The real university will follow the students

Madness in the method, rather than the other way around: There was nothing mindless about what DCU management have been trying to do since 1995, with a quickening after 2000. Vicious to the point of evil and ultimately failed, yes; but there was method there The following initiatives are documented either on this blog, on national Irish media, or on both;

- Tenure was to be abolished; more precisely, it was to be attenuated to the right of 3 months' wages accompanying a summary dismissal, without cause. Since I did not know what any of this meant until 2008, and indeed I assume that the reader does not (nor should he/she have to know as not all of us should need to be lawyers) here is an explanation; even senior academics could be fired for no reason, and were to be entitled only to 3 months' wages as compensation. As now chief justice Susan Denham said from the Supreme court bench on June 29, 2009, that would be the end of academic freedom.

And, of course, the 1997 Universities act declares that academic freedom is the law. Small wonder that the Supreme Court, after a decent interval to preserve face for DCU, ordered Cahill fully reinstated with costs. Nor did DCU follow up on their threat, uttered through junior barrister Mallon at the Supreme court hearing to sack Paul Cahill again - and immediately - in that eventuality. Finally, UCC, UCD, and TCD have all bitten the bullet and interpreted tenure as a job until 65, leaving only DCU.

- Students and staff alike were to be deprived of even the most basic rights of citizens as “autonomy” was granted to the Irish universities. That includes the right not to be bribed , or intimidated; we know this from repeated parliamentary questions

- Students were to lose their right to choose a career; such choice was to be made by the state, centrally

- Students were to begin to pay fees. In UC Berkeley, to take one example, such fees have risen quickly to $14k per annum, with the funds used for building projects.

- University rankings were to be inflated by the addition of expensive “adjunct” staff, normally based in another university, whose publications could be used to pump up the volume. Since 2008, as these staff have become too expensive for the Irish state, rankings have decreased.

- High-achieving students were to be offered exclusive accommodation on campus as an incentive to attend DCU

- Industrial relations (IR)were to be abandoned as a waste of time. If you can fly in a head of dept from Switzerland to work part-time – as indeed DCU has done for nearly a decade - why bother cultivating decent relationships with staff? Indeed, legal judgements could be disregarded – as in fact they effectively were after the Cahill high court case – as no Irish judge would lightly imprison a university president to “purge his contempt of court' as that wonderful mediaeval phrase goes.

The destruction of IR at DCU is VP's single lasting legacy. DCU has been allowed - indeed, encouraged - to act outside rthe law for over a decade and has succeeded only in destroying the delicate network of trust that all too briefly made it a place of outstanding promise. The withdrawal of resources from teaching is a disaster.

It is worthwhile looking at a larger context as well. The Irish were to become an ethnic minority in their own country, with the Chinese becoming the biggest minority ethnic group; the universities were to be moved out of the department of education; and illegal statutes could be replaced by more such illegal statutes.In fact, power was to be decoupled from any kind of legal framework.

So where do we now stand? Well, as I predicted earlier, the first attempt to use the new statute no 5 on a staff member will be met with a High court injunction. The statute will then be declared illegal, and the cycle 2002-2011 will start again. However, it is doubtful that DCU will survive this.

Let us be clear about this; the way DCU was run 1995-2010 is, in the short term, a highly effective way to run an institution. In the medium and long term, it is a disaster to have the college respond to short-term corporate demands in this fashion. Whether that institution should be called a “university” is a moot point; however, the fact is that the international rankings for universities will include it, and its now higher place there will guarantee more foreign students. That is particularly the case as DCU has a good tradition of technical education.

However, it was not accepted practice to throw people under the steamroller of the state until recently. So here is my current response; I do not think that institutions like DCU deserve to survive the 2012 shakeout as MIT, Stanford and other universities attract millions of students. True, they do not yet issue degrees; yet their certificates of completion of course will soon be worth more than degrees from places like DCU. Moreover, these courses are being offered in exactly the technical areas in which places like DCU got their reputation; software eng, algorithms, and so on.


So, to survive, Irish universities will have to revert to being the small, nurturing places that they eschewed in the 2000's. To repeat; I do not think that DCU will survive the debacle of statute no 5. What is interesting now is what to replace DCU with, how to protect the 50k or so graduates (less than the number on a single Stanford course in a month;s time), and how to use the land grant universities in Ireland for the betterment of the Irish people. In a recent post, I even suggested a reversion even to the notion of knowledge as edification; it seems to be the case that the market will provide a better mechanism.

A little about myself. My paternal grandfather returned to Kilkee from the USA almost exactly a century ago and proceeded to become the dominant business force in the area; his counterpart in Kilrush was my maternal grandfather. We were wealthy - even in international terms - before the Irish state was founded, and the advent of a German “aristocrat” in our life was not a particularly smart move by the state that attempted to get our allegiance by invoking republican principles, where titles are an embarrassment. Like many Irish people, I can trace my heritage back to a local “king” (and indeed a Norman baron from Lille) and repudiate all this in the name of participation in Irish society, as all of us do.

This blog started in 2008 as an attempt to protect what we considered was a vital locus of free speech. However, the campaign started in mid-May 2002 when I refused to answer a summons to a meeting that I - in apparent paradox discussed elsewhere - was also to "arrange" (thus vitiating my rights). I revealed elsewhere that this was also the example that inspired Paul Cahill - and I initially advised him in 2006, getting him the barrister for the injunction. After that, Paul's was a better case than mine for the Supreme court as I had not had the benefit of a decade in the USA to pursue research. Our colleagues responded magnificently in 2002-2003, and this would all have been over by March, 2003, but for SIPTU's corruption. The country hyas lost at least tens of millions, and oceans of goodwill as a result.

Since then, we have had Bradley Manning, wikileaks, the Occupy movement and the rise of the Megaversity. Students have a wide variety of choice outside the “universities”and can now get top technical education, and certification, without engaging in scams like U Phoenix, or DCU.


The real university will follow the students, not the other way around

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Stanford
Stanford University 28u Nollag 2011

PS Anseo, fis gur fiu e a fheiceail;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL4X5fTw9DI&feature=related

PPS A few minor points as this is now all over but the shouting. First of all, it was VITALLY important that DCU never scored a victory at any stage - Labour court, rights comm, High and Supreme Courts, EAT. Had they scored one, it is as certain as one can be about these things that hundreds of staff would have been dismissed within month.

Secondly, at no point was I going to accept a settlement - which would have been tantamount to accepting that statute no 3 was fair, and would have resulted in dismissals as above. I may not come across on this blog as particularly likeable at times, but I ask the reader to remember what the stakes were, and how much I sacrificed.