A“visitor” for Dublin City “University”?

The unwillingness of successive Irish governments to send a “visitor” to Dublin City “University”-  as required by the 1997 universities act when there is suspicion of illegal activity, confirmed and documented at length is this case - is extraordinary. I argue here that the reason may have to do with the planned privatization of the place, with big pay-offs all around. The inertia in the Irish state bureaucracy is such that we recently saw a Minister for Justice take his own government down 10 points in te opinion polls by failing to tackle very common garden police corruption before being forced to resign . This may be happening again; in any case, the blog post has also been sent to the relevant ministers

This is my analysis of the  DC “U”. situation, an  analysis that but for the irresponsibility/criminality of various administrations since 1989 would have been performed by a formal university visitor. It will eventually probably form the backbone of yet another costly report.

First of all, there never was any serious attempt to create a recognizable university in the old Albert college site, now DC “U”. In the mid 1970's, an attempt to merge Kevin St and DIT techs into a new NIHE was stopped and the creation of a new college at the old Albert college site was initiated, after a crisis in which Danny O'Hare was otherwise going to find himself without a job. He was thus open to persuasion, and the evidence suggest that he succumbed.

NIHED was moderately successful; sufficient at least to follow the rash of Brit polytechs under Thatcher into university status. The accreditation was cankered, but the calculation was correct that with thousands of graduands every year, no government would take action. That started the criminality; illegal contracts in 1995; an  illegal disciplinary procedure 2001-2010 followed by another such; egregious behavior as the MO.

O'Hare's response, after the mysterious gift from Chuck Feeney's consortium in 1995, a  consortium recently in action in the shafting of Stanford in NY, was to appeal on American TV for the end of tenure. The hem of the dress had indeed been lifted; Danny O'Hare was most recently seen at the Hoover institute at Stanford “Writing” a book about how privatization helps universities. We can take it that the book will duly appear if and when  privatization occurs at DC “U”.

The DCU formula is still in place. What was interesting was how the scion of a Nazi slave labor cement factory chose to interpret the disciplinary procedures to be brought  in by statute;

1.summary dismissal for anyone appointed after 1995, as he made clear at Ireland's supreme court;
2.for the rest., a truly Kafkaesque situation wherein to be accused of outrageous (even if  untrue) violations of contract immediately put them under the new  disciplinary procedure and rescinded their previous rights. Otherwise, they were ruled as frustrating their contract and as having resigned
3.all intellectual property generated was to be assigned 100% to DC “U”. If that needed to be enforced, simply fire the academic, kick her off campus, and use state resources to fight every claim.



In fact, the evidence suggests that the plan was always to privatize the institution; we middle class idiots were brought in to set things up in the 1980's and given a teaching load that prevented us doing much research. Then (after 1995 with the tenure-free contracts) we were to be replaced by a new class of superdrone with better research records than us retards who had been teaching about three times the classes of our rivals.

The fact these new people replaced us in the departments we had set up was a bonus; but even they were pawns. The ultimate goal was a “university” with summary dismissal, no academic freedom/tenure, and the students whored out to corporations. All the shots were to be called through a single “chief officer” who, already well-paid, was doing very nicely from various campus spin-offs.

None of the above could have been implemented without collusion from successive governments, the “union” SIPTU, and greedy corporations. My conclusion is that  DC “U” is a basket case and should be forced into a more reliable accreditation, with a massive overhaul ensuing, or merged with the national universities