The government’s legislative programme for the approaching weeks and months, in including a number of bills which have been on the Dáil’s agenda since before the general election, carries with it considerable reforms to the structure and organisation of Irish third-level institutions, a number of which should be regarded as having the potential to aggravate the already fragile and beleaguered state of the sector and its funding situation.
One such measure is contained in the Universities (Amendment) Bill 2012, a proposal which had remained for many years on the previous government’s legislative agenda and which now features prominently in a recent departmental agenda furnished to the new Minister for Education and Skills, Richard Bruton. This proposed reform seeks to grant the Minister with extensive powers to enforce orders relating to the remuneration of staff, allowing the appointment of an individual of the Minister’s choice who is to be empowered to act on the behalf of the institution called in question to carry out the order. Such enforcement measures are to be open whenever the “Minister considers that a university has failed to comply”.
Such a reform is so troubling because of the threat it poses to the autonomy of universities, as it allows their own organisation and leadership to usurped on the assessment of the government. The severe extent of such an enforcement mechanism and the unilateral manner in which it may be invoked makes the ideal of an independent higher education sector, with the power to examine and criticise both governments and society in general, largely impossible to achieve. As has been suggested by Eoin O’Dell, Fellow and Associate Professor in Law, who helped to draft an alternative proposal in conjunction with Senator Seán Barrett, the measure also fails to recognise that an increasing proportion of university funding is drawn from sources outside the state, allowing the government to effectively dictate how privately raised money in the hands of universities is to be allocated.
The persistence of such a reform in the plans of this government is particularly frustrating in light of the dire financial situation of Ireland’s universities, which have had to bear significant reductions in public funding, despite ever-increasing student numbers, forcing these institutions to look elsewhere for resources. The contemplation of using structural reforms to reassert governmental control of universities, following the consistent withdrawal of governmental support for those universities, is an unsettling affront to higher education.
