In November 2015, when The University Times reported that Trinity was in consultations about a radical reimagining of the way it taught undergraduates, it might have seemed hard to imagine that the Trinity Education Project would ever get off the ground.
In the intervening years, as College struggled to implement the programme in the face of what seemed at times to be an unending sequence of obstacles, it became abundantly clear that those driving the Trinity Education Project would not rest until they had changed – as Provost Patrick Prendergast wrote in The University Times last year – “everything to preserve the standing of our undergraduate education”.
Now, three years later, we are finally on the cusp. On Monday – nearly a month earlier than the start date of old – thousands of freshers will stream through Front Arch to begin an education that will, for many, be a very different one than that received by their forebears.
It is in many ways a moment of huge significance. In some cases, centuries-old academic structures are being overhauled – the introduction of Christmas exams, for instance, marks a break from almost 400 years of tradition. Whatever you can say about the Trinity Education Project, nobody can accuse it of a lack of ambition.
There are, however, a myriad of criticisms of the Trinity Education Project that do have merit. With any programme of this scale, teething problems are inevitable, but those working on the project have often seemed painfully out of touch with the needs of students and staff, and have, in the process of implementing the changes, been met with everything from staff scorn to all-out riot from students.
And there is still a way to go. This year is the first of Trinity’s brand-new entry route into its science subjects. But other courses, such as TSM, are still earmarked for reconstruction.
So, as much as this week marks the formal beginning of what Trinity will be at pains to depict as a bright new dawn, there are significant blots on the past record of the Trinity Education Project, and, you would suspect, significant hurdles in its future.
