Tá cuid mhaith le rá agam faoin dá ollscoil nua atá le bunú nó le leathnú amach as an reachtaíocht atá os ár gcomhair inniu. Déanaim comhghairdeas leis na húdaráis san dá institiúid atá, mar a déarfá, fásta suas agus atá a ligean amach chun saol neamhspleách dá gcuid féin a bheith acu.
I wish these new universities well, but I have to talk about this from my own perspective. I am an academic in the less fashionable area of third level education. While I know from my own dealings with these two institutions that it is not intentional, very often the well meaning case which has been made for giving them university status reflects quite poorly on the work of the regional technical colleges in particular and to a certain extent on the Dublin Institute of Technology. The RTCs are not universities and they have no aspiration to be such, but we have a considerable body of knowledge which challenges some of the assumptions which have underlain the campaign to have these two institutions recognised as universities.
I teach on a degree course in chemical engineering which is internationally recognised. We have not run into any insuperable problem with regard to employment, research access or international recognition for our graduates. It may sound strange coming from me of all people but the final test of any professional course is the marketplace. I know these two institutions have been successful in the marketplace. I know also that the other areas of non-university education have been successful in the marketplace. It probably needs to be said that both the NIHEs and the RTCs have needed less nudging and pushing from the State than the established universities in recognising that there is a market out there, that there is a national role of development and that there is a need to identify and respond to market needs. The NIHEs and the RTCs have contributed to a development of a perception of education which is not a replacement of education by training but which holds that part of the function of an education is to respond to market needs. I will come back again to what market needs are. They can often be excessively delimited in a very simplistic way which can result in a perception of the function of third level education as being to provide specific training to enable people to do a specific job. That is not the way the world will be in the future.
I am a graduate of UCD and quite proud of that institution, but the established universities have sometimes a slightly árdnósach notion of their status in society. They are important institutes of higher education and have contributed a considerable amount but it appears that they want to have the best of both worlds. To a certain extent Senator Eoghan raised this point. They want extensive amounts of public funding to be used to keep them moving but they also want to retain the ethos of a private institution. This is also true of a considerable number of hospitals which apparently believe they are entitled to large scale public funding but equally large scale public inability to have a say in how they operate. We need openness in all these areas. It is not a matter of whether the State should interfere. Interference, control, regulation or attempts to determine priorities by any institution which is funded by the State should be subject to public accountability and scrutiny and need public justification.
One of my consistent concerns is the excessive secrecy in the way the public service, bureaucracy and Government operate. Many of the concerns about what State interference could mean for a university are much more to do with quiet and private interference. I do not mean corruption but the sort of nudges and hints that are never subject to public debate but which can often be used to influence university appointments. I am often amazed by the spectacle of the extraordinarily intensive canvassing for university appointments. Whatever may be said about the nature of appointments in the system where I operate, which is often condemned for being excessively politicised, I do not believe any candidate for appointment to an academic position in a regional technical college who conducted the sort of extensive personalised lobbies that go on for university appointments would even be deemed eligible for interview. That level of canvassing would disqualify a person. The universities, as well as other bodies, have an obligation to put their own houses in order. The high level of lobbying for some university appointments that generates considerable mileage in the back pages of some of our newspapers is not a very edifying spectacle or a very good indication of the academic excellence and detachment that is supposed to characterise universities. I would hope that such lobbying would be excluded either by law or by regulation from appointments to the two new universities and also from the process of appointment in existing universities. It does not contribute to the image of the universities and it ought to cease if the universities wish to retain the perception of independance which they value and which is extremely important.
I do not share the old liberal view that State involvement necessarily involves restriction on freedom. This is a classic old chestnut which is articulated by some people, especially by an individual who is well known for his articulation of a consistently free market position about everything, including education. Proper regulation and proper openness can facilitate considerable freedom within the area of State control. I, as an academic within the State sector of education, have never yet found anybody attempting to inhibit me from saying anything I wish on any subject simply because I am an employee in the State sector. I do not subscribe to the view that there is an all embracing, big brother State about to swallow institutions simply because we believe that those who are funded heavily by the State have a duty to respond to the needs of the community as perceived in its political institutions.
Why a university? What is it that creates this mystique that somehow it is wonderful to be made a university? I think of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, or the poly-techniques in the United Kingdom or the Imperial College in London which do not have the word "university" in their title. Are we in danger of funnelling ourselves into a very traditional view of what makes excellence in third level education by believing that there is this one word which creates a standard? If we are really looking to the future and developing certain qualities in our educated workforce which are necessary to meet the almost becliquéd challenge of 1992, do we want to have one definition of what represents the upper plateau of achievement in third level education? I do not think we should and I do not think we do.
I am disappointed that the two very distinguished institutions which have contributed an enormous amount to innovation in Irish third level education, for reasons that I will go into later on, should believe that the only acceptable term that will define their status is the almost elitist term "university". There are other terms, other titles, which define excellence very well and which should have been considered. Nevertheless I would not, for a second, dream of opposing this Bill. I have reservations about the perception that universities are something unique. I, for one, have no perception that there is an inherent reason academic standards, research standards, international acceptance, employment opportunity etc., are somehow going to be different because we put the word "university" into the title of an institution.
I appreciate that from the time of the setting up of the NCEA, universities have been defined as the criteria of excellence for all NCEA awards, particularly degree awards. I was not happy with that then. I believe that the market is the place to judge it. It is important to remember — and I am sure the Minister of State can confirm this at some stage — that the word "university" in the United States in particular does not give any guarantee of excellence, and there are a considerable number of universities in the United States of America whose graduates would not be recognised by the Minister's Department if they applied for posts in either second or third level education in the public sector here because these institutions are not recognised as universities which have met a standard of excellence. If we are to look at the wider world it is important to remember that there are universities in the United States whose standards are not just not great but which are abysmally and appallingly low, and that there is a huge spectrum of performance within the university sector in the United States of America, and that the Department of Education is intimately aware in terms of assessing the equivalence of qualifications, of the difficulty of being sure that a degree from a university in the United States means the same thing as a degree from a university perhaps in this country or the United Kingdom. We should not be convinced that university automatically means extraordinarily high standards. There are other criteria, the best of which is the market place.
In that context, while I know this is not intended, that it is not deliberate the fact that the National Council for Educational Awards will no longer be making awards in two of our major third level institutions, the fact that it does not make such awards for the Dublin Institute of Technology in most cases, will effectively result in some downgrading of the status of the NCEA. It is as if everybody is going to rise up through this process and then when they reach a certain critical mass, escape from the National Council for Education Awards, and it will become a step on the road to real status as a third level institution. That of course will make it very difficult to get the public at large to accept the fact that, for instance, degree courses in third level institutions which are under the aegis of the National Council for Educational Awards are really the same as degree courses from other institutions. It may, or it may not; but it seems to me that it will create a problem which only the market place can determine.
Having said that, I think there are philosophical issues in this debate which deserve to be talked about a little. We need to remember first that universities are places of education and so is the whole of third level education — and education for what? It is all too easy to see it as education to do a specific job; but it is important to remember there is no such thing any more as a specific job, that the pace of change in the whole of industry, in services etc. is that in fact what we really should be educating people for is actually to accommodate themselves to the extraordinary pace of change that is going to take place. One cannot train people today for jobs that may not exist in five years time because we do not know what is going to happen. Things are changing so rapidly. It is necessary, obviously, to build in a basic groundwork of theory and of practice in any professional area but we ought to be dealing also with much deeper questions like problem solving ability, not how to do the problems that we have traditionally set people in technological courses. We need to teach how to approach a totally new problem that one has never seen before. There is an increasing amount of literature on this issue. I am not talking about giving people sums that are similar to the ones they did before; I am talking about giving people the skill to use the basic knowledge they have in an entirely new environment. That is a difficult thing to teach. It is very demanding for the academic staff because it means a whole new way of examining people. For instance, one starts examining people with questions that do not have a single unique solution. All of us in academic life, particularly on the technological side, set questions that have one answer because it is much easier to correct an exam that has only one right answer. In the area of which I know a little — I do not wish to belabour the point but it is the only one on which I can speak with reasonable authority — if I supervise a student who has a design project, as they had this year, to design a large plant to produce monosodium glutamate, the first thing that is true is that there is not one right answer. There cannot be one right answer. There is a process of judgment about a whole lot of things in that design which would mean that there is a number of equivalent answers not one of which is necessarily uniquely correct. Our job is to make sure, not that students get some one model answer correct, but that they learn how to take intelligent decisions based on the information that is available, that they learn to think, that they learn to analyse, that they learn to reflect, that they learn to search and that they learn then to take responsibility in an organised way for making judgments about the choices they have to make, and that is a much more difficult thing to inculcate than any specific knowledge about a specific topic. That is the core, in my view, of the development of a work force that is capable and continues to be capable of responding to change and to new developments.
The other area is the question of what we are educating people for, and I will come back to this. Again this may come as a surprise as it is not the sort of thing that is associated much with me, but I think that there is an enormous emphasis still in third level education on educating or training people for employment. I would still detect, from what I know of my own students, or students within the institution within which I work, and indeed of students I know in other institutions, an overwhelming perception among those students that what they are going to look for in the short and even in the long term is a job. We are not really beginning to dig into the possibility of educating people for enterprise, to do things themselves.
I come back now to what we need for a climate of enterprise. My view of what we need for a climate of enterprise is quite different from that of some of the right wing idealogues who pass through certain sectors of education. We are not creating such a a climate. Most of our students coming out of third level institutions still see themselves as looking for jobs, and that is not a complete or adequate solution to the country's needs. In the area of education we also need to keep in mind that when we give people a technological education it is not something that closes people's minds down to all sorts of other areas of life. I get very irritated by the distinction made between academic work and applied work and the idea that somehow certain areas of academic life are more applied and some more academic. All areas of education achieve certain objectives, I, for one, would far prefer to have had the engineering training I had, because it has equipped me particularly well for many of my activities in politics, than to have had a traditional arts-based non-quantitative, descriptive but very worthwhile education.
Different areas of education can equip people for quite different things than the name of the course would suggest. The whole emphasis of an engineering course is on pragmatic approaches to problems. I have a profoud belief that problems do not necessarily have ideal solutions, but they have solutions which must have one criteria, that is that they work. I dislike the distinction between academic and applied work, as if the academic was the somehow slightly superior cerebral, wonderful, reflector, almost philosophic, side of education, and then there were the rest of us getting our hands dirty doing applied work. I do not accept the distinction. I do not believe that there is almost an implied pecking order of what is really third level or university education, and then the other little bit that is slipped in at the end which to a certain extent is marginalised. It is a matter of some regret that we have yet to see somebody from the engineering area becoming the president of a university, although we are moving in that direction.
In the area of technological education there are certain assumptions and ideas that deserve to be challenged. The first is that technology and science, engineering and applied science, are somehow magnificently detached, and are value free, that one can teach people to be engineers and scientists, giving them a pragmatic approach to the world without any idealogical baggage. The one area which comes immediately to mind where that sort of a pseudo-intellectual detachment does not work is in industrial relations. Most people who get a technological, business or commercial training will almost immediately come up against one very human problem based on perceptions of human values, and that is industrial relations. If some of the stuff coming out of certain eminent academics from the universities about trade unions for instance, represents an ideological perception which is any way widely held or widely inculcated into students at technology and business, they are in for a very severe awakening when they penetrate the real world of Irish business. People need to realise that inherited American perceptions of the role of trade unions will not work here and will only create conflict. People will have to realise that business is a community of interests. We cannot forget about difficult things like people and train engineers and technologists to make things in some sort of dehumanised industrial environment. No culture has succeeded in creating a high level of achievement and performance while ignoring the human side of industry and business. There are different solutions to the problem but no country has succeeded without taking the human side into account. Anybody who is under the illusion that our nearest neighbour has been successful in an enterprise culture which is unrelated to the people involved should have a closer look at its failure to actually produce much. The United Kingdom has not been successful as a producer of goods. It has been successful as a manipulator of money but not in terms of industrial production. Neither, in the world market, has the US been successful.
The value free technology needs to be elaborated on, because the biggest crisis that will face anybody working in the productive sector here, throughout Europe, in North America and in Japan for the next 25 years is the environmental crisis. That challenges a series of the assumptions that all of us who have been educated as engineers and technologists grew up with. It challenges the whole concept of growth, for instance, the unchallenged acceptance of growth forever which is the basis for a huge amount of technological engineering and scientific education. It may not be possible yet to say with certainty that future growth is impossible, but it is becoming quite clear that the presumption that growth can go on forever in the way it has for the last 50 years, is to fly in the face of the fact that we live in a finite world. The world does not have infinite resources, either infinite raw materials or resources, to absorb the by-products of continuing industrial growth. If China and India, for instance, were to reach the levels of consumption of the United States of America, on the present way in which the US organises itself, the world would run out of energy and the oceans would be entirely polluted. Two billion people living at American standards would devastate the world environment beyond recall. We cannot therefore educate engineers and technologists in such a way that they can somehow keep their heads down saying that they are working for their industry to produce. The social responsibility of industry, whether privately or publicly owned will be more heavily underlined as the world becomes more and more concerned about its future.
An implied ideology of the free market which does not get people used to the fact that industry will have to live under severe environmental regulation, with severe environmental assessment and with severe penalties for failure to operate within the environmental standards specified, is flying in the face of reality. People must be educated to know that they will have to live in a world of regulation and that there will never again be a sort of glorious free market in which industries can produce. They will be regulated and controlled at all levels.
A value free technology which ignores where the raw materials will come from and where the waste products will go, is not on. We may choose to ignore it but public opinion within the next ten years will insist that those in the productive sector will not be allowed to ignore it. There is no such thing as value free technology or science. The basis for a value free technology assumes certain things which are no longer acceptable. One cannot assume that there will be limitless access to all materials or to places to dispose of toxic substances. Those days are over.
Seeing that these two institutions are now becoming universities, I want it on record that people who have an elevated position in education have an obligation to operate at standards of intellectual analysis, knowledge and objectivity which reflect the ethos of those institutions. We would want to be very wary of ideology masquerading under an academic cloak, particularly the sort of ideology which gives us a model of the future based on a selective image of the US.
We have had a lot of talk from certain people in academic life which would lead us to believe that there is only one model for development. It is important to remember that within the industrial world there have been a variety of ways of achieving close to full employment, high living standards and high levels of environmental protection. Some people in academic life have presented us with an image of a failed Europe and a Gloriously successful United States. It is not true and it is less than worthy of the standards of academic excellence one is entitled to expect from eminent academics. People are entitled to expect high standards from the pre-eminent figures in university education.
Somebody mentioned that a lot of the new ideas in the NIHEs, soon to be universities, were based on American experience. America, across the political spectrum, now recognises that it has a major educational crisis on its hands, that the standards in many of its third level institutions are far from adequate, that the level of illiteracy among its industrial workforce is a matter of considerable concern, that American industrial productivity have grown slower than in Japan, in Europe or in this country, and there is a problem in the United States with industrial production, and to foolishly focus our minds on a selective image of one country when there are countries all over northern Europe which have vastly cleaner environments, higher standards of living and dramatically lower levels of unemployment than the EC, Japan or the United States is not an academic exercise but rather a political exercise. If people wish to get involved in politics, let them, but they should not dress it up under the cloak of academic objectivity.
Since we are talking about the universities we ought to address some of the deficits in current third level education. I have already referred to the fact that one of them need to develop skills that one will encourage people to be enterprising rather than to direct themselves towards employment. A second is the extraordinary neglect within third level education for our most important industry-agriculture. I find it astonishing that one cannot get a degree in farming. I am not talking about the people who advise those who work in agriculture but about those who work in agriculture and do not have a plethora of qualifications, supports, third level or further qualifications. We should have people with Ph.Ds not in agricultural science but in the business of agriculture. We should have people with primary degrees in the business of agriculture. There is a feeling that this is a mysterious dark art which can only be passed on from father to child, or from mother to child, and that we cannot conceptualise or encapsulate it within education. It is a business like any other business where a certain amount of knowledge can only be acquired through experience but for which a large body of knowledge can be acquired through training and education.
It is interesting that the most successful agricultural economy in the world, that of New Zealand, has the highest proportion of people working in farming who come from non-farming backgrounds, much higher than this country and the rest of Europe. They have a remarkably successful agricultural industry. It is time the idea that we give people a year or two years training in an agricultural college in the belief that this makes them fit to be farmers, was got rid of. We need people in the productive sectors of agriculture who are of the same academic standard as those who work in the chemical, food or any other industry. There is a need for that level of academic excellence but to date this has not been achieved.
I suggest to the Minister that if we are going to create an those of education which is based on what we need, then legal education needs to be looked at. In the area in which I have some experience, engineering, all the professional engineering institutions recognise qualifications to degree level as qualifying people to work as engineers but it is astonishing that the legal profession do not recognise any third level qualification or any degree as qualifying people to work as solicitors. They qualify a person to train as a solicitor but then they decide whether what one has done in university is good enough to let someone become a solicitor. It seems that we should either drop basic degrees in law in universities, as they are wasteful, and encourage people to go straight to the law societies, or we should regulate the way they attempt to filter out people they regard as not having attained the required standard. It is extraordinary that having got an honours degree in law one has to prove once more that they know something about law. This makes no sense. The legal profession is no more than a self-regulatory profession protecting its own interests.
All the aspirations and legal innovations in the world will not get away from the fact that third level education is hopelessly underfunded and because it is underfunded two things are going to happen. Inevitably over time standards will be diluted and reduced. The non-availability of substantial capital investment to re-equip and modernise laboratories and so on in universities will result in the dilution of standards in the longer term, and the continuing increase in the scale of fees is going to restrict further access to third level education. It will not be too long before all the doctors will be able to get their sons and daughters into medicine because they will be the only ones who will be able to pay the fees. We are moving towards that position. This is socially unjust and in many of the areas where we need the best skills it is also, in terms of our industrial development, profoundly shortsighted. It is a matter of some regret that we have moved to a position where funding for third level education is being restricted.
There are a number of other points I would like to make. A number of Senators have referred to the emphasis being placed on research. I would like to make a clear point here. If one takes a look at the OECD figures on research we will see that there is a fairly clear correlation between the level of non-military research expenditure and economic performance in those countries. It is no surprise that Sweden has one of the highest levels of non-military R and D investment as a proportion of gross national product in the world. It is no surprise either that we have one of the lowest, even though we are improving. In fairness, the Government have made some efforts to extend and develop the level of funding for research and development.
The second thing to remember is that virtually all funding for research and development is paid for by public funding as it is paid by the taxpayers by way of grants or a write-off against tax. Therefore, most research in any society is funded by the public. We cannot get away from this fact. There was a tendency, not on the part of the present Government, but on the part of the previous Government, to concentrate more and more on obtaining private funding for research and development. There is no great evidence to suggest that this approach works. Those countries which have tried to go that route have not been too successful.
It is also necessary to emphasise that research ought not just be of the applied kind. We need a good spectrum of fundamental research because it is out of fundamental research that new ideas come. They may not come immediately, it may be years before they come, but if we do not invest in fundamental research we will simply end up trying to catch up on others' innovations by applying what other people have learned. Therefore, what we need to do is encourage fundamental research, particularly in areas where we have resources, so that we may become the market leaders in some areas.
Denmark, which is about the same size as Ireland, the last time I checked, had about two thirds of the world market in specialised medical analysis equipment because they developed a skill in that area which no other country could match. Other small countries have done similar things. We cannot be good at everything and we cannot be specialists in every area, but if we do not develop a corpus of basic research in a number of areas we cannot and will not be able to develop a real industrial base.
I would now like to refer briefly to the Bill. One of the things I have to say is a matter of some embarrassment. My name is attached to amendment No. 4 but, on mature reflection, I wish to make it clear that while I put my name to the amendment some days ago I will not be supporting it. Having done some further study it is now clear to me that I would actually be opposing the guaranteed right of three students to be members of the academic council——