The recent QS rankings, in which Trinity, in line with all but one Irish university, fell twenty places compared to last year, cast into stark relief a third-level funding crisis which has largely escaped public attention. A joint statement from Trinity’s Provost and the President of UCD, identifying underinvestment as the cause behind this, compounded the unforgiving nature of this assessment of Irish higher education on a global scale. Even in a country where it is water charges, and not student loans, that make and break governments, these developments make university funding that bit more difficult for the public to ignore.
However, Irish universities have been to a large extent complicit in this public indifference to their plight. The pursuit of reputation is the rhythm to which the world of academia thrums. So much of what we value in any qualification is the reputation of the institution that awarded it. Reputation is all that many prospective students have to go on, both in Ireland and internationally, when making their choice to come to study here. Irish universities have had every reason to put on a brave face and pretend that their government is not leaving them ill-equipped to do their job.
Therefore, the fact that the leaders of two of Ireland’s biggest universities would publicly announce the disastrous state of their institutions’ finances, should be taken all the more seriously. After all, they have every incentive not to.
This week may have seen a turning point in the way society at large thinks about the third-level sector. Precipitous falls in rankings capture the complicated causes and processes that have led to this funding crisis in a way that detailed reports cannot. Statements from frustrated university leaders describing the dwindling of their reputations as an “inevitable result of underinvestment” convey an urgency that is not apparent in the nebula of committees and indecision that has been characteristic of policy making in this area for years.
Though it should not have been necessary, this unforgiving evidence may be what Irish society needs to understand the near-collapse of its beleaguered universities.
