In recent years, Trinity has come to embrace the business world’s preoccupation with innovation and entrepreneurship. This embrace is one that has been well publicised. At a lunch hosted by the Swiss-Irish Business Association in the 1592 restaurant earlier this month, the Provost, Patrick Prendergast, emphasised Trinity’s record in innovation, citing the university’s accession to the prestigious League of European Research Universities (LERU) and its position as the leading European university in terms of educating entrepreneurs according to research firm Pitchbook, as evidence of a commitment to innovation. Students will already be familiar with entrepreneurship facilities such as Blackstone LaunchPad and Launchbox that have become integrated into the campus. Plans for future developments also suggest such a commitment, with the College’s business school to house an Innovation and Entrepreneurship Hub.
Innovation, be it in the establishment of a start-up company or the publication of paradigm-shifting research, is obviously something that any university, and indeed society at large, should desire in its graduates. It is because of this that the recent surge in Trinity’s devotion to innovation is largely to be welcomed. Indeed it is perhaps all the more justifiable in a world where old certainties appear to be declining and in particular where universities find themselves constantly seeking to justify their existence in light of chronic underfunding.
However, the holistic education that any university seeks to provide cannot limit itself to innovation and creativity. Innovation’s necessity does not make the maintenance of existing systems any less vital to society’s success. Indeed, it is testament to the quality and effectiveness of past innovations that not all of them instantly wither into obsolescence and demand replacement. However fast we can conjure new ideas, the reality is that the functioning of our society at any given moment will depend on some element of continuity with the past.
Trinity’s graduates will be at the heart of both the development of new systems and the maintenance of existing ones and the apparent priorities of the university’s management should reflect this. While endorsement and resources of the kind that we have already observed should continue to flow in the direction of innovation, a failure to do the same for vital maintenance needlessly diminishes the perceived value of such essential tasks and the esteem, of those who execute them.
