Universities should be free to ‘hire and fire’ and set pay

THIRD-LEVEL colleges should be free to hire and fire staff to compete with the world’s best universities, claimed the chair of the Higher Education Authority (HEA).

But former Ericsson Ireland chief executive, John Hennessy, believes that, as well as changes to internal practices set down by decades of tradition in colleges, greater freedom on salary levels strictly set down by his organisation are required to help Ireland attract the world’s leading academics and researchers.

The HEA allocates Government funding to universities, institutes of technology and teacher training colleges and advises the Department of Education on policy relating to the sector. In a speech to the Association of University Administrators’ annual conference at University College Dublin, Mr Hennessy said a key differentiation between the private and public sectors is to be found in human resources policies, mainly because of the different missions of the two sectors.