Higher education landscape –a crib sheet!

A recent report in the Guardian mentioned how philosopher AC Grayling’s New College of the Humanities due to open in (Bloomsbury) London in September, which is focussed exclusively on teaching degrees in the Humanities, will be dominated by students from private schools with just one in five offers being made to state school pupils. The fee of £18,000 a year was according to Grayling reflective of the cost of providing a ‘very high –quality, intensive education’.

Our funders may not share Grayling’s view that high quality intensive education in the humanities costs, and that may not reflect our bottom line budget, but it is a useful reflection on a trend in institutions (elsewhere), their identity and location and cost. As we are drawing closer to approaching the July deadline when the HEA expects our Institution along with the other HEIs to have submitted to them, our mission as a University, with our strategic intentions as to where we propose to position ourselves in the Irish higher education system, it might be useful to muse on these matters a little. According to a letter sent to Presidents by Tom Boland, the HEA CEO, (on the HEA website), submissions need to cover the institution’s distinctive mission, its preferred institutional type and structure, having regard to current strengths, its institutional alliances and its involvement in regional clusters.-  The ‘current strengths’ piece reminds us that this is a reality check, and should be reflective to some degree of what we are currently composed: in what disciplines and areas our students and staff mainly lie.

A recent (first) visit to DCU campus for a meeting of the new Irish Research Council (IRC- logo forthcoming!) served to highlight for me how institutions sometimes feel different, in a way which is not simply a product of building age or design. It has more to do perhaps with the ethos or focus of the place which can be evident in imponderable ways, but ensures that, although in broad measure all higher education institutions within the HEA remit are places committed to similar ideals and aims, and all engage in the academic and educational endeavour, the ‘mix’ or feel of each is different-not inferior or superior-just not the same. That difference, however elusive, might be exactly what defines us-but we may not realise it. It may also be what our students and graduates best and most easily identify-and remember. It may be why they choose our institution over others, and may determine why and if they stay there. Academic staff, (although of course motivated by the realities of employment opportunities), also often move between institutions of different types for broadly similar reasons.

So if you are a student or staff member what does UCC offer-or what might you perceive as a visiting academic in our institution? Easiest to work from the outside in on this:

UCC has a beautiful visually and aesthetically pleasing campus with a commitment to the visual arts and architecture evident in the sculptures in the President’s  garden as well as the Glucksman.

It is a substantial campus in scope giving a sense of the breath and range of the disciplines within –what is often termed a comprehensive University. It has itself a history and considerable heritage (archives etc.), and a commitment to the historic as well as the modern. Nonetheless although located in the heart of the city-it is moving (unconsciously perhaps!) to the western edge more recently-and so in danger perhaps of becoming ‘suburban’. (Memo to ourselves: watch this as UCC has always been a city campus and an important part of the (second) city.)

It has a campus full of students, not in an overcrowded way, but in a visible sense as their presence around the grounds shows it to be a fun place for sport, games and cultural and social engagement. It is also an environment where students concentrate on knowledge, and are removed of other some concerns. It is generally safe, for instance, and there are no considerations such as a strict dress code etc-(in that sense we are like Google!) as the priority is time (uncrowded) and effort given over to thinking and reflecting and growing intellectually. This facilitates students at many levels but prioritises undergraduate and postgraduate up to doctoral and post doctoral level.

It is an intellectual and elite institution, focussed on research for knowledge. The campus is an environment which houses and values a range of disciplinary experts (our academic staff) who are hired, valued and indeed attracted in, in order to make UCC a site of the deepest possible engagement with intellectual argument and scientific discovery, thereby ensuring nationally Ireland is equipped to engage in dialogue and participate on a world basis in research for knowledge.

Clustering or connecting with the positions of other institutions regionally, is a more nebulous one. I can say that in my own discipline I have seen that it can be a destination of choice for many graduates, who on completion of studies elsewhere -e.g. WIT- want a University experience. For them it may perhaps offer a more theoretical component, complementary to courses where the emphasis elsewhere is otherwise. In that sense it offers either a wider scope, or range, or options to a higher level in many subject areas, which are pursued from a different (equally valid) perspective elsewhere. In itself this reflects the fact that institutionally, University College Cork houses, in equal measure, research and teaching which embraces applied, wholly theoretical, and blue skies thinking, as well as valuing thinking for no purpose at all.

How is that for a start?