Richard Bruton, the new Minister for Education and Skills, will have to contend with a funding crisis that last month a state body said could have “serious and irretrievable implications” for the “future sustainability” of third-level institutions.
The funding option that the new government decides on has the potential to drastically change Ireland’s approach to higher education, with the ideologically opposed options of a loan scheme and a “free fees” system both on the table. However, with Bruton’s own background largely focused with finance and job creation, some parties are concerned that his approach to higher education might prioritise the wrong actions and values.
Bruton’s own higher education experience may provide some solace to those most concerned about the direction of the sector. After graduating with an economics and politics degree from UCD, he stayed there for a year, completing a master’s in economics. He went on to complete an MPhil in Economics at Oxford, a CV which would suggest that he understands the academic trade and the importance of a well-funded higher education sector.
Prof Brian Lucey, from Trinity Business School, noted to The University Times that Bruton was a “very analytical guy”. This, in combination with his research environment experience and his “willingness to consider evidence-based policy”, Lucey said, “bodes well” for the sector.
Since 2011, he has served as Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. As part of the role, he launched the first annual Action Plan for Jobs in 2012, which aimed to create 100,000 net new jobs by 2016. The target, Bruton announced in May 2015, was reached almost two years early. With the “innovation” brief, research funding came under the remit of this ministerial post, too. In January, his department announced a €28 million Science Foundation Ireland investment in research equipment and facilities. The higher education funding sector needs €1 billion to be funded adequately, however – and the programme for government brings us no closer to a solution that was meant to arise from the yet-to-published Cassells report, instead kicking the can down the road and asking a cross-party Oireachtas committee to make the decision.
I’m not sure how he will cope with adjusting from his free competition market views to a properly funded public education system
His economics education, and his time as a researcher at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) however, positioned him firmly on the right-of-centre side of the spectrum, as you would expect of a Fine Gael politician. This presents a problem for the “free fees” side.
Speaking to The University Times, Mike Jennings, General Secretary of the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT), said that he’d have to admit he was “a bit worried”: “He wouldn’t be our ideal choice. He hopefully will have to change his political direction if he is going to understand the dynamic of higher education.”
He went on: “I think he himself would regard himself as a neoliberal politician. He’s very much on the right wing of the economic spectrum. He sees society based on the incentive to profit. He’s very short term in his vision and, in fairness to him, I’d have to say that his vision in his previous ministry was to create jobs in the Irish economy so there was an underpinning of validity to that position in that context. I would worry that everything he says views higher education as simply training, preparation for people to get short-to-medium term jobs and that would be a disastrous undervaluing of higher education.”
Former President of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland and an independent senator on the Cultural and Educational Panel, Gerard Craughwell, told The University Times that education, in a modern society, “must be a free public good with open access for all”. “While Bruton has shown himself to be an excellent and capable minister in the last Dáil, I’m not sure how he will cope with adjusting from his free competition market views to a properly funded public education system”, he said.
On Twitter, Joe O’Connor, a former USI president and member of the Cassells working group, who, on Wednesday criticised the delay in the report’s publication, said that, given the “battle ahead” to secure the future of higher education as a “public good, and not a commodified production line for enterprise, Bruton is worrying”.
In response to this tweet, Prof Anthony Staines, a former board member of the Higher Education Authority, noted that this battle “needs to be fought and fought hard”. “Winning the debate on funding will be vital”, he said. Staines, who was an independent candidate for the TCD panel in the recent Seanad elections, is a Fine Gael member.
The current USI President, Kevin Donoghue, noted to The University Times that while “a Fine Gael Minister for Education presents some challenges in that, from a funding perspective, their objectives wouldn’t necessarily have lined up with ours in the past”, publically funded education being one of the options presented by the Cassells report means that “there could potentially be the opportunity to develop that angle with them.”
Whatever view of higher education he might have that might be different to ours, no higher education system is going to survive with the current level of underfunding
He continued: “They didn’t necessarily go in for any particular model before the general election, so it’s good that that option will be considered.”
In a Labour statement, the last government’s Minister for Education and Skills, Jan O’Sullivan, criticised the programme for government’s focus on education. It is, she said, “either silent, purposely ignorant or just pays lip service to critical, urgent issues”, one of which she said was the “future funding of the third level sector”. She, however, wished Bruton well.
For Jennings, “the number one thing we has to do is fight like a tiger to get funds. Whatever view of higher education he might have that might be different to ours, no higher education system is going to survive with the level of underfunding and under resourcing that we are witnessing at the moment.”
Communication with these parties, then, is paramount, both to address these concerns and to strengthen the sector going forward. Jennings expresses IFUT’s plan to meet with him as soon as possible and their hope that Bruton is “open to new ideas”, adding “we hope that he’s open to listening to our perspective”. For Donoghue: “I think we will find common ground to work on, but we won’t get a full sense of that until we meet face-to-face.”
Correction: 21:59, May 5, 2016
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Staines was a board member of the Higher Education Authority. In fact, Staines is a former board member. Staines stepped down when nominated for the Seanad.
