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