Ronan Costello
Editor
ADVERTISEMENT
Ten years is a long time to carry the weight of expectation of over 20,000 students and staff. You can tell that Provost John Hegarty has felt the burden of this weight. For a decade now he has presided over Ireland’s best university. In that time he has made radical changes to the physical landscape of the college and, more importantly, changed the way college functions. Now in his final few days as Provost, Hegarty has been reflecting on his tenure here and the legacy he leaves behind.
“It’s a bittersweet emotion I’m feeling now that I’m leaving. It’s an incredible privilege to have the opportunity to lead a university like this. But now it’s time to move on,” says Hegarty. In fact, he thinks that the ten year term may be too long. “[The job] needs a turnover; new people with new ideas. The term could be a couple of years shorter with maybe an option to exit earlier.”
Ten years ago Trinity College was drifting. For decades it had been happy to coast along on its reputation, knowing that age and the magnificent campus would always attract the best students. Its academic structures had not been examined, its postgraduate programmes were small and underdeveloped and it was an inward looking community that had shunned interaction with the local community. Provost Hegarty sought to change all of this. At the beginning of the millennium, he saw himself as the reformer that Trinity needed. Having earned an international reputation as a world class physicist, adept at attracting major research money, Hegarty was determined that he could bring his expertise to the office at Number 1, Grafton Street.
Now in 2011, he seems satisfied that he has done most of what he set out to achieve. “The biggest single development has been in the postgraduate research are because we’ve grown the number of students participating in it. We went from a pretty low base in research to being ranked pretty highly in the world,” said Hegarty. “We’re in the top 1% in 15 areas. It means we’re beginning to peep above the parapet. We would like to be a world leader in a number of those areas. Just recently our Mathematics department has been ranked in the top 15 departments in the world.”
The preoccupation with college rankings is something that took on much more importance during Hegarty’s term than it had been given before. The ease with which knowledge of various institutions can spread has lead to a more globalised student population, keen to attend the best universities in the world. Trinity has fared well in these rankings, something which Provost Hegarty is keen to point out. However, some have felt that the criteria by which universities are judged in these rankings places a disproportionate emphasis on postgraduate research which can lead to neglect of undergraduate teaching. Provost Hegarty firmly rejects the assertion that this has happened in Trinity. “We never developed postgraduate teaching at the expense of undergraduate teaching. Before, Trinity was largely an undergraduate University so research was thin on the ground. It has grown, but it hasn’t grown out of proportion, it’s just grown from a very small base. I don’t see any competition between the two.”
While Hegarty may be please with the development in postgraduate research, one of his major regrets was that he had to increase the student numbers in Trinity at all. At the beginning of his term he was determined to improve the quality of students that Trinity produced and to do so he was convinced that he would have to maintain a strict limit on the number of students admitted to the college. However, he was forced to change his approach on this as the government based the criteria for grant size on the number of students in the college, not the quality of the college’s output.
Of course, another of the developments in previous years, the dramatic increases in tuition fees, may ensure that fewer students attend Trinity in the future. When Provost Hegarty began his term, the registration fee was set at €396. It now stands at a prohibitive €2000. One of the more remarkable things about our interview with Provost Hegarty was the casual ease with which he accepted this as a necessary and indeed beneficial cost to students. “I think that students should make a contribution. I think it’s good for them and it’s good for the institution. It does give students a weight of ownership in what they’re involved in. I mean, €2,000 is a sizable contribution. It’s a fee. It’s a tuition. So, there is a balance between how these essential services of government are funded,” said Hegarty. “Is it through taxation of everyone or is taken directly from the person? Taxation has risen hugely in this country but it’s paying for education, it’s not paying for the banks and I don’t think the population can tolerate another increase in taxation, not willingly anyway. The alternative is that students pay directly, and it’s one or the other and I would support students making a direct contribution.”
However, it has been shown in recent past that Trinity students now baulk at the idea of making financial contributions to the college, even when the benefit of it is specifically student focused. So it was with the referendum on the proposed student centre when students voted against making a yearly contribution to the cost of its construction. The student centre was a central promise of Provost Hegaty, indeed he can remember promising that Luce Hall would be the new student centre when he have his hustings speech on the steps of the Dining Hall ten years ago. “I’m disappointed that this wasn’t achieved. We almost did it at the very end of my term. It was delayed in the middle of my term by the sports centre. We couldn’t do anything about the student centre until the sports centre was complete. And recently there was the referendum that asked students for a contribution and students voted it down and that’s what brought the whole thing to an end. It needs to revisited, said Hegarty. “It would take some strong support form the students union to make it happen. The referendum was also held at a very bad time, when no one had any money. I think it was the worst time in the world to have a referendum! I would rather they had held it three years ago. If it was brought forward again in the next year or two I think it could fly.”
Recently, students have also railed against the introduction of semesterisation, specifically against what many feel was the half-measured way it was introduced, with no semesterised examinations. Provost Hegarty has some sympathy with this viewpoint and is quick to point out that the Student Union of the time was vehemently opposed to the notion of Christmas exams. “The whole world has gone semesterised,” said Hegarty. “Eventually I think it’s quite likely that trinity will have to have a semesterised exam system. I think semesterisation is an incomplete process at the moment.” His successor, however, is totally against Christmas exams despite recent referendums and polls carried out by the SU which have shown a large majority of students to be in favour of their introduction.
Hegarty knows what it’s like to go against the crowd. In the middle of his term he undertook the most ambitious shakeup of college structures in decades. The results were not appreciated by college academics, as was shown by the results of a survey leaked to The Univeristy Times in the first issue of last year’s volume. Provost Hegarty acknowledges that there was heated debate at the time his plans were coming together and he further acknowledges that the change has been uncomfortable for many staff members. However, he brushes off any criticism with clichés about change being necessary and natural. In this he may be proved correct. He notes that smaller disciplines were at risk of being wiped out altogether and that the merging of schools mean that multi-disciplined courses became the saviours of these disciplines, thus broadening the choices available to students. Still, this does not change the fact that for now, the restructuring process has been seen as a failure.
However, while it’s probably far too early to cast a judgment on his legacy, this Provost would at least seem to have enjoyed a fruitful term. Walking from front arch, past the Long Room Hub, by the Naughten and Lloyd Institutes, through the Science Gallery and Sports Centre and on out to the new Biomedical Research Institute, it’s clear that Provost Hegarty has had a profound effect on our university. The building construction he has overseen and the structural changes he has implemented will leave a legacy for decades to come, and will most likely benefit the university.
“The goal of the Provost is to ensure that the university is in a somewhat better state at the end of his tenure than it was at the beginning,” said Hegarty.
Few would argue that he failed in this mission.
