In the end, there may be very few universities

My home university, Stanford, recently invited off-site registration for a course in AI. It was made clear that off-site participants would NOT receive credits from Stanford for their participation; they would, however, receive an indication of where they might have stood in a Stanford class. As someone who has had two courses accredited by Stanford academic council, and taught them there, I can confirm that this is easy to do.

There are now 130,000 + students enrolled for this course, making its enrollment about an order of magnitude higher than Stanford's entire resident student body;

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/opinion/the-university-of-wherever.html?_r=1

The issue, of course arises; why hire very expensive and often poorly-trained management and teaching staff at taxpayers' expense to provide an inferior version of such courses on expensive city real estate, particularly as much of the core content of many such courses has been available under an irrevocable creative commons license for some time, due to MIT's open courseware initiative;

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

Alternatively put, it has been clear for some time that countries like Ireland may not need banks, given the (admittedly morally ambivalent) existence of as Euro zone; that a national airline may similarly be an ego trip; why have universities? There are positive arguments in the context of”student moral development” and “national spirit”; but these are precisely what successive governments have explained to us, at great cost, that Irish universities no longer do;

http://9thlevel.ie/2011/07/21/dangerous-legal-vacuum-at-the-irish-universities/

I have few, if any, illusions about the significance of this blog, or indeed of the very costly struggle that both Paul Cahill and I underwent to ensure that some form of procedure other than summary dismissal obtained at Irish universities – and by extension in the public service in general. One would expect trash like the Sunday Independent and the Daily Mail to join the war against academic freedom on behalf of their corporate masters. What was surprising was that the "paper of record", the Irish Times, joined with great gusto in the fray. All are being sued; the Irish Times has already printed several retractions and one apology, and the Sunday Independent has yet again altered its website's record of events - I had a similar experience with them in 2003, resulting in them removing a webpage. That is not enough.


It also is as well to confirm that IBEC, acting for DCU in 2003 on foot of their appeal to the Fleming judgement, did indeed use a little-known provision in a 1990 IR act that forbade strikes for “single dismissal” and threatened SIPTU with a High Court injunction. SIPTU, of course, then went over to management's side in an egregious act that ended with them losing their “closed shop” status at DCU

What I have learned is that, absent an alternative narrative and claim to sovereignty and jurisdiction such as that provided by the republican movement, the Irish state made it clear that it was perfectly happy to operate in a lawless – indeed in a downright antinomial environment. Who better to call the shots in such an environment than a scion of a WW2 forced labour enterprise?

Time was when we used to sit down as Irish people and work out our differences. The major significance of the past decade is that we have flushed out a certain segment of Irish society, who now are administering a bankrupt state for a colonial body. In the meantime, I am open to privatization of the universities (with the exception of TCD) precisely to bring them under the rule of law. There is no way that a private enterprise would have gotten away with what DCU, among others, has gotten away with over the past decade

I am fully aware that the putative purchasers might decide to shrink the campus size 98%, eventually turning them into server farms with a skeleton administrative staff. It is possible that there will be no need for universities in Ireland at all, and all courses will be run remotely from a few sites in the USA and China. Yet it is clear that, as previously happened in health, the Irish state has proved unable to achieve even the moral stature - let alone technical ability - of the catholic church, against which it now rails so petulantly, in its running of key institutions.

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Stanford
8u Deireadh fomhair 2011