Professor challenges college to ‘be radical’

A LEADING professor yesterday challenged his own college to change direction and stop striving for a better ranking in the world of academe.

Professor of International Politics at the University of Limerick (UL), Prof Peadar Kirby said the priority of the college instead should be the education of under-graduates about Ireland’s “remarkable neglect” of the environment.

In his thought-provoking inaugural address at UL, Prof Kirby said the Irish economic model is environmentally unsustainable, worsens poverty and should not be held up as an international example of progress.

Prof Kirby urged UL to take a lead by educating all students, irrespective of their course discipline, as to the severe crisis now upon us.

Universities, he said, must chose whether they are educating people for temporary survival in our declining industrial age or for an emerging and more sustainable future society.

Not alone have universities failed to challenge policy makers and the direction they are taking this country but more often than not simply accept, without criticism, the agenda set by government, he said.

Prof Kirby said: “It is disturbing in the extreme to find that more and more of those who lead our universities seem to see the role of the university as being at the service of a particular government project rather than being spaces where such projects are debated, contested and refined, and new projects promoted.

“Indeed, one of our largest universities now states publicly that it is aligning its research priorities with those of government. This is the death knell of the university as we have always known it. It is putting the cart before the horse: universities at their best have always been characterised by their concentration of power through their commitment to the promotion of new ideas. Are we now to have a university system that takes its leading ideas from government and aligns its output to serve these?”

Prof Kirby said there is little about public policy that gives him any confidence that achieving an equal and sustainable society in post Celtic Tiger Ireland are the objectives of policy makers.

He continued: “Our economic production as well as bringing us wealth and sophisticated living beyond our wildest imaginings, has also brought us grim poverty and inequality.

“My challenge to UL, then, is to cease always looking over our shoulder at what the others are going and trying to claw our way up some dubious inter-national ranking of so-called world-class universities. Let’s take the lead and make a radical gesture.”