Speech by Dr Michael P. Mortell,
President, The National University of Ireland, Cork
at the Conferring of Arts Degrees, Thursday, 24 July 1997 at 12.30 p.m.
 
SOCRATES

I spoke, at last year’s conferrings, about the University’s vision of itself as an Irish-European institution. The University had at that time just made its application to the European Commission for the award of a SOCRATES Institutional Contract. This contract provides the framework within which we engage in a wide range of collaborative activities with European partner universities - including the exchange of students, the joint development of courses, the organisation of specialised courses of teaching. These activities arise from several of the University’s objectives for the future; the pursuit of innovation, the development of partnership, the adaptation of our teaching to the changing needs of our students.

The result of our bid to the European Commission for support of our European partnership activities is now known, and this result is at once a sources of satisfaction and of disappointment. First and foremost, the contract which the University has now established with the European Commission acknowledges the success of our student exchange programme. So, it reinforces the intense satisfaction which we take in the achievements of many of you who are graduating today, and who have spent a period of study abroad in another European country.

You have gone to study as full-time students in another country, in another system, and your success contributes, not only to your own future prospects as a citizen and a worker in the European Union, but also to the University’s high standing among its partners. At the same time, some 300 European students come to study here: places in UCC are in high demand among our partners, and the award of an Institutional Contract acknowledges the hard work undertaken by many Departments across the University in teaching these students and in helping them to adapt to the conditions of work here. For my own part, I am happy to acknowledge the work, not only of you, our European ambassadors, but also of those here in UCC who accommodate visiting European students in their classes.

The success of our application for support in the extension of our European collaborative activities is a further source of pride. UCC has emerged from this selection process as one of the leading proponents of European activity in Ireland. Our Institutional Contract spans the widest range of activities of any in the State. UCC is the only institution to have been awarded a prestigious European Teaching Fellowship. It is the only institution to have received approval for its Intensive Programmes- these are a range of innovative developments which will bring students from different countries together for a brief intense specialise course of teaching.

On the basis of support which it will receive from the Commission, the University will bring European teachers to Cork for short period of teaching, so that students who do not travel to other countries can benefit from our extensive network of partners. The University is thus set to realise - and to realise with success - some of the objectives which I described last year in outlining our European policy.

Our feelings of accomplishment, which we share with those of you who are graduating today, are nonetheless coloured by some disappointment. Why? Simply because the European Commission has not been able to match the range of its own educational ambitions with adequate levels of funding. Now, it is always the case that we must grapple with problems of funding. Against this background, the University has itself over a number of years significantly increased the contribution it makes to the exchange of students and other collaborative activities and aims to do so again in the coming year. But the shortfall in funding from the Commission for the range of activities included in the Institutional Contract is too great to be sustained in the medium and long term.

And so I must say that the European Commission’s vision of the "Europeanisation" of the university curriculum, at all levels of study, will not be realised unless it can raise funding to the level of its educational vision.

This is not only a matter of funding for universities. It also affects individual students and their families. I believe the level of the grants awarded to Irish students travelling to European universities to be far too low. The case of European collaboration makes particular demands of the Commission. The active involvement of the European Union is a key catalyst to inter-university partnerships.

Multi-university partnerships require support in part because of the otherwise insuperable difficulties of co-ordinating the budgets of institutions across Europe. And finally, ambitious and innovative universities like University College, Cork will be faced with hard choices in the year 2000 and the following years, when the SOCRATES programme will be reviewed: we are unlikely to be able to afford the level of financial commitment which the European Commission assumes (for some of our projects are being funded at as little as 20% of cost), and at the same time develop our capacity for delivering a high-quality curriculum for our students in other ways.

The SOCRATES programme runs until 200, as I have said. The coming years will be critical in ensuring that this initiative receives the support that it merits. I look to all actors in this debate - to the Commission, the European Parliament, to our own Government - to meet the challenge of giving real effect to the development of the European mission which we share with our partners.