The Minister for Higher Education Simon Harris (who at least is not quite as idiotic as his predecessor Mary Mitchell O'Connor, now mercifully excised from the Irish political scene) last year announced plans for new legislation on the governance of Irish universities. The plan, presented as rationalisation (as so often), is to amend the Higher Education Authority Act (1971). Elements of this proposed reform - hailed by government as the most important change to Irish higher education in 50 years - include a dramatic 'slimming down' of university governing bodies, the empowerment of the Minister to appoint a majority of non-university members to such boards, and legal structures to enable government review of university 'performance'.
It's a sign of the sorry pass to which relationships between Irish universities, their academic staff and the state have come that such a proposal can even be considered. The Minister betrays the profound ignorance of the nature of the university institution in general of his peers and his generation in the suggestion that universities need to be governed primarily by non-academic and non-university personnel. And the posture of the universities shows how weak and ineffective scholars have come to be in representing their work, their interests, their contribution to society as anything other than the unwarranted privileges of whining irrelevant eggheads.
The very 'idea of the university' is of a collective of independent and self-governing scholars. Originally as in the case of the University of Bologna, widely reckoned the first university, the independence of scholars obtained particularly in relation to the Church and ecclesiastical powers. Later, charters of independence were issued for universities by princes, prelates or the towns in which they located. The first and most famous of these was the Constituto Habita, adopted at Bologna in 1155, protecting the freedom of a travelling scholar, and conferring on such scholars freedom from reprisal and the right to be tried by their brethren. This can be understood, therefore, as the foundational document of academic freedom, as we think of it today.
The point here is that such freedom and the self-governance which flows from and protects that freedom, is fundamental to the notion of what a university is. The difficulty, nowadays, is that universities have taken on the financial support of modern states and then more recently, as Western states have shrunk in the neoliberal era, universities have been encouraged to manage themselves as businesses and to seek and win the support of private capital.
So now in Ireland, we find the universities caught in a situation of structural contradiction. The government seeks to enhance the power over universities of non-university and non-academic agents, both from the state and from private corporations, even as it withdraws funding from those same universities. More control, less money.
The control is potentially Stalinist in effect. The government wishes the universities to be 'accountable' even as the monies thereby to be accounted for are becoming less and less. This is not the first or the only recent government initiative vis-a-vis the universities which has authoritarian characteristics. Last year, Ms Mitchell O'Connor announced the Senior Academic Leadership Initiative, which provides structures and funding for up to twenty professorships across the Irish university system, application for which will be restricted to women. Efforts to achieve gender balance are admirable. A scheme which allows government to reach into the heart of a university and shape the specifics of a core element of policy - recruitment - sets a very dangerous precedent.
But Irish universities, even Trinity College Dublin, our oldest and most 'prestigious' university, where academic self-governance has been preserved more and for longer than elsewhere, are vulnerable to state meddling. Academics sorely need to devise ways to explain and represent themselves to the society as a whole, showing that their activities - pedagogical, scholarly, experimental, critical - constitute an inestimable contribution to that society and need to be protected and respected as a public good and a crucial component of democracy itself.
An example of just how brilliantly such arguments can be made comes in the following blogpost by my friend and comrade Conrad Brunstrom, responding a few days ago to Minister Harris's latest announcements. The link to his blog is posted here with Conrad's permission.
