Sunday, April 26, 2009
Visions of the Irish university
The other models include the hybrid system that the examinations board introduced into Ireland in the 1880's after the failure of Newman's initiative. It took the scholar/student model, funded it with taxpayers' money, and gave a sense of professional advancement to the students involved. It worked well -and is in fact the only real accreditation of the Irish universities - until the incoherent 1997 universities act attempted, in self-contradictory fashion, simultaneously to enshrine academic freedom, tenure, and a dictator. A truly creative act would have anticipated John Seely Brown's framework, in which the admin, academic, and accrediting parts of the university are separated, and tenders accepted for use of the physical infrastructure.
Pre-1997, we managed to stay up to international standard by an informal task description that essentially made teaching 80% of our job, research 20%. This worked because, while we had teaching loads that were perhaps twice that of the international average and wages perhaps one half of the same, let us remember that the Irish were educating Europe at a time when its natives were daubing themselves with woad. After 1997, an attempt was made essentially to transform the university sector into taxpayer-funded R+D for industry.
Lest we forget, the patents emerging from the government's $50 million+ sponsorship of Medialab were sold for 28 Euro; multiply both sums by perhaps 100 for what SFI and PRTLI will cost and bring us. Alternatively, to repeat; anyone bright and commercially hip enough to invent a real product will have been bright and commercially hip enough to remove it from the university's IP claims. Stanford's main achievement in this respect has been to back off HP, Yahoo, and Google as their lawyers taught the founders of these companies to say “Stanford Who?”. All 3 companies have since been generous to Stanford.
Elsewhere on this blog, this writer has worked out what the scholar/student model would look like, with knowledge regarded primarily as edification. Any lacunae in the teaching part of this system can be worked out with reference to the web; this is precisely what Paul Rabinow and his group, fearing the commercialisation of UC Berkeley, are doing. The corruption involved in the grip that “Big publishing”has on science is being confronted by the academic community in the whole of Harvard, MIT, and the education dept of Stanford, who have voted for an open access model of publishing for their papers with copyright ceded to the university in the first instance, who can then negotiate with the publisher to make the work available for the whole of humanity. So, in the early 21st century, 3 of the best universities in the world have moved to a new model exactly as the unaccredited Irish universities obsess about IP.
There is, of course, yet another model for those who want to stress the vocational aspect, one that can emerge organically from the original model, and this will feature later on in this blog.
Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Aibreán 26 2009
