Quoting a recent European survey he stated that Irish universities were ranked 11th in financial autonomy and 11th in staffing autonomy. He claimed Irish Universities are hampered by management practices designed for the civil service and not for organisations expected to compete in the international marketplace for academic talent.
In a barely disguised remark about the need to eliminate bureaucratic procedures and enable a greater discretion by university management in the performance management of all staff, he appealed to government to provide what he described as an institutional management toolkit equivalent to that seen in successful European, American or other international universities. He reminded government that, “While our resource challenge is under significant foreign influence at present, the legal and employment regulatory framework is largely under our own domestic control.”
Dr Murphy went on to outline several areas in which he felt immediate action was possible even in the constrained economic climate. He outlined the need to support academically talented students, the need to look to other nations in better fiscal conditions to underwrite reforms in the Irish system and a call on government to engage with the university sector in the necessary restructuring of it.
Noting that today Irish university expenditure per student is 30% behind that in UK universities. He called on government to engage with wealthy nations, who value education and can take a longer term perspective, to invest in the system here and to help create a loan system for new students. In a clear repeated reference to his earlier call for the introduction of economic fees, he stated, “The validity of greater personal contribution to funding higher education, which has always conferred significant advantage in lifetime earnings, must be squarely recognised by government.”
He reminded the business audience present of the constraints faced by the third level system. The successes of Irish universities, over the past 10 years have been accomplished with funding levels that rarely equalled and continually trailed the OECD average. He acknowledged that adequate future resourcing of higher education will require immediate hard decisions on the part of government, but committed that universities are ready to lend their support in addressing these matters.
In a concluding plea, Dr Murphy was unequivocal in his expectations of government, “I expect our government to persuade the EU and ECB that austerity which restricts investment in the talents and competence of the next generation makes no sense, a view espoused, I believe by IMF.”
Picture: UCC President, Dr Michael Murphy
Address by President of University College Cork, Dr. Michael B. Murphy at the Cork Chamber Business Breakfast, Tuesday 20th December, 7.30am in the Clarion Hotel
Good Morning, Ladies & Gentlemen,
Delivering a lecture at UCC last year, Dr. James Watson, Nobel Laureate, made the simple statement that in this century, countries will only be as strong as their universities. In the absence of large reserves of valuable resources, only knowledge, precious in its novelty and in its applicability will determine the well-being and wealth of countries or continents.
While it is heartening to see our soil fertility, marine assets and abundance of fresh water being restored to economic prominence above the ephemera of the Celtic Tiger, the fact remains that natural assets represent only 20% of the economic potential of this country. We in Ireland must rely instead on the ingenuity and competence of our people, our human capital. To compete in a knowledge intensive world the majority of the population must enjoy a high quality third level education and a substantial minority must embrace 4th level education delivered by institutions performing to world beating standards. This is not rhetoric, it is a sober statement of a harsh reality. But it is also a call to everybody in our society, to all of us here this morning, to embrace challenge and to exhibit ambition in the same manner as those who represent our region so well in Thomond Park or Croke Park year in and year out. The only difference is that this is one competition we simply cannot afford to lose.
UCC 2011
On taking up the role of UCC President some 5 years ago I promulgated the concept of UCC as a regional university discharging its role to world class standards. Eschewing Harvardesque ambitions in this century if not in the next, I set out UCC’s role as a connector between our region and the globe, bringing accumulated global knowledge to our citizens while transmitting discoveries made here to the rest of the world. Though affectionately referred to as “the college”, on the side lines of the Mardyke pitches, UCC has been transformed over the past 15 years from a college, familiar to Americans and to 1990’s graduates, to being a university today. With almost 20,000 students and a staff complement bordering on 3,000, a quarter of our students now read for graduate degrees while 1,200 are pursuing doctoral programmes. All now enjoy research informed and research-led teaching characteristic of a university. Almost 3,000 international students from 100 countries spend all or part of each year at UCC. If a neutron bomb exploded in the quadrangle, some ¾ of a billion euros would be eliminated from the annual revenues of this region.
Our Alumni today number almost 100,000. Among them you will find the Head of Nuclear Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); another has won the 2007 Fritz London Prize for Physics with a 1:3 chance of winning the Nobel Prize for Physics; one is a member of the Presidential Science Medal Selection Committee of the United States of America; another is Vice President for Research at the University of Maryland and overseer of one of America’s largest science parks, in Washington; one can be found as the Head of Communications Security at the White House! Our most important KPI may be the achievements of our graduates.
Notwithstanding the economic challenges of our time, the university’s books are balanced in 2011, and borrowings that funded earlier capital investments which have beautified the campus and provided incomparable research capabilities, have been brought under control.
Income for research has grown year-on-year over the past decade, matching the best in the state. Our annual publication rates have increased by 50% over the past 5 years, and to an equivalent degree in their impact on global science. You will have read of the world’s first junction-less transistor invented at Tyndall Institute, with the potential to cut the cost of semi-conductor chip fabrication by over half, and energy consumption by such chips by up to 75%. You will have read of a novel technology to farm sea urchins, to support the high-end Japanese sushi market! You will have read of the discovery of the world’s oldest leather shoe in a cave in Armenia by a team of international archaeologists lead by Dr. Ron Pinhasi at UCC.
In the past 4 months you will have read of UCC science in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist (twice in August/September), even in Die Welt last Sunday week. But the metric of most importance is that the return on research investment at UCC measured by the number of patents, licenses, or spin off companies generated per €10m spend, is firmly in the range applying in the United States, or the European Union, and is remarkable given the embryonic state of the research culture and capacity of Ireland. Parenthetically, I should add that the commitment of Ireland over the past decade to research (knowledge discovery) has played no small part in the transformation of foreign direct investment to Ireland. Over a third of FDI this year is directed to R&D projects. At breakfast in Indianapolis three weeks ago, the President and CEO of Eli Lilly, Dr. John Lechleiter, told me that the relationship established between his corporation and UCC is a key driver of Eli Lilly’s continuing investment in Cork.
I will leave the last world on UCC’s performance to adjudicators external to us. The commitment and achievements of our staff and students persuaded the Sunday Times to name UCC as Irish University of the Year in 2011 and to do so for the third time in 10 years. We became the first Irish university to gain a 5 star rating in the new international system devised by QS. In the five major ranking systems this year (QS, Times Higher, Shanghai, Leiden and Sunday Times) Trinity lead (it’s not easy to close on a competitor with a 250 year head start!) but we lead UCD in two, trail in two and are even in the fifth. It is no mean achievement, given the challenges of scale, location, history and resource base, to be ranked by all systems in the top 2% of the world’s 16,000 higher education institutions.
Key Projects
Our ambitions for UCC are set out in the current Strategic Plan, accessible on the web but due to expire in 2012 and requiring reinvention during the coming year. We are your university and collectively, we must enable the future success of this region, continuing to educate and train to the highest standards, conducting research that is, increasingly, world class, and applicable in this region, but above all continuing to spawn world ready and work ready graduates. We must continue to enable foreign direct investment, but also, contribute to the genesis of new local businesses, and the growth of existing businesses. We must graduate creative and professional people to populate the political, social, cultural, legal and healthcare domains of our region and beyond.
We have ambitious targets to educate more international students, creating long-term geopolitical influencers for Ireland, and conduits of Irish business and culture to the globe. To this end we have recently added a joint venture medical school in northern Malaysia and are working energetically towards a joint International College in China. Our alliance with the Irish Management Institute is one element of a plan to effect greater influence in Dublin. The Maritime Energy Research Centre under development at Ringaskiddy in partnership with Cork Institute of Technology and the Irish Navy will be world leading. We are fully committed to enabling the development of the Science Park at Curaheen.
Work is underway to crystallise more effectively a clearly differentiated brand for UCC and to project it on the international stage. We are I believe, validly criticised for underperforming in celebrating the quality and importance of what we do on the wide global stage. In that regard we may have failed the region in the past.
UCC has made remarkable strides over the past three years to respond to the economic crisis and we have recognised the critical importance of innovation and entrepreneurship in recreating success. The introduction of cross university modules on entrepreneurship, the creation of business incubation centres, the introduction of graduate mentoring programmes by successful businessmen, some present, the adoption of advisory boards across the university which today encompass the services of 240 experts external to the university – all testify to the institutions’ responsiveness. Greater collaboration with employers in recent years means that, UCC now provides more “on-the-job” internship and clinical placements for students than any other university in the country. Our aim is to make employment opportunities or volunteering opportunities available to every undergraduate student.
Partnership with industry has enabled us to attract over €24m in awards from Enterprise Ireland in 2010, the highest of any higher education institution in the country, and twice as much as UCD and Trinity combined. We have also been the most successful university in attracting innovation vouchers, sponsored by Enterprise Ireland for small and medium sized enterprises in the three years to 2010. However, recognising the risk that some of you may break into the hymn ‘How Great Thou Art’, let me say that I believe that all of this is but a start and that there is much more to be done by UCC to capitalise on the goodwill of regional businesses who work with us to continually improve the work readiness of our graduates. The creation of an entrepreneurship culture across the whole university, not just in the sciences and business faculties, but within all disciplines, will remain an on-going challenge. But we are committed to meeting that challenge.
And on the matter of strategic partnerships, I celebrate the collaborative and complementary roles played by CIT and UCC in meeting the diverse needs of our local economy and society. Through joint degrees, research collaborations, and necessarily friendly rivalries in an increasingly managed competition, we are judged to have set the national standard for inter-sectoral and inter-institutional cooperation here in Cork
Challenges – Inevitable and Optional
Having reviewed the thrust of UCC’s evolution from College to University, from ivory tower to an institution responsive to societal needs, let me conclude with some remarks on the challenges ahead. I will begin with comments on resources.
Most of you will not believe that the achievements of UCC, and other Irish universities, over the past 10 years have been accomplished with annual funding levels which never exceeded, rarely equalled and most commonly trailed the OECD average. During the Celtic Tiger era we built houses for people who didn’t need or want them, and several motorways to places that might need them in 70 years’ time, but we continued to regard education as a cost rather than as an investment. Yes, our universities have in the past decade punched well above their weight but I am likely speaking to you at the end of a short-lived golden era – unless we face up to the challenges that face us – some of extraneous origin, but many of our own making and under our direct control.
No, I do not expect a government that believes that it is broke to invest more in higher education. But I do expect a government that will have fought more effectively for a morally fair sharing of the European banking burden to so do. I expect our government to persuade the EU and ECB that austerity which restricts investment in the talents of the next generation makes no sense (a view shared, I believe by IMF, and supported by learned Nobel Laureates in Economics); I expect our government to scour the world to find banks in cash-rich nations which recognise the long term value of investment in education, to collaborate in front-funding of a loan scheme for the projected tens of thousands of additional new Irish students presenting in the next 15 years. The validity of greater personal contributions to funding higher education which has always conferred significant individual advantage in lifetime earnings, must be squarely recognised by government. Irish university expenditure per student is now 30% behind that in UK universities (on a purchasing power parity basis). Assertions that we can compete successfully against these odds resurrect memories of the occasion when a deluded Irish politician advised the German Ambassador to bring his government to Dublin to learn how to run a modern economy. Sufficient resourcing of higher education into the future requires immediate, not just hard, but enlightened hard decisions on the part of government; universities will not be shy in playing our part.
But there are other constraints on our success entirely of our own making that can be banished by government, almost overnight. State micro-management of Irish universities has become stifling. A recent pan-European study of autonomy of the universities ranked Ireland 11th in financial freedom, and 11th in staffing autonomy in a context where all international data indicate that university performance is directly proportional to sectoral and institutional autonomy. University College Cork is prescribed the number of staff that it can employ; the ratio of senior to junior academic staff is prescribed; the starting salaries are prescribed; the application of increments is prescribed; the laying off of staff on a “first in first out” basis is prescribed; incentivised early retirement has random effects across the institution making a mockery of strategic planning. Whether a staff member performs to levels that are best in the world or worst in the world makes no difference to his/her remuneration. The imposition of discipline, or the imposition of dismissal for incompetence or poor performance will necessitate a three year peregrination through as many as six layers of internal and external adjudication bodies.
Irish universities are subjected to micromanagement on a daily basis by a centralised national bureaucracy most of whose members never attended university (many may have attended pre 1990 colleges) and who have never worked or managed within higher education. While there has been much political and journalistic hand-wringing concerning the poor performance of Irish universities generally in this year’s world rankings, placing blame on the economic crisis, there has been silence on the absence of any semblance of an institutional management toolkit equivalent to that seen in successful European, American or other international universities. Remedy of this lies in the hands of the Oireachtas through reform of the 1997 Universities Act and the granting to universities of a staff management and development framework that befits institutions that must compete for staff, students and resources on the international market – rather than the model designed for management of our domestic civil service. While our resource challenge is under significant foreign influence at present, the legal and employment regulatory framework is largely under our own domestic control.
The third and final challenge I wish to highlight is a sociological one. Over the past 15 years the state has rightly promoted expansion of higher education to ever larger proportions of the population and has introduced strong programmes to make higher education accessible to disadvantaged minorities. Again, I am pleased to say that UCC leads the sector in the proportion of our student population assisted through social disadvantage, physical disability and lifelong learning support programmes. However, there has been a price which has become increasingly evident. It has become unpopular, indeed politically incorrect, to voice concerns about the needs of academically talented students. In my youth when resources were particularly scarce, care was taken to create opportunities for the brightest students through a variety of scholarship programmes. Today, following expansion and democratisation of higher education, bringing into the universities significant numbers of academically weaker students, with greater need for more academic support from fewer available staff, our ability to maximise the talents of the intellectually gifted have diminished. There is extensive anecdotal evidence of many of our brightest students emigrating after completing Leaving Certificate for overseas education, and never returning. There is, in my view, a requirement to rebalance the portfolio of special support systems to include recognition of the needs of those who, properly supported, will most likely deliver discoveries and innovations that will create whole new fields of human endeavour and new economic paradigms. Silicon Valley was not built by those in the mid-range of the statistical distribution of academic talent. The ICT age, the space age, the nuclear age, the Hollywood age - all were mostly sparked by those in the top 2-5% of academic performers, who attended schools and universities that met their needs in innovative ways. Irish universities can so do (have done so in the era of those alumni that I celebrated earlier) but must be empowered to so do, again, by the state.
Concluding Remarks
What I have shared with you in the last few minutes is not intended to be contentious though I am a firm believer that it is the duty of the universities in every society to hold a mirror up to power. I am a firm believer in the value of dissent in sustaining, long-term, the strength of any society or organisation. I recommend as a Christmas read a book, published some years ago by Dr. Cass Sunstein, Professor at Harvard, Adjunct Professor of Law at UCC and, today, a member of the National Security Council of the White House, a book entitled “Why Society Needs Dissent”. If Irish universities had played a stronger role in this domain during the past decade, perhaps our state might be healthier today. I have raised these matters because I firmly believe that they will determine the effectiveness of our higher education system and the success of this country in the years ahead. We are not helpless in facing the challenges I have set out. Two of the three are wholly within our power and one, the resource challenge is not insurmountable. We, in the universities, are ready to play our part but success will happen only through partnership between the universities and the state. The state bureaucracy has power but often lacks many of the necessary competences while we have many of the competences but not the power. Trust is missing, but can be developed. If James Watson is right, that countries will only be as strong as their universities then I invite you, leaders of the business community in this region, to lobby for, to enable, and to support a more mature relationship between the state and the Irish universities and, together, help make Ireland strong again.
ENDS
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