I move No. 53. Universities and Colleges: "That a sum not exceeding £20,750 be granted to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the Year ending the 31st day of March, 1924, for Grants in Aid of the Expenses of University Institutions, including Grants under The Irish Universities Act, 1908."
COMMITTEE ON FINANCE. - UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES.
It is somewhat unfortunate that Estimates of such surpassing importance as these should come before a jaded Dáil of some twenty members. There are a great many very important questions, which I for one should be very glad to pass over, but it is utterly out of the question that they should go unnoticed in the present Debate. For me, as a representative of the National University, there are at least three outstanding questions of great importance, though not of equal importance. The first is the position of the National University, the second is the question of the building debt, now pressing heavily on University College, Dublin; and the third, last but not least, is the question of the remuneration of the staffs of the three constituent colleges of the University, the College in Dublin, the college in Cork, and the College in Galway. With your permission, I will deal first with the National University. It is not mentioned at all in the Estimates; no provision is made for it. Now, on all hands I find an extraordinary lack of knowledge as to what the nature of the National University as an Institution is, and what the relation is in which the constituent colleges stand to it. Many who read these Estimates come to the reading with the impression already formed that University College, Dublin, is the National University. Others speak to me about the position of the staffs in the University of Galway, and I know in Cork that 99, if not 100 per cent. of the citizens refer to the college there as the University. I think that, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour, it is right that I should indicate why the National University exists, and is left out of these Estimates, because the question has a very material bearing upon the second, and in comparison with it, the more important point, the building debt on University College, Dublin. Deputy Johnson spoke of the Middle Ages, and that rather gives me an excuse for going back a little into the earlier periods of history. An attempt was made to establish a University in Ireland for the Anglo-Irish as far back as the 14th century by the Archbishop of Dublin at that time. There had, as we know, been great Universities in the Gaelic period before the coming of the Norman, but it is a strange coincidence as regards the figure 4 in this history, that in the 14th century the attempt was made by Pope Sixtus IV. to set up a University here, just as Universities were set up by the Papacy in Scotland. Edward IV. attempted to create a University for the Norman settlers in Drogheda, and his attempt would have been successful but for the Wars of the Roses.
I mention this because I want to show history repeating itself as regards the building debt of University College, the effect of a great war to dissipate the efforts for the creation of Universities in Ireland. Owen Roe O'Neill, who was not only a great general but a statesman of very conspicious ability, had a project for setting up four Universities in Ireland. There is the possibility of four Universities being set up in Ireland, as in Scotland, again; I do not want to go into contentious matters. Deputy Figgis draws my attention to the figure 4 on the Orders of the day, as a further item in this coincidence
Four members for each University.
It used to be. The college of the Holy and Undivided Trinity was founded by Queen Elizabeth and an amended Charter was given by Charles I. That became modern history when the attempt was made by Mr. Bryce, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, to meet the demands for higher education on the part of Catholics by setting up what appears to have been contemplated by King Charles, a second College in the University of Dublin. This became a problem of living interest only a few years ago. There were advocates for Mr. Bryce's schemes, which the late Professor Mahaffy, afterwards Provost of Trinity College, always denounced as the sprawling University system that is known as the Federal University system. According to Mr. Bryce's scheme, Trinity College and the Queen's College in Belfast, the Queen's College in Cork, and the Queen's College in Galway, and the new College to be created for Catholics in Dublin, notwithstanding the geographical distribution being so obviously against such a thing working academically with any good result, were all to constitute the one University. Fortunately for education and for Trinity College, not at all two antagonistic things by any means, Mr. Bryce's scheme was defeated; but what was hoped to emerge from it did not result, the second college in Dublin University. We had always asked on behalf of Catholics for a College with University powers similar to Trinity College. The result of our agitation was that the Presbyterians of Ulster got a College with University powers, although they had protested they wanted no change, and the sprawling university was created for the Catholic majority. The federal system was set up for us, with the result that we have the National University which is really constituted by the old Queen's College, Cork, renamed the University College, Cork, also the Queen's College of Galway, renamed the University College, Galway, and the new College set up in Dublin, University College, Dublin. In addition there is the college of St. Patrick's Maynooth, which the Dublin College recognises so as to bring it within the scope, partially however, of the University work. The National University is a sort of clearing house, if I might borrow the expression from banking, for those constituent colleges, but there is this obligation that the degrees for which all or most of the lectures in the constituent colleges are preparatory are degrees of the University—the examinations for degrees are University examinations and are conducted in each constituent college by the Professors of the college.
Now, the endowment of the National University was nearly £10,000, and the Charter of the University imposes on it, as regards its examinations for Degrees and University distinctions, that for every examination in every subject included in a Degree Course there should be employed an external examiner. The result is that while it imposes a heavy financial burden upon the very limited resources of the University, it at the same time, I must admit, has raised the value of the College universally, and the Degrees of the University, because—and this holds good, not merely in Medicine, but in all the Faculties—only the most distinguished scholars, sometimes from Trinity College, sometimes from other Colleges or Universities of the same standing in Great Britain, are engaged for the work. I brought the figures with regard to this because, after all, it comes down to figures in the end, no matter how interesting the past history may be. The endowment of the National University is £10,000 a year. The cost of fees for external examiners was £4,428 last year; in round figures one might say £5,000.
There is another limitation, if I may call it so, imposed by a Statute upon the University. No programme of studies, no course for examination, no arrangements whatsoever bearing upon examination, can be made by the Senate, which is the Governing body of the University, until reports have been received, first from the Academic Councils of each constituent College, and then from a body called the Board of Studies. Now this Board of Studies is a little Parliament. In point of members and representative character it represents the Academic Councils of the Constituent Colleges. Travelling and hotel expenses have to be paid for the members of the Board of Studies when they carry out their work in Dublin as a University Faculty Committee, and the cost last year for the travelling and hotel expenses of provincial Senators and members of the Board of Studies was £1,076. Then the printing of examination papers was over £2,000. You will not be surprised when I add to these figures a statement of the amount of the overdraft of the University at the Bank. The overdraft has been steadily increasing, and it stands at the figure of £7,000.
That is the position of the National University of Ireland, with an endowment of £10,000, with a duty imposed on it by its Charter of employing the highest scholars—and consequently at the highest rates that rule in academic circles—and with the charge of providing for the examination work of all the Constituent Colleges. It is in debt, and it cannot possibly get out of debt by any contrivance whatsoever. In the Estimates for University Education it does not appear at all. I am glad to see Dublin University or Trinity College has not been treated with that neglect. Only a few weeks ago the Minister for Finance came to the rescue, in a small measure, no doubt, of Dublin University by transferring to it the fruit of a sum which had accumulated under the Land Act and which had been originally provided to free it from whatever losses might accrue through depreciation in its properties and land in Ireland. It has got a small Vote in addition in those Estimates. I remember, when the Land Bill was introduced, Deputy Thrift made a hurried calculation that the effect of it upon the Institution, which is honoured by having him as one of its representatives, would lose some £5,000 a year. The representatives of our University are not terrified by the passing of Land Acts. We have no land; we have no accumulated capital. That holds good more particularly of the new college which was created in Dublin. We began at zero. We had no land, no buildings, no equipment, nothing only the annual grant, and we are to compete in friendly rivalry with an Institution that goes back to the days of Elizabeth, with a rich foundation, and an accumulated capital that some of us calculate—though I am sure it will be contested—as worth over £300,000 or something like £350,000.
So much for the University. That University is of the federal type, and it is notorious to anyone acquainted with the history of University development that the federal University has always been a sort of cocoon arrangement out of which should develop newer University Institutions. In recent years in Great Britain you have seen developed what are called the Civic Universities. You have University Institutions in Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield and Bristol, of the same type as University College, Dublin. Some of these merged from being constituent Colleges of a common University. That was the incubated stage which they passed. It is common knowledge here that University College, Cork, has long aspired to become the University of Munster. Many of us who belong to the University College of Dublin would like to hasten the day of that evolution. There is no more reason why Munster should not have a University of its own than that Manchester or Sheffield or Bristol should be provided with one. I notice the Minister for Finance smiles. The Minister for Finance is so pre-occupied with great questions of State that naturally he has not had time to give to the consideration of University development, and he has not had the opportunity, naturally, of seeing how much of late the truth has been borne in upon the British mind that it was the State devotion to the University development that almost gave the victory to Germany in the great war,. John Bull woke up and realised that unless he devoted a large amount of his public treasure to the development of higher education, he would be beaten in the next encounter, beaten not in the field so much as beaten in the great war of commerce and industry and development upon every line of modern progress.
Could you tell me where to get the money?
I could if it were relevant, but for the moment I am merely the beggar-man. Afterwards, perhaps, I may suggest where the begging is to be done. Now, the building debt of University College is a war debt, and I must apologise for the almost sordid details, as they call them in the newspaper accounts, of domestic budgeting that only ends in bankruptcy. When the Irish University Act was passed creating University College, Dublin, a Constituent College of the National University and providing that the hitherto Queen's Colleges should likewise be Constituent Colleges of the Common University, a sum of £150,000—mark the munificence of this—was voted to building and equipping —not to build merely—the two new institutions. At the time, the College of Science and Government Buildings for housing the Department of Technical Education and Agriculture, were being put up at a cost of £450,000. For a University College and its proper equipment as a College to develop scientific study upon modern lines, a sum of £150,000 was provided. We had to divide that sum between the two institutions. I have tried to indicate the character of the University by speaking of it as a clearing house for the Colleges. £40,000 only was allotted for the purpose of the University. That left £110,000 for the building of the University College, in a year in which the University of Edinburgh was spending £200,000 on one chemical laboratory for four hundred students. The public in Ireland do not realise what it costs to build a modern laboratory. The equipment for electrical engineering in the building alongside of us—a building from which it could not be removed—represents more than a quarter of a million of money. The effort to remove it from where it now stands would, it is estimated, depreciate it by at least £30,000, and that is a very small estimate. It costs from £28,000 to £30,000 to equip one ordinary laboratory in the University of Berlin. What did we get along with our £110,000? In consideration of the £40,000 given for the building of a University building, which has never materialised, we were given the old premises in Earlsfort Terrace, which were erected in the 'sixties for Exhibition buildings. They blot the site. We were able to remove only portion of them. The remaining portion, which we could not afford to remove, stands within twenty feet of our principal laboratories at the back of the new buildings in Earlsfort Terrace. They blot the light and the air and spoil the planning of any future developments, yet we cannot afford to take them away. There they are, an incubus.
It was not bad enough that we should have a site to clear and £110,000 with which to build a new University College. When we got out plans, conceived on a very moderate scale indeed with a view to what we thought would be the limit of our expansion educationally—a limit beyond which we have gone in recent years to an extent that none of us could have dreamed of—the Architect's plans for such a modest institution were such that it was calculated between £165,000 and £200,000 would be required. Whereupon we cut our coat according to our cloth. We arranged to build about £68,000 worth believing, as prices then were, that we could make some sort of equipment with the remaining portion of our £110,000. That stage was reached at a very unhappy moment when the great labour strikes of 1913 were raging in the City. We found it difficult to get the work proceeded with, and we had barely got portion of our building up when the great war of 1914 broke out. As many of you remember, there was emergency legislation introduced that allowed contractors to escape from their contracts if they were not able to carry them out without loss. We were put in this unhappy plight, that with a large part of one block of our buildings already erected but not roofed, and the contractors demanding increased remuneration, and threatening—I use threatening not in any sense of finding fault with them; it is a shorthand phrase for what happened— to remove the great plant which it would cost enormous sums to take away, and more enormous sums to put back again, we had to agree to a new contract on much more onerous terms. To cut the thing short, the small portion of building that we have already erected has cost us up to the present £155,000. In that we have provided not one inch of space for anatomy, nor for the great sciences that underlie the science of medicine at the present hour, with the sole exception of the small laboratory for physiology. This is a thing which I am satisfied the public would not credit, that while those charges for building increased, the British Treasury, that came to the rescue of similar institutions in England that were suffering material loss to recoup them for their losses, ordered us to supply the additional charges out of savings, if you please—out of economies from our endowment. The Minister for Education knows quite as well as I do how feasible it was to make economies out of the annual endowment for University College, Dublin. The Minister and I became colleagues in the University College at that period, and both of us were strongly of opinion—I do not know as regards the Minister, but I am still of the same opinion—that it was our duty to the people of Ireland to have proved up to the hilt the contention that we made at the time, that the endowment was so ludicrously meagre that it could not be worked with, and that our proper policy should have been to run the College straight into bankruptcy. However, I think we were a minority of two. What was the result? We paid our Assistant Professors year after year the munificent salaries of £180. There has been a good deal of talk here in the last few days—and I myself have joined in it—with regard to the remuneration of secondary teachers. But think of the position of Assistant Professors in the National Institution! University College supplies the educational need, not merely of the City and County of Dublin, but of a large area extending into Ulster and across the Midlands, even encroaching upon Munster itself. Our Professors were paid from the beginning on a lesser scale than the Professors in the College of Science. Those salaries we were told were only initial. Mr. Birrell said at the time that no doubt the endowment was insufficient. We were to show what we could do, and more money would be forthcoming. The first little increase we got was 10 years after the first institution of the new College, and then we got it through the Universities Grants Committee at a time when all the University Colleges in England and Scotland were having their condition inquired into and relief was being given to them. At the present time in Queen's University, Belfast, there are 18 whole-time Professors, and each of these has a salary of £900 or upwards. In the University of Liverpool the University Lecturer has £700 per year. I need hardly say that the National Institutions in Ireland have to be satisfied with far less. What is the result? Only men who, for patriotic or other motives, are devoted to work in Ireland, can be retained in the services of the College.
I mention that, in connection with the building debt on University College, to point out that we could not possibly, at a time when those of our Professors who were well enough off to have Life Insurance policies were selling them—two of my colleagues to my own knowledge were selling their furniture in order to meet their bills—come to the assistance of the building debt. Meanwhile, the Bank overdraft was piling up interest, and the Treasury callously told us that it had warned us if we went on with our building in the war period we should meet the extra cost ourselves. Had we done the other thing and left the College without a building, or the portion of the structure already erected to the mercy of the weather all these years, we should have been accused of wanton extravagance. We should have been told by the Minister for Finance, possibly, that we were bad business men. Now, the building debt on University College, at the present time, is between £20,000 and £30,000. I maintain, and my colleagues maintain, that that properly should be regarded as a war debt to be borne by the British Exchequer, and that in whatever settlement is being effected as a financial settlement between Great Britain and Ireland, it must be so dealt with by our representatives. We cannot carry on as a first-class institution as fully as we are in a capacity to do—except as regards limitation of material resources—with the building we have. It is utterly impossible. We have outgrown, even as regards the Departments to be housed, the existing buildings. I have some figures here which the College made out and presented to the Minister for Finance. In our first year we had a total of 530 students. At that period we looked forward to some day having 700 students. Then we had 695, 765, 888, 871, 939, 953, 1,017, 1,086, 1,147, 1,332, 1,317. The cost of running the College is particularly small. I think it necessary to inform the Minister for Finance and the Dáil of that fact. We have not been bad business men in the carrying on of the work of the College. If he compares the figures and the cost per head per student of administration in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol, or even in the parsimoniously administered University Colleges of Oxford and Wales, he would find that ours is the most economical. Our administration costs £5 per head. The cost by way of salaries expended upon the teaching staffs runs up to £90 per student in some of the English Civic Universities. With us it is below £50. I do not like, as it is so late, to keep on with details on this question, and yet I feel that it is my duty, and one not to be shirked, to the University and to the Colleges to give the public some slight idea of what the financial position is.
Professors are supposed to be men with no needs, no ambitions, no place in life whatsoever, and that any sort of remuneration is good enough for them. That was not the idea in the great expanding countries of the Continent, and in the eastern side of the United States. Not by any means. We have in University College, Dublin, a staff of 53, full-time, that is, 33 full-time Professors, and a certain number of lecturers, and a certain number of assistants. During the great years of strain no bonus was paid to anyone in University College, Dublin, except to the laboratory porters and the women who sweep and wash the corridors. The Civil Service officials of high and low degree had received their third bonus before that little sum I speak of came to us through the Universities Grants Committee, when we had been working on our meagre endowment for fully ten years. We realised, as every institution did, that the pressure of the higher cost of living and depreciated value of money came more upon and was harder to endure by those in receipt of smaller salaries, and so we devoted our attention to raising the income of the assistants and lecturers. We have joined in the scheme which has been adopted in similar institutions in Great Britain as to the initial salary for assistants and for lecturers. Every Deputy here has received from University College, Galway, a printed document; and if he were to take the trouble to study it without relation, as it must be studied in relation, to the prevailing scales of remuneration elsewhere he might come to the conclusion that those men are paid abominably in University College, Galway, and University College, Cork, and that they were paid remarkably well in University College, Dublin. Now I have dwelt upon the wrongs of University College, Dublin, first, in order to put the thing in a better perspective. In these tabulated lists you are given in University College, Galway, three whose salaries do not exceed £300; one whose salary does not exceed £400, and these are the assistant lecturers. There are two lecturers in Galway who do not exceed £400; in University College, Cork, there are only two lecturers that are between £400 and £500. In University College, Cork, there is only one professor with between £300 and £400; two between £400 and £500; twelve between £600 and £700, and five that have over £800; these are in professional subjects. Now I have already dwelt upon the fact that University College, Galway, has always found it very difficult to retain the services, for more than a few years, of highly qualified men. University College, Galway, has been used merely as a stepping-stone for younger men on the road to advancement in the British or Dominion Universities. That is not good for education.
Now as regards the subject of science— those great agencies of modern expansion that are as necessary to the development of the country to-day as petrol is to the driving of a petrol-propelled engine. It is impossible to think that when a student in one of these institutions has obtained high university distinction and looks about him that he will refuse—say one of our chemists—that he will refuse the offer of a great steel manufacturer in Sheffield who desires his services and would say "No, I desire to give my best years in the service of my college on half or one-third of the income that I might derive elsewhere." You will not get sacrifice of that type from more than a very infinitesimal fraction of the men brought up in the university colleges. Now the Minister says where is he to get the money. There is money for everything—millions of money to buy out the landlords and transfer the ownership to the tenants, which is a most admirable and commendable thing. There are millions of money for all sorts of services. But observe the symbol of the thing as here visibly before you to-night. It is the University Estimates that come last; always the University last. But in any other civilised country in the world the University comes first and as a prior charge. How are we, I ask this Dáil, to carry on University work year after year with the public authorities telling us that we must be satisfied with the meagre endowment that we have and the wretched equipment; that there is no money for us? Money can be got; money would be got. I do not believe that the Irish people here or beyond the seas have any idea of the way in which their country's future is being defeated, unconsciously and unintentionally, but none the less genuinely, being defeated by the attitude taken up by those who ought to be interested in the educational expansion of the country. We spend nearly four millions a year on what is called public education. I would not propose to diminish that by one penny, but what I want to do is to get the public in Ireland to realise that they are going the wrong way about creating an educational organisation in this country. It is a fallacy that I encounter everywhere; I am tired dealing with it for the last 20 years. We are told about the foundations being laid, and the walls raised and the house roofed. That is the most misleading illustration or metaphor ever advanced. That is the order in which instruction is imparted to the child and the growing youth who get a certain initiation at the primary stage, as it is called. When he eventually reaches the University, if he does ever reach the University, the work there is to build upon the work done in the secondary and the other schools, and if that has been bad it is impossible for the University to do its work. But when we are creating an educational fabric for the nation we do not begin, no one would dream of beginning, at the lower stage. We begin with organising the University because from there must come the teachers and must come the influence that will create the programmes, courses, methods, and everything in short, of policy in education. And here we are year after year listening to these—I will not use the adjective I was going to—wretched fallacies that we are doing great service to our people when we are providing them with a knowledge of the three R's. What we have stood for here is for the provision of education.
I shall, of course, be told, as it is the custom to tell a professor talking about any subject, that I am a visionary. But, there are visionaries who know nothing of the facts, and who have not made themselves acquainted, and are not in a position to make themselves acquainted, with the facts of what is done for higher education in other countries. The Minister for Education, speaking on the Intermediate Estimates the other day, spoke of the pious founder. Look at what the pious founder has done in America! The John Hopkins University. Look at what the pious founder has done in our own day, and in the Minister's own lifetime, in Bristol, where Mr. Wills, the tobacco manufacturer, has given princely sums to convert what was a small College into a great Institution. But what happens in Ireland? A man is on his dying bed, trying to make his peace with God in his last hour, and is asked by those with some authority to leave his money to—what has been irreverently spoken of as fire insurance—paying his premium on his policy very late. But among all these charities there is never presented to him for his generosity the great nation-building charity of education. Why? Because it would never occur to anyone, except a professor perhaps, in this country that education was a charity, or that education was a great national concern, a thing of great national benefit and a great constructive force. I daresay it is the last time I shall ever speak here on these estimates, and perhaps that will be my excuse for being so long. I must say that I would have been much longer if I could have taken the opportunity of beginning earlier.
I beg to move "That the Committee report Progress and ask leave to sit again to-morrow."
Agreed.