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