NUI Disbanded

Maestro

So, the Minister of Education has unilaterally decided to disband the NUI.

http://bit.ly/NUI_Disbanded

This arrogance merely further demonstrates the autocratic nature of the current government. The NUI is an important instrument in higher education. It functions as the gatekeeper and ensures standards of the highest level. It is the last bastion of academic collegiality in Ireland (the IUA has ensured that Managerialism has replaced the collegiate system in the Universities).

This is the beginning of the corporatisation and privatisation of higher education in Ireland.

As a footnote, let's not forget that the NUI also has THREE seats in the Seanad - something politicians would love to get their hands on.

Dionysus

It would have been more appropriate, given the tiny size of this country, to have dissolved UCD/UCC/UCG etc and put them all under the name NUI. Instead, in the past ten years state policy has been to allow each university to in effect break away and promote itself and in the process sacrifice the idea of a national university.

How we are supposed to compete internationally with such divisions is beyond me. Small-minded parochial thinking once again.

Dionysus

Just after reading today's Irish Times on the NUI disbanding (http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0122/1224262842800.html ; http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0122/1224262843984.html). I'm much more annoyed about the entire thing now, in no small measure due to Michael D's anger at this sudden overthrow of the NUI.

In particular, where now do all of us who decided to attend an NUI university and were awarded primary degrees, masters or doctorates from the NUI stand with our qualifications? It defies belief that this decision has been made without a single consideration for the hundreds of thousands of Irish people who have been awarded NUI qualifications.

The position of our qualifications has not even been considered, if the public utterances are anything to go on. But the position of these awards which I, and hundreds of thousands of other people worked for, matters greatly.

Many of us could have chosen other universities but opted for the NUI because, rightly or wrongly, we believe in the idea of a national education institution which unites all the Irish universities in a world where we, the Irish, are just a blip. We could - easily - have jumped across to Britain and made our contributions to universities such as Cambridge or Oxford. We chose, instead, to stay at home out of a sense of patriotism, in the best and most honourable sense of that word, to our country, and the idea of Ireland.

This is a really bad public policy decision. I will be writing to my local TDs to get it rescinded and proposing that the constituent universities in this tiny state of Ireland be strengthened within the NUI framework rather than weakened. Despite the aspirations of UCD under Hugh Brady to strengthen UCD at the expense of the other universities, all Irish universities will be weaker as a result of this.

Dionysus

And, by the way, according to The Irish Times above Batt O'Keefe never even turned up in Dáil Éireann to defend his decision to abolish the NUI. Dick Roche was sent in to answer questions, usually by saying he was not in a position to answer them. This is bad politics in every sense of those words.

El Siglo

Should we organise some sort of a demonstration? It's actually really sad, there was even after the 1997 reforms a great level of camaraderie between graduates. A degree from UCD was equal to that of NUIM or UCC. Now it's all gone.