"Discipline In War Counts More Than Fury" - Learning From Victory at Maynooth

On Tuesday morning, the Governing Authority of Maynooth University met in emergency session, to discuss its planned change in the way staff members of GA are to be chosen, from election (which has been the status quo) to selection by private consultants.  This plan was a tributary outcome of the Government's 2022 Higher Education Authority Act, which shrinks 'governing authorities' to a maximum headcount of 19, and fixes a permanent non-university majority of members at 10.  Faced with a letter from the Irish Federation of University Teachers rejecting this measure out of hand, with letters from international scholars in support of their Maynooth colleagues, and with the results of a petition organised by IFUT which had accumulated over 1160 signatures in a couple of weeks, GA voted to accept the current arrangement, to reject a 'hybrid' model which had been proposed (three to be elected, two selected), and to reverse its original proposal for the selection of all five members.

This victory has been achieved by the redoubtable and brave work of the IFUT Maynooth local, by IFUT staff and members more generally and by the support of a large network of Irish and international scholars and other persons interested in the future of Maynooth, of higher education in Ireland, and indeed of higher education and academic freedom everywhere.   

A victory, yes, but while one wishes to see the University work harmoniously after a period of tension, we who have fought for this achievement must not drop our guard.  We must never underestimate the forces arrayed against us.   Those forces will rally and return.   The victory achieved is one which does not wipe away many other problems at Maynooth or at Irish universities generally - commercialisation, the whole vacuous rhetoric of 'excellence', the mushrooming of often unaccountable management, the hegemonic re-purposing and use of 'radical' ideas and language to achieve undemocratic and empty ends ('equality, diversity and inclusiveness', top-down, management-led 'decolonisation' of curricula, the by-passing of departmental and disciplinary structures and democratic forms by the creation of 'schools', and much more).

We in Maynooth are deeply grateful to our comrades in Ireland and abroad for their support.    But we also have much to learn, as we strategize for the struggle which undoubtedly will continue.   We have much to learn from the crisis of public universities in the United States and from the struggles produced by the British Brown Report 'reforms'.     Even as we in Maynooth celebrate a victory today, Brighton University's management is seeking to eviscerate many of that institution's programmes and is cutting staff by 10%.   Compulsory redundancies wantonly axe careers, destroy departments, and wreck the learning opportunities of students.    All of these tactics may yet come to Maynooth.   

 

There will be much talk in Maynooth about the need now to put aside differences and work in the belief that 'we' all have the University's interests at heart.  But we do not all have the same interests at heart.   Management is concerned with students, teaching, and research only as 'inputs' and 'outcomes'.  It is in the thrall of a profoundly reified conception of learning and pedagogy.   It has no sense of the intellectual vocation, of the value of critique and dissent, and of education as a public good.

Maynooth staff and students have achieved a fine victory.  But we must remember that the moment of victory is that of the preparation for the next war, and we must plan accordingly.

Conor

The Future Will Only Contain What We Put Into It Now - the Maynooth crisis continues

 

Aontacht is the website of Irish Student Left Online.    Aontacht is a non-sectarian media collective of left-populist character, which seeks to challenge Irish society from the viewpoint of political parties, trades unions, tenants' organisations, student groups and workers' interest groups. It welcomes contributions, video and media contributions coming from a revolutionary socialist perspective.

Maynooth activists Steph Collins and Naoise McManus have published an extremely valuable article on the Maynooth crisis.  Collins and McManus are socialists and both are members of Students For Change at Maynooth.   Their article brilliantly outlines not only the current constitutional crisis at Maynooth - epitomized by the drive to appoint staff members to Governing Authority by private selection, rather than by democratic election - but offers a deeper history of the rise of neoliberal managerialism at Maynooth.   They also offer important background on the recently appointed President of Maynooth University, who is clearly the crucial and most ruthless driver of this process and of the wider process now underway of the bureaucratisation and commercialisation of Maynooth.  

Here is Steph and Naoise's superb article: 

Maynooth University “Systematically Excludes” Staff From Key Decisions in Trend Towards Commercialisation

It Is Forbidden To Forbid

Part of what is most sad and unfortunate, as well as infuriating and frustrating, about this current situation is that there are plainly staff - senior and maybe not so senior - at Maynooth University who consider that a good sharp dose of neoliberalism and the 'New Public Management' is what Maynooth 'needs'.  Otherwise, the current increasingly authoritarian and aggressive - and deeply anti-intellectual and anti-pedagogical - regime would never have been set up, the current spate of largely untransparent and barely accountable senior managerial appointments would not be taking place, and the bizarre and Orwellian 'Strategic Plan' would not have been created largely over the heads of staff, students and their contributions.

  

Students often have a much clearer and more profound sense of what the commercialisation of higher education looks and feels like than their teachers and supervisors.    Academics should listen, and co-operate with their student comrades.   We have universities, education and the future to protect.

Conor

The Wolf at the Door - Democracy Threatened at Maynooth University

Comrades -

For a long time, it seemed that Maynooth University enjoyed a degree of shelter from the chill winds of managerialism and commercialism which have eviscerated so much of what is good in the British and American university systems.   In truth, various pressures have been encroaching on Maynooth, its staff, its students, its facilities, for a couple of decades but these things were hidden or cushioned by the expansion created in the Celtic Tiger years.   Now, especially in the wake of the global pandemic, there is no mistaking the threats.   A beast approaches.    

The beast comes in various forms.  It comes in the form of an ever-greater stress on digital and electronic education, modes of teaching, learning and teaching environments.   It comes in the form of a highly aggressive top-down managerial style which the senior administration is content to deploy in all interactions with staff.   And it comes in the form of the cynical corruption and arrogant avoidance of Maynooth's legally constituted systems of governance by that senior administration.    

The immediate context is current government legislation, promulgated by Simon Harris, Minister for Higher Education, which seeks, inter alia, to shrink the 'governing authorities' of Irish universities, and to fix a structural majority on those governing authorities of non-university members.  In Maynooth specifically, the situation is massively worsened by the existing administration which wishes to abolish the electoral process by which staff have hitherto democratically chosen the university representatives on Governing Authority.   Staff members are instead to be selected by (no doubt handsomely paid and utterly unnecessary) outside private consultants.    

What the senior administration of Maynooth University is doing,  in pushing forward this harshly anti-democratic policy, is destroying one of the fundamental pillars of what constitutes Maynooth University and any proper university.   That pillar  is the principle of self-governance.   The original medieval universities were groups of scholars, with collective legal rights protected by charter, and independent of both secular and ecclesiastical power.   This too is the root of academic freedom - in 1155, the University of Bologna issued its Constitutio Habita, which guaranteed a scholar unimpeded passage in the interests of scholarship and pedagogy.    The senior administration of Maynooth is tearing up these rights, and is casually and ignorantly gutting the institution's status as a university.    Maynooth is well advanced on the road to being what Bill Readings called a 'university in ruins'.

Here is a superb blogpost by my comrade and friend, and the Head of the Maynooth English Department, Conrad Brunstrom, on this crisis: 

Representative Governance at Maynooth. Please read and sign.

Conrad urges readers to sign the petition organised in defence of Maynooth's vestiges of democratic self-governance.   Here is the link to the petition.  Please sign it and please pass it on as widely as possible.   

https://my.uplift.ie/petitions/defend-democracy-at-maynooth-university

Conor