Provost Patrick Prendergast, an engineer by trade, could do little to hide his delight as the €60 million Engineering, Energy and Environment (E3) Institute was announced this week.
The new project, which has received a €15 million backing from the government, represents everything Prendergast has stood for during his tenure – innovation, philanthropic success and a dogged determination to “not be caught napping” in the headwinds of a funding crisis and an increasingly competitive global third-level sector.
However, the project also tells us two things about Irish higher education. The first is that the government’s fetishisation of STEM shows no sign of diminishing. Prendergast put that irony best himself in a speech two weeks ago, when he said that Trinity’s success in the arts and humanities reflects Ireland’s own success: “The main reason why our small country is known around the world is for literature and arts”. Unfortunately, funding still doesn’t reflect this.
But more crucially, E3 reveals something of the demarcation between Ireland’s ambitions and wider government policy. When it comes to efforts to attract students – E3 will apparently boost student numbers in Trinity by 10 per cent – the Department of Education seems indefatigable, rebranding institutes of technology to make them more amenable to an international audience and setting ever-loftier non-EU student targets for Irish universities. Colleges, starved of funding for close to a decade, have been happy to oblige.
Yet this energetic bid to attract students has not been matched by any efforts to accommodate them or support them. The government is still dogmatically refusing to build student accommodation, leaving it to private providers that are showing little sign of curbing their extortionate rates.
While Dublin Institute of Technology is building on-campus accommodation at Grangegorman, it won’t be ready until 2020, even as the area becomes a hotspot for student housing companies. But even DIT’s accommodation could cost students nearly €900 a month. In Trinity, accommodations plans for the new campus at Grand Canal Dock are far from well defined.
This isn’t to discourage grand projects or ambition. However, too often students – under more pressure than ever – can seem like an afterthought.
