I accept that. I may have misstated the facts there. I think the feelings of the Commission were aroused by the fact that their views had not been put before the public, although the Minister had received their report, before he made his announcement. I recognise the fact that the Minister had considered their representations. I do not place too much stress on that. It is difficult always to know when is the right time to do something and when something is overdue for a long period it is, perhaps, criticised because it is not done at that particular point.
The university has many roles. First of all, and most obvious, it provides higher education but it has other roles to play also. One which in this country has tended to be undervalued is research. Research has tended to be ignored for its own sake, and this is wrong, because there are many fields of knowledge where without considerable concentration on research within the universities the quality of teaching inevitably suffers. The extent to which this is true may not be appreciated by people outside the university but many of us in the university who have experience of teaching there know this to be the case. Should people for any period find themselves not undertaking some useful research in their subject they find themselves very quickly running dry and feeling that they are not in their lectures able to offer the students the kind of stimulus which they should have. I have mentioned already that as regards research there is a problem because the existence of two universities in Dublin has encouraged the establishment of separate research institutes in areas where in happier circumstances research institutes would have been within the university, not necessarily an integral part of it, perhaps a separate organisation, but within the framework of the university and their staff might have been university teachers and there might have been an interchange of research workers and lecturers, lecturers going to undertake research and research workers giving lectures. This we have not had.
We have, for example, today the Agricultural Institute, a remarkable body doing an extraordinary range of work with relatively generous resources by the standards of this country and yet cut off from the university and having very little contact with it and certainly with no interchange of staffs giving lectures or no members of the university staff going there for their own purposes to do research. We have similarly the Economic and Social Research Institute with perhaps a little closer contact with the university but still not close enough, still without interchange of people. There are others. We have, indeed, quite a range of institutes of various kinds which have been cut off from the university. I would hope that one of the happier results of the Minister's intervention in the universities would be that, having merged the two universities, the old reason for keeping the institutes out of the university would go and that they would become closely merged with the new university.
I want to stress the importance, whatever may be done at the undergraduate level, of having single postgraduate schools as far as possible in the university so that there is one post-graduate school with which a research institute can be readily associated, in this way ensuring the interchange of people and of knowledge between the research and teaching levels. I shall come back to that again but I want now to mention two other aspects of the role of the university which are more general and less specific but perhaps not less important. One is—and this is not a universal characteristic of all universities but it is something which universities have a potential for—the taking of an independent view, the creation of an independent opinion. In Britain, Ireland and America this tradition is strong. It is not so strong on the Continent. I hope that when we join the EEC there will be a two-way flow of useful experience between ourselves and the continental countries. I hope that one of the things they will learn from us— and we have much to learn from them —is the tradition of academic independence and the autonomy of the university, an imperfect tradition because people are imperfect and because the world is imperfect but, nevertheless, a tradition which has been maintained in Britain, Ireland and America. It is not so on the Continent. I recall within recent memory a university professor coming to this country to lecture. There was some dissatisfaction expressed by those who heard his lecture at the limited range he covered and at the very narrow interpretation he put on the subject. When inquiries were made from him privately as to why he could not have spoken more broadly it transpired that he had his instructions from the relevant Government department in the country from which he came as to what he could and could not say on the subject and that settled the matter for him. That is something which, thank God, is inconceivable in this country. University professors and lecturers, down to the lowest grade, are independent and they would not be told what to say or what not to say either at home or abroad. Having seen the unhappy role that the university played in Germany in the Nazi period, we can see the importance of an autonomous university institution, the important role they can play in providing an independent body of opinion. Many university people have their own political opinions. Some of them are actively engaged in politics, most of them are not. Some of them do not care a damn about politics but even those who, if I may say so, are actively engaged in politics find that the independent outlook of the university tends to infect them at times and certainly those who are not actively engaged in politics take an independent view and this is a great strength in any democratic society.
Another quality of the university which is important is the tradition of high quality, the desire to maintain high standards, something which then can percolate down through the educational system but which if it is weakened in the university by negligence on the part of the staff, by lack of concern for high standards or by lack of resources which may make the maintenance of high standards difficult, is something which then can infect the other aspects of education. It is from the university high standards come and they should be cherished there. This is a point which is well made by the Commission and one which is worth making again here.
On the question of the need for autonomy of the university there is, I would say, a misunderstanding here. There are people in the university who push this to the point of feeling that the Government's job is to pay the piper whatever the piper asks and not only not call the tune but not even to whistle the air or to suggest what tune might occasionally be called. The universities are a part of society. They cannot act irresponsibly. They must play their part in the life of the nation. They must concern themselves with the particular national needs at any given time and they must recognise that as they derive the bulk of their resources from the Government, the Government have a legitimate interest in the work they are doing. At the same time the balance to be maintained is a delicate one and a difficult one because while the universities do have the duty of providing for the higher educational needs of society, the duty of having regard to what these needs are, the duty to provide courses in areas where there is a need for them, nevertheless they are not simply there to meet a demand. They have an independent life of their own and the quality of life in the community depends on their living their independent life. It depends on university staff being free to carry on research in the area that interests them and not in the area dictated to them by a Government Department.
The autonomy of the university is important also for particular political reasons and the maintenance of this balance is a difficult and delicate thing to achieve. So far in Ireland we have maintained balance fairly well but at I think considerable economic cost in that the lack of contact at policy level, the lack of even the beginnings of planning or co-ordination of policy between the Government on the one hand and the universities on the other, has left us with an untidy and unsatisfactory university system which has not played its role in the life of the community as fully as it should. At the same time, in particular areas there is even today excessive Government intervention in the affairs of the university, too close contact, too much regard being paid in particular parts of the university to the special requirements of Government Departments. However, it is a relatively small problem confined on the whole to particular areas but we have failed to maintain a perfect balance here. We have allowed parts of the university to become too much the tool of Government policy. It is not a problem I stress greatly but in areas we have completely failed to co-ordinate the public policy with the actual work of the university.
This, I think, the Commission has tackled well although I think we can add something useful today in this debate and I hope that out of this debate and the discussions and the legislation that will come will emerge a system that will preserve the autonomy of the university but will ensure that they are encouraged to play their full part in the life of the community and that the Government is in a position to ensure that they are aware of the needs of the community and to encourage them to meet those needs. I feel we can do much more in this regard in the future than we have done in the past. At the same time, the Government's role within the university must be minimised. It is important that at no stage should the university become the direct front of the Government. I should like to pay tribute to the tradition that has been followed in this country by successive Governments and maintained by this Government of appointing to the governing authority of the universities outstanding people of integrity who make a great contribution to the life of the college in the work they do on the governing body but who are not the agents of the Government or the Minister, who are not there to execute his desires and whom the Minister maintains contact with and does not attempt to influence in the carrying out of their work. We have the tradition of the appointment of people of high standing in these positions by the Government. They may or may not share the political views of the Government. They are not concerned with pressing these views if they do share them and they are there to represent the public interests independently and not to press Government policy and not even to maintain liaison between the universities and the Government. This is a great feature of our present system. I hope this will be maintained. I should like to emphasise this point to those of our friends from Trinity because they have not had experience of Government appointments to their governing authority and they may fear that such appointments might affect their autonomy. I can offer no guarantee that that might not happen because future Governments may change their view on these appointments. Our experience in UCD has been happy in this respect and if the present system is maintained in future the universities have only to gain from appointments made by the Government and have nothing to fear or lose by them.
The duties of the universities in playing their part in the life of the community are several. First, they must take the social responsibility to provide courses in the kind of subjects for which there is a need at the proper level. This does not mean that every time somebody wants a diploma in some subject at sub-university level that they will introduce a diploma course. If anything, our universities have gone too far in that direction in introducing courses at diploma level which are not of university level, courses at times which would be better dealt with elsewhere. They have done this because of general defects in higher education here and very often there is not an opportunity elsewhere for these courses to be given. It has meant that the universities have been distracted at times from their true task and the calibre of their work perhaps reduced by catering for too many different kinds of courses, not of university level. That does not mean that the university has not a duty to provide at its own level the kind of courses which are needed by the community.
It also has a responsibility to ensure within the limits open to it that as far as possible there is freedom of access to the university for as many people as possible from as many walks of life as possible. Universities have a duty to do this as far as possible within their powers because, in fact, the whole system by which the Government gives grants to universities is one which does not encourage the universities to take this responsibility. Whose responsibility is it to determine the terms of access of students to the universities? The universities' view is that it is for the Government which gives the money to decide how it should be given and that all they can do is give a small number of scholarships internally. It may be that this is the Government's view, but the universities never found it out, that it is the university which should be more active in this field in allocating its resources in a manner which would encourage entry of students who have the ability but not the means. It may well be that the universities think the Government should be doing this. The universities in some cases feel that it is not their job but the Government's.
I suspect a misunderstanding here as to who should play this role of ensuring free access to education. I hoped that this question of the responsibility of the universities and the Government in this matter would be clarified, not in the course of this debate as we shall not go into that in detail, but in subsequent discussion which will arise out of the Commission's report and out of the situation created, and that we will get a system under which the relative responsibilities of the universities and the Government in this matter will be clarified.
The universities have some responsibility. If they have not exercised it fully it is because it is not understood clearly how they should exercise it or what Government policy is in this regard. The universities also have a duty to co-operate among themselves. The fruits of co-operation can be great in this field. The possibilities for improving academic standards, for offering students a wider range of courses and specialised experience, are great. These opportunities could easily be grasped particularly in the city of Dublin, especially in the last 50 years, where within a few hundred yards of each other we have two colleges each of which contained academic standards of high calibre, specialising in different topics and who could have lectured on or assisted in research work had there been a minimum of co-operation between the colleges. But, there has been a failure in this regard for which the universities must take responsibility, a failure which the Government is now seeking to overcome and do something about by this merger proposal.
We in the universities must accept responsibility for not having acted cooperatively in these matters, for having avoided co-operation by tending to shut ourselves up and not play our part in working with each other in the common good of the students of our colleges. The fact that there was this failure in co-operation has, in fact, been one of the primary reasons which led the Minister to intervene. There are voices in universities who criticise him for intervening, not only as regards the timing of his intervention but for the fact of his intervention. Those voices are by people who fear any Ministerial or Government intervention a threat to the autonomy of the universities. These are proper and understandable fears. If it is felt in the universities that it would have been better for the Minister not to have acted in this way then those in the universities who by creating a situation that left him with no alternative but to intervene must take the responsibility in this matter. It is we who by failing to create the conditions of co-operation between the two colleges have necessitated this deus ex machina intervention, who have brought this on ourselves, and we do not have the right to say we will not co-operate with each other. We will not let anybody make us co-operate either; this is something any university has a right to do in the exercise of its autonomy.
I want to come to the failure in regard to provisions in the universities, not in a way that they are not comparable with Britain and Northern Ireland, but looking at our situation as we find it today. The problem with regard to buildings is acute. While something is now being done about that, and we are grateful to the Government for the financial resources they have provided in this regard, the situation is still not a happy one. We have at the moment conditions of appalling overcrowding. It is only because of the opening of the science block that the bulk of the staff in University College, Dublin have even the opportunity of sharing a room with each other, not to speak of having a room in which to work for themselves. There was a sigh of relief at the departure of the scientists as it became possible for people to sit two to five in a room instead of having to grasp the opportunity of popping in to see a professor for two minutes and wander around the corridors for the rest of the time.
It is a great relief but it still leaves us in a very unhappy position because the average member of the staff is in a room with two to five other staff members and it makes it extremely difficult to give tutorials in these rooms. It is in fact impossible to find any other room in which to give tutorials as the rooms in the college are occupied all the time. The situation is extremely difficult. Box and Cox arrangements have to be come to. Other staff members have to go out of the room while students are being given tutorials. We hope that the move to Belfield, from the UCD point of view, will give some relief and in the other colleges also there are building plans which will give them relief. I must, however, express fear lest the provision made is inadequate. It is hard to judge this because the raising of standards in the last two years may have had an effect on numbers although we have not seen any sign of that so far. If it does not, it looks as if the buildings now being provided at Belfield—I am speaking of my own college in this respect—will be barely adequate even in the first year for the students who will be occupying them and we shall, therefore, face either the need within a year or so to start building extensions—bad economics for a start to have to extend a building which was just put up—or more probably we shall be left to become overcrowded in Belfield just as we have been in UCD during the past 20 years.
There has been too much cheeseparing, leaving a small margin for extension so that buildings, when we go into them, will be capable of taking the extended population only for the first few years. There is one particular problem which needs to be managed. It is in relation to the library. The provision there has been cut from the original requirement very drastically by something like 60 per cent. While we may fit into the lecture rooms and, if we can turn over the lunch-hour rapidly we may fit into the restaurant, we shall not be able to fit more than 40 per cent of the students into the library. Many people felt the plan was far too inadequate to begin with, even before the 60 per cent was lopped off. I suggest to the Minister that any capital resources that may become available will be used to restore the cut in the library plan, to bring it up to the approximate size required by the students. In this matter the case is of a higher degree of urgency than in the matter of the other buildings. The facilities in the library will not be half adequate and the case for the restoration of the cut is a very powerful one. The time to do it is while the plans are at an early stage and the building work will not start for some time to come. I plead with the Minister that when any capital funds present themselves he will bear this in mind.
The overall financial position as regards current needs is so bad that it is hard to visualise us catching up. The fact that the amount of money per student per annum is only 25 per cent or 40 per cent of the British figure is so bad that it is hard to see how we can even offer to catch up. This is reflected in the staff position. Our staff student ratio of about 20 to one is so bad that if we seek to do what the Commission proposes, to bring the ratio down to 12 to one by 1975—a modest proposal—it would leave us 50 per cent worse off from the point of view of Britain. This would require a 2½-fold increase in staff in eight years. One would like to think it would happen, but where will we get the staff on that scale in that period?
We have fallen so desperately behind that it is difficult to find ourselves catching up in any foreseeable period. The problem of getting the staff in that period will be almost insuperable. With all the best intentions and best work in the world it would take us well into the 1980s before our university could be brought up to British levels as regards staff. It is an appalling indictment of successive governments in the past number of years. It is not entirely the fault of the present Government though it has been in the lifetime of the present Government that the situation has been allowed to arise in respect of which we must look to the prospect of waiting until the 1980s before we can hope to provide higher education for our children.
At page 104 the Commission point out that the staff-student ratio is no better now than 25 years ago when it was appallingly bad. In that time nothing has been done to improve it. Now we have the prospect of making up in eight years what we neglected to do in 25 years. I am afraid it will be beyond us. In all this, what we have faced is a total lack of planning, something which has been emphasised in several cases, in the Fine Gael policy in which we emphasise the need for a long-term plan to develop the Irish universities in consultation with the university authorities so that any improvement of the student-teacher ratio will be on a planned basis instead of allowing it to deteriorate from year to year. This long-term plan which Fine Gael propose accords with the Commission's report where this is emphasised as follows:
The framework of the system has been developed mainly since the midnineteenth century. Its development, however, has come about piecemeal and is not the produce of any comprehensive plan. Its component parts were created to meet the requirements of particular times: Trinity College to supply the needs of the Protestant State and its Church in the late-sixteenth century; the National University of Ireland to meet Catholic claims for acceptable institutions of higher education; the national teacher training colleges to provide teachers for a scheme of public elementary education; the technical and vocational education colleges to train personnel for commerce and industry; the professional institutions to provide training for the professions they serve; and the research institutes to supply particular research requirements.
The result is that the system which has thus evolved is not a unified system in which each part is functionally related to the others, but is a system of separate units which, in their working, often overlap with each other, while leaving some areas inadequately provided for. The two universities, the National University of Ireland and Dublin University, operate independently of each other. Each of the five university colleges conducts its own teaching and research, although the NUI colleges are joined together in the University for certain purposes. Each of the teacher-training colleges is a separate institution, and, with one exception, the colleges have no association with the universities. The technical and vocational education colleges have been developed within their own particular system. The professional institutions and the research institutes also work independently. There is little co-ordination of effort even where it might most be expected. The two universities, for example, operate separate matriculation examinations and prescribe different standards of entry. Movement of staffs between the colleges of the National University is late, even on a temporary basis. The permanent transfer of staff from one college to another is hampered by the absence of a common superannuation scheme. Consequently, staffs are tied to particular colleges and there is little sharing of specialist knowledge among the colleges.
The fragmentation of our educational system is serious; even more disquieting, however, is the fact that institutions appear to think primarily in terms of their own individual interests.
The report spoke of antagonism between the different institutions and stated:
As to the universities and the vocational colleges, evidence from University College, Dublin, indicated the strong antagonism to the participation of the Dublin colleges of technology in the professional training of scientists, engineers and architects, while the authorities of these colleges, for their part, were adverse to suggestions of a university association. Again, the evidence of the administrative authorities of University College, Dublin, showed hostility to Trinity College, Dublin.
This is an unhappy situation. We want to consider why it has arisen and we want to consider the increases in the numbers in the colleges without any adequate provision of resources. It is not simply because of Government neglect. It is due to Government neglect but we must look a little beyond it to see why there is such Government neglect.
There is a degree of Government neglect over a long period. It is much greater than in any other area and one cannot but feel that there is something else behind it than just simply a question of lack of interest. We have seen here that there is a rather complex situation. The university colleges have seemed to take the view that they have a duty to the public to take in any student who passes a qualifying examination which hitherto was of a grade of extremely low standard, and that they have no right to refuse anybody. They might claim the right to exclude people from particular areas but in principle they must find a place for everybody who succeeds in the pass Leaving Certificate examination. I should like to know whether in continental Europe the entrance requirement to universities has been anything as low as ours. You must bear in mind that the pass Leaving Certificate is obtained by 91 per cent who enter for the examination and you must allow for the fact that those who do the examination are, it is true, relatively more intelligent than the other section of the community who do not do it.
A university examination which cuts out 25 per cent or less is quite inadequate as an entrance examination. The universities should be catering for the top, I will not say five, ten, 15 or 20 per cent of the 75 per cent, but they should be catering for a relatively small proportion. The result of the low entrance standard, and the system under which the Government provide grants for university education at reduced fees at a fraction of the economic level has been that you have coming into the universities a very large number of people who are quite inadequately provided to participate successfully in the life of the university and to emerge from it with a degree by the universities. That is all because the universities have the feeling that it is their duty to take those people in.
One cannot feel helping but that this was motivated by a feeling that if they fill themselves up with as many students as possible the Government will bale them out. There is also the feeling that secondary education is so inadequate that to exclude anybody from a minimum standard of a pass Leaving Certificate might be to exclude somebody who would do well in examinations, but through no fault of his own, but through deficiencies in secondary education, has only obtained a pass in this examination. They feel that people should be given an opportunity to do well in the university and if they do not they can leave. Besides that there is a feeling with universities that to abide rigidly by such a policy they would be making a strong case to the Government for extra resources and pressure could then be put on the Government to increase resources to them. Quite apart from the fact that the Government have proved impervious to what they might regard as the blackmail element in this, the most they would have done would be to provide for extra students but not to improve the basic deficiencies in the universities, vis-à-vis the students.
I do not believe you can improve the position in this way. The Government have not accepted this philosophy and there is no evidence that any of our governments, up to this, have accepted the philosophy that they have a duty to provide adequate resources for all students who go to the university. You have, therefore, two policy making mechanisms operating in the universities, one where they are hoping to secure extra resources and the other rejecting this philosophy, not accepting the fact that the universities have a duty to take everybody in and the Government have a duty to provide the resources to cater for those people. The result of this has been to provide us with a university system which is desperately overcrowded, desperately underequipped and desperately understaffed. It is, as I said, largely the fault of the Government, but I think the universities also have a responsibility. Certainly both have a responsibility that they have failed to come to terms in regard to this problem.
They have failed to sit down together and put their two philosophies together. The Government have never seemed to find out what was the thinking behind the university attitude to the entrance of large numbers of students and the universities have failed to find out what the Government attitude was in regard to this. The result is that we are producing many more university graduates per head than in Britain. In fact, the latest figure I have is that we have in our universities 4.5 per thousand of the population and in Britain they have 2.65. We have, in other words, in our universities, a proportion of the total population which is about 70 per cent greater than in Britain, yet our national resources are barely half of those of Britain and the resources we devote to universities are only a fraction of what they devote in Britain.
There is something wrong here. There is no policy making mechanism. The Government and the universities have never agreed what policy should be. We have very many people who are not qualified to be in universities, very many who survive there for a long period but leave without a degree and without much benefit to themselves eventually either. They take up room in the universities, they take up places in the library and the classroom and diminish the quality of education available to the remainder. Out of this emerges rather more graduates than in Britain but this is because we produce six times as many pass Arts graduates as they do in Britain. We are behind in areas like science and technology but we produce six times as many pass Arts graduates. Many go into teaching and many have to emigrate. This is caused by there not being any coordinating policy between the Government and the universities.
How can we achieve such a policy? There must be some kind of co-ordination which will not interfere with the autonomy of the universities in regard to the running of their own affairs, in deciding what courses they will give and in their charges. They must realise that they cannot expect the Government to give them astronomical sums and that the Government must have some voice in determining the policy to be adopted. The solution which one can see in this—this was recommended in the Fine Gael policy and in the Commission's report—is to establish a policy commission on which there would be representatives of the university and the public interest. On such a commission you would have the public point of view and also the university point of view. Such a commission would consist of academic interests and Government interests, not more than two civil servants, similar to that in respect of the NIEC, where you have Government representatives consisting of two civil servants and I think eight representatives of the general public interest.
A committee with that kind of representation of the public interest and that kind of academic representation could attempt to produce a jointly agreed picture of the kind of resources that should be provided, the number of graduates that should be produced, where the need is greatest, where extra places are required, where they are producing more than we need. These recommendations should not be binding on either the Government or the universities, on the Government because the Government cannot be bound to produce financial resources ad lib and not binding on the universities because their autonomy must be maintained and no committee should be able to dictate to them precisely what courses they should or should not offer. I believe such a committee producing an agreed report and recommending to the Government and the universities what the broad policy should be as regards entrance standards and perhaps needs in different areas would, in fact, be heeded by both sides. There could be occasions when the university could decide that it wanted to provide a course which such a committee decided was unnecessary and it could do so from its own resources. Universities do have some resources of their own apart from State funds. There could also be occasions when the Government could feel that they could not meet such a heavy financial commitment as had been recommended by the committee and they might want to postpone or even not to accept some of the recommendations made by the committee. Both should be free to do that but I believe that in normal circumstances the pressure on both sides to be reasonable and to accept the report would be great and that out of this mechanism you would get an agreed policy in marked and pleasurable contrast to the total lack of agreed policy which has brought us into our present disastrous position with universities overcrowded with the wrong people, many of them incapable of benefiting from a university education while at the same time the financial resources required to go to a university and the disastrous lack of scholarships exclude many people who ought to be there. I believe, therefore, that such a mechanism which we in Fine Gael have recommended would avoid the present overcrowding. We would balance resources with students. We would maintain standards and we would serve the national needs which require to be met.
This whole question of entrance policy is a difficult and a thorny one. It is something that should be decided by the universities themselves but so far they have not shown themselves effective at doing so. They have, as the commission point out, failed to introduce at any stage a common entrance examination and the entrance examination they have accepted, the State past Leaving Certificate, has been a totally unsuitable examination for university entrance. Serious thought needs to be given to this. We do not know what the Commission recommended on this because that volume has yet to come but I feel we must have a university entrance examination. I believe, although I know there was division of view on this subject, that a leaving certificate examination, a school leaving examination designed primarily to give most students something to show that they have completed their school career reasonably successfully, something, therefore, which the great bulk of people should pass and few should fail, cannot be an adequate entrance examination to a university even though a student has passed an honours paper. I think it is desirable that it should be a general examination, that it should not be specialised, that it should involve a range of subjects and should not involve too narrow a base of specialisation.
At the same time, for university entrance there is much to be said for requiring students to specialise in a smaller number of subjects. Again the fact that there is strong evidence that Irish university students generally go too young suggests the need for a new entrance mechanism under which the present leaving certificate with all the improvements now being introduced would be independent as a school leaving examination and no one will be entitled to come to university who had not passed the requisite number of subjects. A student would be required under this system not only to have passed out of the school system showing a competence in a fairly wide range of subjects but would require also to have passed a separate examination additional to and later than the school leaving examination, an entrance examination that might, perhaps, be in three subjects, preferably not in one area like French, German and Italian but three subjects from three different areas but, nevertheless, involving a certain degree of specialised work. This would ensure a higher standard of entrance to the university. It would ensure that people had experience of specialisation before they went there and it would ensure also without laying down any more rigid physical age rules than at present that the average age of entry would be raised.
I am opposed to rigid rules in regard to physical age because the degree of maturity of people varies enormously from one to another and those rigid rules can involve hardship for individuals and often operate quite unsatisfactorily allowing people in who are quite immature and keeping others out who are mature. We should, as far as possible, avoid this obsession with physical age but by imposing a higher standard and the need for an additional year for most people to complete this examination we would, in practice, ensure that most people would be older. If there is one thing university people are all agreed on it is that students are coming in too young, not sufficiently mature. Again and again I have been told by students in their third year that it is only in their third year that they are beginning to understand what a university is about. The first two have been a process of transition and now there is only one year to go. I feel this is regrettable. I feel that anything which raises the average age without imposing a rigid physical age barrier would be a good thing and I hope that the Minister would meet sympathetically any proposals that might eventually come from the universities for such a change of policy.
For some reason universities believe that the Government insists that they must accept the Leaving Certificate. I do not believe that. Certainly I am not aware that the Government has ever laid this down. However, it is one of the myths of university life that this is something you cannot change, I do not believe the Department of Education would take a rigid view on this. I am sure they would be sympathetic to any proposal. Such an entrance examination should be common to all colleges rather than having separate examinations for different colleges.
On the question of teaching I would merely comment that the present system of three year honours courses in NUI is not adequate and I would hope we would have a four year period as they have in TCD although three years is adequate for the general course and I think the four years in Trinity is excessive there. I am not sure that NUI should increase the length of the general subjects course.
There are several points in the Commission's report which I feel one must criticise or comment on critically. The proposal for new colleges has not met with university favour and I think it needs to be reconsidered. The Commission's report on this in some respects is internally contradictory and the effect of their proposal would be to downgrade various professions by pushing them into new colleges, instead of the universities, with lower entrance standards. Although there is a lower entrance standard, there seems to be a proposal that people could move freely from the new colleges to the universities despite the fact that the entry to the new colleges is at a lower standard than to the universities. This would be unsatisfactory. I do not think that new colleges is the right answer in Dublin where we can expand university facilities perhaps by up-grading non-university institutions or establishing new ones.
The new college proposal needs to be looked at carefully. It appeared unsatisfactory in the summary but when we came to read the full version, having been told by people who read it in advance that it made a marvellous case for the new colleges, I, at any rate, felt unhappy with it. I had thought that perhaps the summary did not do justice to the report and that perhaps in the full version the new colleges would be justified fully but they were not. The proposal put forward, although one accepts the motivation in putting it forward, needs to be looked at carefully. It would involve lowering the standards and may not be the best approach to the problem of extending higher education.
There are problems in the recommendations for the professions. The fact that the agricultural and veterinary professions would be hived off and put together in a separate college is something, I understand, that the veterinary specialists are not too keen about. This is a solution which one cannot look at with enthusiasm. It should be carefully examined. To take these groups out of the university is a pity. They are, in fact, physically segregated from the university and in the first year do most of their lectures in different locations. The students are not integrated into the universities in these faculties, as indeed is true of some other technical faculties, but the tendency is for them to develop into an empire of their own, teaching academic subjects and duplicating the facilities available in the central corps of the university—in the Arts and Science faculties. That is a reason for integrating them more closely into the university so that the students may benefit from more fully participating in the life of the university. This is a proposal which should be looked at. There are technical difficulties of course in regard to the veterinary profession because of the requirements of registration from Britain— and we can see how useful it is when they are registered in Britain in the present foot and mouth epidemic. The requirement is that the course should be in a university and the Commission treats this in a cavalier manner, saying blandly that presumably this can be got rid of. They are unrealistic on this problem.
There is also a proposal for a technological authority. It is an obscure proposal and it is difficult to get to the bottom of it. They say that this authority would have a function in the distribution of finance. One cannot reconcile the distribution of finance to university faculties with the proposal that there should be a Commission for Higher Education to channel finance through from the Government to the universities. This proposal for technological authority seems misconceived.
Again, as regards the teaching profession, the proposal that the teachers should be associated with the new colleges and not with the universities is unsatisfactory. The whole question of teacher training is something we need to look at. I commend to the Minister the Fine Gael proposals on this point which have been carefully thought out and which may provide the basis of a solution. We have been careful to declare that they may not be the only possible solution but may be the best. They should be looked at carefully. We believe all teachers should have university education and not new college education. Their university education should involve some current training in educational practice followed by a specialised year of educational theory in practice. This would provide a better and fuller training and would also enable us to produce more teachers for the training authorities which are in a bottleneck under the present system. If students had to spend one year in the training college after three years in university this would make possible an expansion of the output of teachers. This proposal is one which needs to be looked at.
Certainly the whole role of St. Patrick's Training College needs to be looked at. We cannot possibly overestimate the magnificent work done there, where there has been such enlightenment in changes and improvement, not only in the training of teachers but also in the field of educational research. In fact, the only serious research is being done in St. Patrick's Training College and the whole question of educational research and training of teachers is something which needs to be looked at again in the context of all these changes and any changes that take place in St. Patrick's should play an important part.
With regard to Cork and Galway, before coming to a conclusion on the question of the merger, I merely want to say one or two things as there are others here who will wish to say something on those. There is evidence that there is a certain minimum size for a university to be viable. This is not an absolute figure as that would depend on the range of faculties. A university which had every possible faculty would need to be bigger than one with a narrow range but even with a narrow range of faculties there is a minimum size required before you get enough students to enable a fairly wide range of specialisation to be carried out and to make it possible in turn to give a sufficient amount of research and to give the quality of education and university life required. It should be a priority for Cork and Galway to reach this minimum level. Without wanting to put too fine a figure on it there are many people who feel that something like 4,000 students would in the range of facilities in Cork and Galway represent a minimum viable level in which those universities would be able to operate more satisfactorily. Indeed, some feel one should go beyond that figure. But you can get loss of contact with students. It is, in any event, a view which many people think represents a minimum.
Every assistance should be given to those colleges now becoming universities to reach this figure very rapidly so that they may be able to offer the wide range of specialisation within the faculties they will have and carry on the necessary range of research that will be desired. In order to secure that result, and in order to compensate for the undoubted disadvantage of their geographical position in terms of attracting academic staff, these colleges should get preferential financial treatment, whether by way of grants or preferential treatment to students going there by way of scholarships, or both, and that is something which one should consider further.
There is a case for differential treatment. It is difficult for these colleges to attract staff. The fact that this kind of problem can exist is recognised elsewhere. In Queen's University in Northern Ireland in order to attract professors from Britain they are offered the mid-point, of three points, on the professional scale at entrance. A person who would be appointed at the bottom of the scale in Britain automatically goes to £400 higher in Queen's, but once they trap him he gets no more. The maximum salary is the same as in Britain. In this way they attract people. Of course, Queen's is less attractive than Oxford or Cambridge or London, from the point of view of people in Britain. We may have a similar problem here. There may be difficulty in filling posts in Cork and Galway. We have experience of civil servants at the moment which is an example of that Dublin people do not like to leave Dublin. To attract as wide a range as possible of people not only from Dublin but from outside Ireland some preferential treatment, or differential arrangement, is required. It is important that if they become independent universities they should be given every possible opportunity to become successful ones. Any cheeseparing in respect of Galway or Cork could be very seriously damaging in the long run and it is the opinion in the other colleges that preference should be given Cork and Galway at this point so that they should have a good start as independent universities.
We have one other college, Maynooth. What role it should play in Irish education is an open question. It does not appear that within the college there is general agreement as to how its role might develop and its governing body may not have decided. If it is decided that Maynooth should become a full university college, a normal university with its own governing body chosen in the same way as the other universities, I am sure the staffs of the other colleges would welcome it as, say, another college of UCD. That view has been expressed by the Irish Federation of University Teachers.
Now what about the Dublin situation, this most critical and sensitive problem at the moment? There has been some criticism of the Minister for intervening and of the timing of his intervention. It may be that only such an intervention could have got something done in that area. The Minister may be forgiven for thinking that there was a certain lack of progress in this area and that some kind of push was needed if progress were required. Perhaps the first push came in the Fine Gael policy document at the end of November. That document stated that Fine Gael favoured one effective policy-making university authority in Dublin and that, even though there had been ecclesiastical problems in the past, if the Government tackled them they could be overcome.
That document was issued in November and I am glad the Minister, in December, went to the Government with proposals. I hope the fact that Fine Gael had committed themselves on this point helped him, if it did not even inspire him to do so. The fact that he had the assurance that if he did take this step he would not be attacked in the rear by the Opposition made it easier for him. In any event, he made the announcement. He has indicated on occasions when he has addressed various bodies of university people that what he visualises and what the Government visualise is a university with two colleges as far as possible complementary and, in a gloss on his original document, when interviewed by the educational correspondent of the Irish Times he envisaged that this concept of two colleges, as far as possible complementary, did not include unnecessary duplication. He realised that one cannot be doctrinaire in this matter— that it might well be necesary, while we can, to achieve economic and academic advantages.
The Minister's proposal does not, as I understand it—I hope he will confirm this when he speaks—visualise a university with two colleges one of which would consist of certain faculties and the other with other faculties. Such a university has been proposed. In one article devoted to this subject it was suggested that a desirable solution would be a university with two colleges, one with arts and science faculties and the other with all the other faculties. Such a university would comprise two geographical sites. To call them colleges would appear to be an abuse of the term as we have come to understand it in these islands, because the university would be a single whole with certain institutions in different sites, as indeed UCD is at the moment.
Colleges which did not have a certain range of discipline, colleges which lack science faculties, would not be ordinary university colleges in the term used in these islands and I do not think it was the Minister's intention to suggest such a structure. Several small faculties which are so small that they are not economically viable as separate units, where there are no strong grounds for their retention as such, should be merged so that any economies to be gained may in this way be reached.
After the Minister's speech, Professor Chubb said on television that the economies to be gained are not great. Perhaps the economies to be gained now are not but the potential economies may be considerable. The Government, in planning university education in the years ahead, can legitimately want to ensure that there is not set up duplication of faculties in two places which would be uneconomical. The actual economies to be achieved at this point of time are not very great because the bulk of the students are in such large departments that the merger in one department would not bring any economies, only greater confusion. When there is a case for merging, when the faculties are small, the cost would not be great.
I am not arguing against the merger on these grounds. Any economies that can be achieved should be gained, but the great merit of the Minister's proposal lies not in economies at present or, indeed, in the future, but in the raising of academic standards which would be achieved in a university of two colleges, complementary as far as possible, in which the range of specialisation of staff would be open to all students. At the present time we have in both colleges, and in most departments, excellent staffs but in neither college have we got all the available experts. Even the largest departments could benefit, certainly at post-graduate and possibly at higher undergraduate levels. The standard of the education now available would be considerably enlarged by merging two small staffs into one or at any rate making their services available to the students in either college.
The academic gains from the merger would be great, the economic gains small. Of course, the potential economic gain is significant but not nearly as great as the academic gains. Let us consider the alternatives. One alternative proposed by the Governing Body of UCD was not acceptable to the Minister. It was that there should be one university with one college. The Minister has ruled this out on the grounds that we have two institutions with traditions of their own and that he does not wish to wipe out either but to bring them closely together for the economic and academic benefit of the community. Another view is that there should be two universities but that they should be totally complementary. Another is that the university would be one, with one college but with sub-institutions. The objections to this are several. First, it would not meet the Minister's requirement that the identity of the two be maintained and their traditions preserved.
It has been suggested that if you put arts and science into Belfield and the professional faculties into College Green you could not say the traditions of Trinity College would be retained. Nor would UCD, endowed only with arts and science faculties, be the kind of college it has been in the past or that many of its staff and students would like to see in the future. A college lacking any of the professional faculties at all will spend a large part of its time providing service teaching.
That arrangement does not seem very viable particularly when one considers what the teaching services are in Stephen's Green and science in Belfield. Something like five-sixths of the teaching will have to be done by UCD staff. Most of the science work must be done where there are laboratories, which are situated in Belfield. Moreover, in latter years, no fewer than 14 departments provide all the services for teaching for university faculties, so throughout the life of the student he would find not alone during his first year that the teaching would be in a different college from the one he nominally belongs to but in the years which follow he would be either going to the other college or be taught by teachers from the other college.
It is an abuse of the term to have two such institutions. Another alternative, of course, would be to put arts in one place and science in another and associate with each the relevant faculties. You would then have a liberal Arts College and a technological institution. You would have a divided university system along lines which are not traditional in this country and which have been found elsewhere to be unsatisfactory. In other countries where you have such institutions, and an attempt to divide them in this way, it has been found to be educationally unsound. This would again destroy the traditions of both colleges and it would end that there would only be a small degree fewer problems as regards the students.
It does not appear, therefore, that any merger which involves a complete segregation of faculties is workable. The fact we are faced with here is an unalterable one, that is, that there are two sites. There are problems of tradition and problems of identity, but due to the passage of time those could be got over if there were seen to be advantages, if both colleges were prepared to work together, to forget traditions, to forget identity. The fact that there are two colleges creates insuperable difficulties. You either separate them or they are both truncated. Agriculture could be attached to the Albert College but you have to watch that you do not separate the students and deprive them of the full educational facilities and also deprive the staff of frequent contact with people in other faculties. This is very useful to the staff. I am afraid that any such policy would be unworkable. Moreover, it is unnecessary. While nobody would make any difficulty about the merging of some departments, where there is an economic case to do so, the merging of larger departments has been shown to be unworkable and is quite undesirable.
When you have, for example, 300 first year students in one class and 1,200 in another—those are real figures for some subjects—there is no conceivable economy to be gained by putting them together. You cannot fit them in any one room and it would be most undesirable to build a room to fit them. We are already in the position in University College that we have to divide groups into as many as four divisions of 300 in each. There is no economy, that means a proposal to increase the space would not be of any value. Indeed it would aggravate the very great problems of large numbers which we already face by putting two lots of large numbers together, thereby worsening the position of students, which certainly does not improve their position.
Some of the ways in which large numbers affect students are not readily understandable. I have only just discovered one particular aspect of it which had not struck me before as it is some years since I was a student and when I was a student the classes were smaller. It has been pointed out to me by a student that it is almost impossible for students readily to get to know each other because if you were sitting in a class of students where there are large numbers you are very seldom sitting beside the same person twice. One effect of the present system is that people intend to keep in touch with those they knew at school and not to make any new acquaintances. The students are not integrating together in the university community because it is physically impossible for them to do so because of the large numbers.
From this emerges a picture of how the universities might work in accordance with the Minister's prescription and the problems involved in having two colleges, one in College Green and the other in Belfield. Each would have a group of arts subjects and also science subjects. Certain faculties would be in one and others would be in the other. You would have between a half a dozen and a dozen arts subjects taught in both as they are at present, the other smaller arts subjects would be merged and they would be in one or other college. The common subjects taught in both colleges would need to be closely co-ordinated if the full academic merits of the Minister's merger are to be gained. How would this be effected? It has been suggested by the Irish Federation of University Teachers that where you have parallel departments in the two colleges and maintained because the numbers are so great that to put the two departments in one joint one would be impossible, that faculty would be responsible for the courses in the two colleges and would directly operate the post-graduate courses so that as I mentioned earlier there would be a single post-graduate school so that they would both link. Such a structure seems to many of us to be workable. It seems to us it will not meet the Minister's prescription as laid down. It would give us two colleges, each maintaining its identity and its traditions, working together. The question of the economic gain would be such that the larger subjects would be taught in both colleges and yet the post-graduate subjects would be organised by a single university and staff, both departments working closely together.
This, I feel, is what we should be moving towards and I would hope that out of the Minister's merger proposals and out of the discussion now in progress something of this kind would emerge. It would have the merit also of avoiding the complex movements of students and staff implicit in the other proposal because under this system the main service teaching subjects like mathematics and economics would be in both colleges subjects which serve other faculties, and this would mean that the students in a scientific discipline in UCD would be served by a mathematician in that college and the scientifically orientated students in Trinity would be catered for by the Maths. Department in Trinity College. This would get over this mass movement. If the other proposal were accepted all the first year students of the one college would have to be contained in the other. It is a practical system, probably the only practical system. We know that an attempt to impose the other system would prove unacceptable to many people. We have the views of Professor Chubb of TCD and Professor Meenan of UCD making it clear that the faculties should be located in one or other college but separately for the two colleges without any common element would be unacceptable to them and they represent, indeed, a large body of opinion.
This was evident from the unanimity of the report prepared by the Federation of University Teachers representing teachers of all the colleges, Cork, Galway, Maynooth as well as the two Dublin colleges. They met in Maynooth last summer and reached a unanimous view on the shape of the new university and their view represents the majority view in both colleges. I hope the Minister will have regard to it and I trust that the negotiating teams from the two colleges will have regard to it in the negotiations at present in progress.
Finally, in relation to the new university there must be a strong university authority, not alone co-ordination of parallel departments, but the authority itself must be strong. The Minister has made this point in what he has said to the universities and in his original statement and I think he is right. I might not agree with him in every detail. He may have to reconsider his proposal that all property would be owned by the university. I feel this makes nonsense of his other suggestion that the authority would be free to seek endowments from students. I feel that the common ownership of property is a mistake. However, I feel the university authority would need to be strong. It would need the power to ensure adequate co-ordination of the colleges in the future. On this there are divergent views in the colleges but I think in principle the Minister is right though one may disagree with him on points of detail. He has proposed that the university authority should be composed of equal representation from the two colleges and government representation. This is a hard pill for UCD to swallow because we are much larger than Trinity College. It is asking a lot that we should accept in those circumstnces a position of equality with a much smaller college. I believe, nevertheless, that this will be accepted in the spirit in which it is meant, as a generous gesture to the smaller college and regarding the smaller college as still representing in some measure a religious minority in this country although these religious divisions we hope will disappear completely in the new university, where they will cease to be relevant. One of the advantages of the Minister's policy is that it has led to the disappearance of these divisions already. Their formal disappearance we hope will follow.
On this university authority the Minister proposes to have public representatives. This is an innovation for Trinity College and they may fear it. Our experience has been to the contrary. I hope the Minister will maintain the tradition which has been maintained by his Government and other Governments over the years of appointing people of eminence to represent the public interest, who would be free to disagree with the Government's views or the views of the Civil Service and to represent the public interest in an independent manner and I think we can look forward to the contribution that those independent members will make.
The question of how many there should be is a matter of opinion. The universities have recommended one-third. The Minister has spoken of a half and expressed his willingness to accept a small figure but it is still a matter for negotiation. Most people will wish that the number would not be one-third but somewhat less. However, that is a matter which can be discussed. They will have a very important role to play in the early stages because there will probably remain at the beginning some rivalry between the two colleges and the independent members will have to hold a difficult balance especially in view of the fact that the representatives on this body will be so representative of the principles of the two colleges.
I hope that the constitution of the colleges will be democratic and by democratic I mean that they will be run internally, by their own internal academic staffs and that they will not be so organised as to operate in an autocratic manner. There is a real difficulty here because academics are not the best people to organise administrative matters. On the other hand, a university in which the administrators are dominant and control the activities of the academics is a very unsatisfactory place to live and one in which there would be great tension. A compromise has to be found in which there is a democratic constitution and the governing authority of the college the academic council representing all the staff, not just selected or senior staff but all the staff but where they have the good sense and are required by the constitution to appoint administrative officers with the necessary authority to get things done. It is difficult to maintain this balance. It is not certain that in the existing colleges this has been maintained and it is a matter that is very important.
The Commission put the emphasis on academic control by proposing that the President should serve for a relatively short period of five to seven years instead of up to retirement at the age of 70. They have pressed for the introduction of a rather more democratic system than there has been hitherto, in some at least of the colleges. They have also suggested that with the exception of the President university officers should not be members of the governing body. I hope the Minister in any proposals he has to make will have regard to these recommendations.
Finally I would like to thank the Minister for coming here today and to apologise for the inordinate length of my remarks which have exceeded the length of time of my remarks on any other subject in this House to date. They would have been longer but for the fact that the debate has been circumscribed and for that I think everyone will be thankful.
