? In part because a structural transformation to a ‘knowledge-based economy’ is underway; one dependent upon related shifts, including the emergence of a ‘knowledge society’. And which institutions are critically important to producing a knowledge society? Well, many, but a key one is, undoubtedly, the university …” (more)

[Kris Olds, GlobalHigherEd, 28 September]

“One of the first things drilled into you at university is to never miss a deadline. But when your son develops a rash that rapidly starts to cover his tiny body, and the doctor suspects scarlatina, handing in coursework is the last thing on your mind. I had to deal with incidents such as this because, unlike my university classmates, I was a mum at 18, and when I set off to study at Leeds, I took my ten-month-old son with me …” (more)

[Camilla Chafer, Times, 29 September]

“Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe slipped out of the country last week on a mission to win friends in Saudi Arabia. At the invitation of King Abdullah, the minister attended the opening of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Jeddah. Sounds like a good move. The university will have one of the largest endowments in the world (around $10 billion) and it has sought research partnerships with universities overseas …” (more)

[Irish Times, 29 September]

“… Another of the charges levelled at the QAA is that it only looks at the quality of the processes of higher education, not the standards of the degrees awarded. He answers that charge: ‘What’s overlooked – and perhaps this is a communications lesson for the QAA and the sector – is that review is only one part of what the QAA does. A significant amount of what the QAA does is its work in the academic infrastructure, which is exactly about subject benchmarks, programme specifications, qualification framework. What it doesn’t do, and where I wouldn’t want it to go, is try to impose working in a model of a national curriculum for higher education. That would strike at the heart of what’s one of the great strengths of the system, which is that institutions are independent, they are autonomous and they have that fundamental responsibility for what they teach. But they don’t do that in a vacuum …’” (more)

[Polly Curtis, Guardian, 29 September]

“Patrick Honohan has now officially taken over as Governor of the Central Bank. The Sunday Business Post had this snippet yesterday: ‘Much speculation about who will fill the chair of international financial economics and development at Trinity College, Dublin, shortly to be vacated by Professor Patrick Honohan when he takes up his appointment at the Central Bank …’” (more)

[Philip Lane, The Irish Economy, 28 September]

“I had a research group in Galway from 1981 until 1994. Recalling that period today, when scientists in Ireland can now compete for significant levels of funding, seems similar to recalling the days when children went to school in their bare feet! There were some very modest funding schemes available at that time from the Health Research Board and from a precursor of Enterprise Ireland, but the real opportunities lay in the European Community Framework Programmes …” (more)

[Frank Gannon's Blog, 28 September]

“… If, on the other hand, the education system predominantly exists to teach people how to think, efficiency cannot be the only consideration. It is not enough to just teach the most pupils at the lowest cost. Nor is the investment into the education of children based on social status justifiable. Education, under this model, is not a private good but a public one, like policing or health care. In which case, one expects a fairly wealthy country like Ireland, even in times of recession, to do all that is possible to ensure universal access to universal standards …” (more)

[Bryan Mukandi, Irish Left Review, 28 September]

“East Antrim MLA Ken Robinson has described steps outlined by the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ulster, Professor Richard Barnett, and the President of the UU Students Union to tackle anti-social behaviour both on and off campus as a positive response to recent well publicised events … ” (more)

[UUP Blog, 28 September]

“The major political parties risk a backlash at the ballot box from young voters whose attitudes are hardening towards the charging of university tuition fees, a poll shows. The YouGov poll, commissioned by the University and College Union (UCU), found some 85% of under-24s oppose higher fees – far exceeding any other age group …” (more)

[Polly Curtis, Guardian, 28 September]

“It has become an article of faith among many federal and especially state policy makers that the United States cannot possibly improve the performance of its higher education system without a significantly better way of collecting data about the performance of individual students and colleges. Advocates for better data have abandoned the idea of a federal ‘unit records’ system in the face of vocal opposition from private colleges, privacy advocates and many Republican lawmakers. But the notion that an alternative could potentially emerge by developing state student data systems and stitching them together into a ‘national’ network has taken hold with widespread backing …” (more)

[Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, 28 September]

“King’s Inns is to meet senior officials from Dublin Business School (DBS) tomorrow to discuss whether to continue validating the school’s law degree. DBS began offering a degree in Irish law in 2007, following its takeover of the law school at Dublin’s Portobello College, which offered a degree validated by the University of Wales. Since the takeover, a number of law lecturers have left DBS. Law graduates who wish to become barristers can take an entry examination for the King’s Inns degree if they have a primary law degree approved by the Inns. But the King’s Inns website removed the schedule of approved degrees from its website two weeks ago, and is refusing to tell prospective law students whether it recognises the DBS degree …” (more)

[Kieron Wood, Sunday Business Post, 27 September]

“… The report is valuable in many respects, but it follows the pattern of many quality assurance initiatives in that it concentrates on institutional arrangements rather than the more important question of what it is that these institutions are actually supposed to protect or assure or enhance. As I have noted before in this blog, quality understood as process is not always helpful, in that the main output of such an approach is often bureaucratisation. Even at a national level we have a pretty incomplete view of what constitutes quality, beyond a desire for clear evaluation processes …” (more)

[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 28 September]

“A report likely to recommend hefty pay cuts for ministers and top civil servants will be presented to minister for finance Brian Lenihan within days. The details of the report of the Review Body on Higher Remuneration in the Public Sector are a tightly guarded secret, but government insiders are expecting it to recommend significant reductions in pay. The report is also certain to be used by the government as part of a softening-up process ahead of probable further pay cuts across the entire public sector …” (more)

[Shane Coleman and Martin Frawley, Sunday Tribune, 27 September]

“Anybody who has worked on large scale projects that involve, for example, large scale survey design, data collection, development of policy reports on top of the development of academic papers and intellectual development will know that there are a lot of challenges involved. One key issue is how communication is structured in the group. Some of this is ‘soft’ in terms of good personal relations, day-to-day interactions but the use of technology is almost essential once one goes through a certain scale …” (more)

[Liam Delaney, Geary Behavioural Economics Blog, 27 September]