It is always very difficult for me to follow Deputy FitzGerald. In fact, I sometimes think that Deputy FitzGerald has been invented as a private cross for me to carry as spokesman in the same area for the Labour Party. There are three reasons why it is particularly difficult: first, because his speeches are always so exhaustive, not to say exhausting; secondly, he and I have been talking about this sort of subject in one context or another for the last ten to 15 years and agree upon so many things; and, thirdly, because he tends invariably to pre-empt nearly all the logical points which can be made in a discussion on a measure of this kind dealing with higher education.
However, I think I can fairly say that there is a slight difference of emphasis between Deputy FitzGerald and myself in our approach to this Bill. I approach the problems of the Minister with, perhaps, a greater degree of sympathy than Deputy FitzGerald has always shown. I cannot help remembering that in discussing a measure of this kind we are dealing with what is in statistical terms an esoteric level of education, one which, for example, is extremely unlikely to be made available in the immediate future to the vast majority of the kind of constituent whom I represent. When, therefore, Deputy FitzGerald and, indeed, academics of all kinds speak of the correct fact that Governments never make available to them the level of financial endowment which they would wish, I, perhaps, speaking as a Labour member, feel more strongly than Deputy FitzGerald the realisation that the Minister's shopping bill every year is a very extensive one, one with very many claims upon it, and that the claims of the university or the tertiary institution is only one among many such claims. While it is an important one, it is, as I said, a claim that comes from a section of society which is scarcely representative of society as a whole.
I say that at the outset in order that any remarks I may make here about the shortcomings or virtues of this Bill can be kept in the correct perspective. It remains undeniably true that for the bulk of our people primary and, with some luck, secondary education or vocational education is the highest to which they can aspire. Therefore, those of us like Deputy Dr. FitzGerald and myself who are practising academics are in danger at times of forgetting this fact and of putting on the wrong hat at the wrong time. I can assure the Minister that this does not apply in my case and I am sympathetic to his difficulties in framing this and other measures that relate to university education.
I do not intend to carry my discussion of this measure into quite as broadranging a field as that into which my predecessor took it. Nevertheless, certain broad issues must be taken up before approaching the Bill in any detail. One which Deputy FitzGerald spoke of was university autonomy, that precious and indefinable substance behind which the academic retreats whenever his comfort appears in any way to be threatened by the realities of the outer world. University autonomy is one of these beautiful phrases usually associated with talk of the quality of the teaching, the maintenance of standards and, above all else, delivered in a manner which appears to settle any point of dispute in Newman's Idea of a University. I well remember the late Deputy Donogh O'Malley saying to me once during the very early period of the merger debates that if he heard anyone again standing up at a meeting and referring to Newman's Idea of a University he would scream. This is a very understandable attitude.
Academics are notoriously conservative. I do not think the Minister can be blamed—although he was not exclusively blamed by Deputy FitzGerald, but I do not think he can be blamed even to the extent to which Deputy FitzGerald blames him—for his failure to shift the academic community into the 20th century. Personally I have the utmost sympathy for anyone who endeavours to take on the academic establishment, more particularly if he is not an academic himself. By that I do not intend to suggest for a moment that somebody who is not an academic is in any way unqualified to act as Minister for Education. All I am saying is that a period of personal, face-to-face knowledge of the degree of blood-letting, convolution and mutual bickering which goes on in the academic world is an asset when it comes to endeavouring to discern the reality that lies behind some of these resounding phrases. My own personal experience would suggest you would have to go as far as the Roman Curia to find a body of men as conservative as the average academic.
Talk of autonomy must be seen in the context of the social responsibilities of our universities. There are forms of university autonomy which I would defend to the death, and I shall have something to say about that in the context of this Bill. However, the concept of autonomy has to be taken in the context of the fact that it is ulimately the taxpayer who is the fount of the existence of the contemporary university.
All the universities today depend on the taxpayers, the great majority of whom have no opportunity of entering the institutions which they finance unwillingly, and I think we should remember that. It is a point to place on record even at this time, that even my own college, Trinity College, Dublin, is now almost entirely dependent upon State grants. The widelyheld illusion that it has vast funds of a private kind dating back to the Reformation or something like that, I regret to say, is not the case. The depreciation in the value of money, the growing cost and size of education has rendered my own college as dependent upon the community as any other institution.
Therefore, in approaching a Bill like this we should be wary of the academic motor reaction of falling into a sort of hysterical suspicion of the Minister and of the Department of Education. As far as I am concerned, in introducing this Bill the Minister, whether he be a Minister of a Fianna Fáil Government or any other Government is the spokesman of the community to whom these institutions ultimately owe their existence and their loyalty, and he is entitled to precisely the degree of respect which attends upon his office. As a dissident lay Catholic once said to me: "One may dislike the Pope but one should not abuse the Papacy." The same is true of the Minister for Education. That respect has been sadly lacking amongst academics, a group of whom I once heard refer to the late Deputy O'Malley in this way: "and him not even a university man", which of course was not true.
The university academics concept of autonomy is an interesting one. It is, as Deputy FitzGerald hinted, an ideal situation in which he would approach the Minister for Education or the Authority with a bill and, standing smartly to attention and touching his forelock, the Minister for Education would supply the moneys requisite to meet the bill and would not direct the smallest inquiry as to the manner in which they were dispensed. Reading even the critique of the present Bill produced by the Irish Federation of University Teachers, an organisation of which I have the honour to be a founder member and was for many years secretary, I could not help feeling that their view of the Bill was that in an ideal world the Higher Education Authority would be totally autonomous vis-à-vis the Minister and the universities would be totally autonomous vis-à-vis the Higher Education Authority. It seems to me mildly impracticable, to indulge in something of an understatement.
At the same time, to balance this slightly—I hope I have made my sympathies clear to the Minister—the fact does remain that here statutory recognition is being given to a body which must possess a measure of dignity and independence if its recommendations are to carry weight and if it is to be other than simply a clearing house for ministerial directives. When this body was first set up the gentlemen, some academics and some not, who accepted membership of it, I think I am correct in saying on an ad hoc basis, were subjected to a considerable amount of criticism by some of what I might describe as their more reactionary colleagues. It was argued that it had the effect of taking something like the king's shilling. Their position was not rendered any more envious by the impression created by the then Minister that their function was to implement in detail broad policies which had been agreed upon already in principle. I think he used the immortal phase, “What has been decided has been decided.” Oh, that that were so in the case of the university merger. However, it is not. Certainly that statement did nothing to enhance the status of the Higher Education Authority.
Furthermore, in the Estimate for Education last April the Minister dealt what I can only describe as a very calculated rebuff to the expertise of the very institution that he had established. I quote from the Official Report, Volume 245, column 1320:
Members will recollect that the Higher Education Authority in a recent report estimated that £24 million would be needed to meet the capital requirements of the universities in the coming six years. This Estimate and the accommodation planned in relation to it has been very carefully examined by the special building unit in my Department. This has been done in a very thorough fashion having regard to the most up-to-date building techniques and costs based thereon. I am fully satisfied that accommodation of the magnitude proposed by the Higher Education Authority can be provided at a cost not exceeding £15 million. The intention of the Government to provide funds on this basis has been notified to the Authority.
With respect, that is a very peremptory dismissal of the expertise of a body which the Minister had himself set up. It would have been better to say "You want £24 million, but I have not got it. All you are going to get is £15 million", rather than saying to them, "you have done your sums so badly that my building unit can do the same sums and come up with an answer which is £9 million less". That seems to suggest they are mentally defective. The Higher Education Authority were put in an embarrassing situation at the outset. I should hate to think that the idea of having a Higher Education Authority with real motive power and dynamic would be turned into a sort of repository where unwelcome ideas could be dumped and where difficult questions about the merger could be dealt with by saying, "Ah well, the Higher Education Authority is talking about it." When the Higher Education Authority makes its mind up it is told by the Government it is an ass, that no notice will be taken of it. I do not know whether the Minister has ever read David Copperfield but if he has he may remember in that novel there was a legal firm called Spenlow and Jorkens and Mr. Spenlow always took the view when approached by one of his clients for any concession that he would be delighted to concede it but that Mr. Jorkens would not permit this. Mr. Jorkens was an invisible character who turned out to be one of the most inoffensive of men. I hope the Minister does not intend to play battledoor and shuttlecock with the Higher Education Authority in this way too, utilising it to express the wishes of his Department when these are appropriate and at other times ignoring it. This would be very unfortunate and I hope he will not allow this to be done.
I do not ask that universities should be granted that degree of autonomy which permits them to spend in any fashion they like and educate in any fashion they like irrespective of the manpower needs or the social aspirations of the people, nor do I suggest, and here I differ from Deputy FitzGerald, that any Minister of State who sits in that chair over there, with the dignity attendant upon the fact that the people have voted him there, can be expected to bring into existence a small body of men who are totally independent to administer so vast a section of the country's welfare, irrespective of Government decree. The answer lies somewhere in between. I hope he will permit the Higher Education Authority a degree of autonomy which will allow men to assume membership of it with dignity and make a constructive contribution to education as the Bill seems to suggest it wishes they would.
Much has been said about section 12 of the Bill and the Minister has expressed his readiness to amend that section on the Committee Stage. I welcome this readiness on his part and I hope his amendment will be appropriate. The most dangerous implication of that section is the possibility that grants for university institutions should be earmarked. Deputy FitzGerald and I have argued this point out with the Higher Education Authority in different contexts and like Deputy FitzGerald I fully appreciate the necessity to earmark capital grants. It is patently absurd that a university should be given £½ million for a third or fourth generation computer and spend it on the most sophisticated school of Greek on these islands. Obviously we cannot have that. It would, however, be dangerous if areas of teaching which have established academic excellence in universities were to be phased up or phased down at the whim of the person who dispensed the money.
As I have said, academics are conservative people by nature. When I was attempting to conduct an analytical study of the possible rationalisation of departments between the two Dublin colleges in the context of the Irish Federation of University Teachers I found, and I think Deputy FitzGerald found the same thing, that the most pristine academic arguments could be produced satisfactorily and triumphantly to establish the absolute necessity for retaining everything that was being taught on either campus in precisely the form in which it was being taught, if not better and more expensively. Obviously this cannot be permitted to continue.
Fashions in teaching change and sometimes the academic in his otiose bumbling way may be clinging to a truth which is worth preserving and the relative wastage of public money in permitting him to continue to teach subjects which do not have an obvious instant technological feed back for the community, may be justified in the long term gains for the community. For example, at the moment technology is all the rage. I am not saying that is wrong but as a university man I consider the problems of Kevin Street and Bolton Street in terms of space and equipment are far worse than any that exist in our universities and must have a far higher claim on the Minister's attention. We are all going technology mad. The Americans started it and then Harold Wilson took it up and made it a big thing and just as they are stepping away from it we are picking it up and married to this are dangerous signs that education is solely the servant of the manpower needs of the community. In those circumstances it might seem appropriate to go down to one of our universities or colleges and say, "Stop teaching Latin altogether, stop teaching Greek, turn out a quarter as many doctors as you are turning out at the moment, do not turn out any lawyers for ten years or more, but give us 500 electronic engineers by 1975."
That would be highly dangerous because fashions change and what has been destroyed cannot be built up again. I do not know if it would be legislatively possible to build that into the section. I do not think it is. I should like an assurance from the Minister that it is not intended that the current expenditure of existing departments in universities should be tinkered with in this way, first, because it would be a bad thing academically and secondly because, as the Minister and the Department very well know, this will mean that the HEA to some extent, and the departments still more, will become a battlefield over which the conflicting claims of academics will rage with a sort of incestuous fervour which will redound to the benefit of everything except education. I would heartily advise him not to do that.
On the subject of the chairmanship I should also like a little bit of illumination. I infer from the Bill that the chairman will, of course, be a fulltime official. I am not completely clear from the Bill—and again Deputy FitzGerald touched on this point— whether he will be a civil servant who is seconded for this purpose, and what kind of person he will be. I should like to join with Deputy FitzGerald in praising the present Chairman of the Higher Education Authority. There are qualities in Dr. Ó Raifeartaigh which equip him superbly for that post. He is a man of enormous administrative experience, a man with a genuine interest in and a deep knowledge of both the practice and the philosophy of education and a man of wide culture. There was a most happy coincidence in his becoming available, if one might so put it, at precisely that moment. There is no guarantee that a similar person will become available in the future.
I would tend to the view that the chairman should be elected or appointed by the HEA with, perhaps, a power of ratification in the Minister's hands. I am not for a moment casting any aspersions upon the present chairman or any foreseeable one in the immediate future, but there is enough "hole and cornery" in this country without leaving so central an appointment in ministerial hands. This will be a better system.
I, too, am a little unhappy about the designation of other institutions as being of higher educational status. This is referred to in section 1 (c). I ask the question at once, by whom? The answer is, of course, the Minister. What institutions? There are institutions, as Deputy FitzGerald said, like the Royal College of Surgeons which would seem instantly to qualify but there are other institutions which fall into more shadowy ground. This power would be better left to the authority itself. There is a dangerous tendency again creeping into educational fashion in Western Europe, that is, that you create a university by calling it one, by calling something that exists a university. I do not think this is correct.
I am as anxious as anyone else to break down the distinction of status between the technological institute on the one side and the university on the other. It is often a very unreal distinction. This is a much deeper problem than simply designation by a Minister, a sort of act of knighting by which this thing becomes elevated to a university. The whole question of improvement of facilities in the context of such an institution arises. It is obviously an enormous subject and if I may, in a moment of self-parody, define the problem which faces the Minister, it is, I think, whether at the tertiary level the binary system should continue, which is the kind of gobbledygook, I am afraid, that people like academics tend to use when they are pretending to be helpful to Ministers for Education. There is a slight danger here and I share some of the fears of the academics.
Reference was made also to the supervision of the overall provision of student places. I wonder if the Minister would illuminate this a little further when he is replying? Is it intended that the Higher Education Authority can set a ceiling on an individual college? For example can it say to UCD: "You are too big. Get smaller." Or to Trinity College: "You are too small. Get bigger." I do not know. This type of action would be very bitterly resisted by the academics. Obviously some sort of agreed pattern of development and size must be attained. I wonder what is the best way to do it. I think it had better be done by consultation. Certainly, a policy of the inflation of the Dublin complex is highly undesirable and there have been signs for many years that this is what is happening. Oddly enough, speaking as a member of a Dublin college, my fears here would be for the colleges in Cork and Galway. I hope we can rest assured that the Minister is thinking of them when he speaks in this way.
This is a point I intended to bring up in the context of the earmarking of grants even on the issue of capital equipment. I wonder how it is intended that the provision of money for costly equipment will be determined in the future once this body is statutorily in existence. Will the buck stop ultimately on the desk of the Secretary of the Department of Education? Will it stop at the desk of the Higher Education Authority? If for example TCD and UCD come to the Minister looking for an identical computer at the same point in time, both of them will not get it, and quite right too.
This, of course, is the very issue which the universities in their insensate blindness, in my opinion, on 6th July, 1968, refused to face by refusing to have anything to do with the merger. Here, sans merger we are left in a situation where I am not quite clear what will happen about the provision of this sort of costly capital equipment or, indeed, the provision of buildings in the permanent competition that takes place for capital grants for buildings. I can think of instances but it would be invidious to mention them. I might seem to be falling into my other function.
In the absence of a merger solution there will be a battlefield somewhere and I wonder where it will be. If there is to be an ultimate power of appeal in financial matters to the Minister, the Authority will inevitably be downgraded and lose status. I want to put this as courteously as I can about some of my colleagues. Any really good university politician or operator will know where the buck stops, and that is where he will go to look for his grant. If it is not the HEA he will cock a snook at the HEA and by-pass it. He will take the Minister out to lunch or something like that. In those circumstances the HEA will become a pretty ludicrous institution. This worries me.
Section 8 (2) of the Bill provides:
Requests submitted under this section shall be examined by An tÚdaras annually or at such other intervals as it may determine.
I hope it will do its best to encourage a system by which three or five year university budgeting is encouraged rather than annual budgeting which I do not think has proved to be a very satisfactory way of planning the long-term development of universities.
There are a number of small points which do not bear directly upon the Bill. At the outset let me ask the Minister—I think this is relevant and I have addressed a question to him on this subject—where does all this leave the university merger? Here we have an education authority which is set up to co-ordinate and look after the interests of a number of teaching institutions. These teaching institutions are antiquated in their structure and static, on the whole, in their attitudes to educational development. They have passed through a seething turmoil in which by the strangest series of alliances all sorts of odd bods have got together to thwart the Minister and his predecessor about the merger, all sorts of people with no ground in common.
In all this the one thing that has been lost sight of is educational necessity, educational desirability. When the dust has settled, if it has settled about the merger, we are left with institutions unchanged except that they can now perhaps celebrate the famous victory of preserving themselves in their previous mothball condition. I do not think this makes the task of the HEA any easier because a great unanswered question mark still hangs over the shape of the institutions which it is supposed to bring together in harmonious development. I am, of course, an unrepentant supporter of the merger plan. I thought there were many good things in that 6th July statement of 1968 and I do not cast the same blame upon the Minister's predecessor for failing to deal with the academics as Deputy FitzGerald has cast. It is totally impossible to get agreement from any body of academics and I think the late Deputy O'Malley appreciated that the only way to get an academic to do what one wants him to do is to make up one's mind and consult him afterwards. They cried for consultation throughout that whole period and when they got it all they did was to reject every possible alternative put before them.
This leaves us with a whole lot of unanswered questions which this unfortunate Authority will have to deal with—the rationalisation of existing facilities, for example. The community simply cannot stand the expense of maintaining parallel facilities in the more expensive fields of teaching. The present question mark which hangs over medical teaching is an example of this. The community can perhaps bear the cost of having duplicated teachers of classics, history or political science, the so-called blackboard and chalk subjects, because they are cheap. Even if they are inessential they can be permitted to continue because they are cheap. This is not true in the case of the dearer subjects. I hope this concept of rationalisation about which much wind has been generated by the academic staff association which has never been explained to me will not be left to the universities in Dublin in particular to determine. I hope the Minister will appreciate that if he brings to the attention of these universities that they are, within the limits of genuine academic freedom, the servants of the community and that it is his function to knock their heads together, he has the sympathy of the people on these benches. It would be a very sorry state of affairs if university education, which is so often the hard won prize for sacrifice in a family for a working class child, if the needs and orientation of this tertiary level of education, should be left to log-rolling bargains between institutions. I hope we will find that that is not the case, that the HEA will, in fact, have teeth if not to implement the merger, which I still hope defiantly that it will, at least to test the sincerity of the academics about their apparent desire to avoid expensive duplication.
One specific way in which a major reform has been delayed by this permanent merger thing is the review of the governing body structures of all the Irish colleges and an attempt to achieve their uniformity. My own college, by a paradox which is typical of its history, possesses a governing structure which is superficially undemocratic but in practice, I think it is fair to say, proves highly democratic. I do not think the same can be said of the constituent colleges of the National University. In a situation where not merely student opinion is not adequately heard on these bodies but junior staff opinion is excluded and where a shadow of insecurity hangs over non-statutory lecturers and professors approaching retirement age who know that the extension of their jobs for a further five years depends on the goodwill of persons of authority, this sort of thing should be remedied quickly before we have a repetition of the case which the then Justice Kenny took. I see no reason why this knot should not be cut quickly. I would ask the Minister to ask the HEA to make up its mind one way or another about the merger quickly and then to expedite the review of the structure of the governing bodies of all the Irish colleges, including my own.
I welcome the statement of the Minister that one of the subjects which the authority will look to is the common grading of levels of university staff. Ridiculous anomalies have existed here for many years with assistants and junior lecturers in my college, assistants, assistant lecturers, non-statutory lecturers and so on in the other colleges. The sooner some order and logic is brought into this and justice is seen to be done the better. I am also glad that he has referred to the fact that the authority will have as part of its function, the examining of common methods of appointment to university staff. Again it would be invidious to go into specific cases but I can think of one case which has occurred within the last 12 months which, to my mind, cast serious doubt on the method of appointment in one college at any rate. The sooner all these appointments are filled in the same way with public advertisement and with, in the case of senior posts, external assessment by qualified people, the better.
I do not share Deputy FitzGerald's enthusiasm for the projected council of universities. It has always seemed to me that a council of universities would inevitably prove to be a large, unworkable body of estimable men— dons, clerics, county councillors and such like people—who would travel long distances at 1s 6d per mile at three-monthly intervals and exchange platitudes and return to their places of origin. I do not think a body of that kind could ever be anything else. I do think the Minister should clear the air as to whether this council of universities will be founded or not.
I am a little bit unhappy about the provision in section 6 (1) of the Schedule to the Bill that the Government may remove an ordinary member of the authority from office at any time. However, I am not experienced in these things and perhaps this is normal procedure. The Minister might be prepared to comment. Certainly, some member of his party have made statements about academics by name which would not tend to leave me with the feeling that an excessively independent-minded member of the authority would be immune from jealous attention.
I endorse Deputy FitzGerald's suggestion that there should be students on the Higher Education Authority though not six as requested by the USI which I think is unrealistic. Two or three would be a logical number. I notice the Minister did not tend to fill up the full complement of places on the authority in the first instance. I wonder if, perhaps, he had something like this in mind for a future stage. I hope he had.
One subject which could very well be referred to this body in the very near future is this issue of evening students which is so pressing at the moment. This is surely the sort of thing it ought to be talking about. I shall not develop that point.
Deputy FitzGerald and indeed the Irish Federation of University Teachers' memorandum made much play about the maintenance of standards in universities. I am a little sceptical about this. Just as I say the university academics idea of Heaven is an autonomous university, so also a university teacher's idea of proper standards in a university would be a staff-student ratio of one to one and lengthy vacations during which he could refresh himself upon the deeper aspects of his subject, only in practice he probably would do nothing of the kind. While so many people are clamouring for admission to our universities it is only realistic to expect the academics to accept that we do not live in an ideal world. Very often this concept of the maintenance of standards is a dignified facade to hide a form of snobbism which I find objectionable, the sort of argument put forward by Kingsley Amis in England that more inevitably means worse. I do not think this is so and if the day ever comes that our university educational system, which should be geared to the admission of all those who have the ability to enter, as ours is not at the moment, shuts its doors to qualified Irish applicants, even with the best academic motives, that would be a very bad thing.
I should like to ask the Minister in relation to the authority what is to be the position of the various research institutes which have proliferated in the country over the last 20 or 30 years. Some of these are doing excellent work. Some of them were developed because inter-collegiate rivalries of one kind or another, which we hope no longer exist, made it impossible to locate their work on one campus or another with the result that there is a certain illogical divorce between them and the whole structure of tertiary education I should like to see a situation in which there would be a much higher degree of cross fertilisation between these institutions and the universities and I hope the authority which, apparently, will have responsibility for the whole field of tertiary education, will also bear these institutions in mind.
I should like the Minister to elaborate on the recruitment of staff to the authority and the status they will hold. Will the authority advertise and recruit staff in its own way or will staff be seconded to it from the Department of Education?
On the whole, the Bill is a good one. The idea behind the Bill is the correct one. I do not blame the Minister for the delay in introducing the Bill. Anyone who has had any experience of academics knows that delays are inevitable.
I should like to associate myself with the expressions of approval of the existing officers of the authority, Dr. Ó Raifeartaigh and Mr. Jukes in particular, who have been very helpful and very worthy servants of the authority.
There is a slight air of unreality about this Bill and that is borne out by the paucity of the attendance during this debate and the few speakers who are anxious to offer. This is very, very sad. It shows that to the majority university education still has not got very much relevance. That cannot be said about a debate on agriculture. As I say, it is sad. It is also very wrong.
I endorse what Deputy FitzGerald said about writing into section 3 a specific clause providing that one of the functions of the authority will be to produce equality of opportunity in education. It might lead to nothing. It might be as much of a dead letter as are the principles of social justice enshrined in our Constitution, but at least it would be there.
The Minister says that he will endeavour generally to further higher education and promote knowledge of its value to the country. Judging by these benches he has quite a task in front of him. I hope he will instil into the authority that its function is something more than merely taking over the status quo in university education. I hope some element of crusading fervour will be imparted to the authority. I hope it will consider the level of university grants to students and admission requirements, relating these to the leaving certificate curriculum and to the needs of the new generation of children, who, under the beneficial results of the Minister's and his predecessor's secondary education policies, will be hammering at the doors of these universities in the next five or ten years. I hope the authority will have a responsibility to them as well as taking off the shoulders of the Minister some of the burden of running the university machine. If the day dawns when these young people clamour for and find their way into our universities, perhaps then these benches will be full for a discussion on higher education.