Professor Mary Gallagher:

I thank Senator Marie-Louise O'Donnell for having organised this discussion. I am really happy to appear before the committee to speak about what I love, which is my work in higher education. It will not be just about my work, obviously. I need to state that I am not representing the views of UCD or speaking for UCD in any way. As the committee is aware, higher education is a very diverse sector and almost anything I say will be true of some of it but it will not be true of all of it. I just want to make that disclaimer. I know I am protected by a certain amount of privilege but I would probably need to be on some kind of witness protection programme to say some things that are probably true of the whole lot. Everybody is doing their best and there are still huge problems. I hope what I am going to say makes sense. I have tried to compress it into the seven minutes but I think that is sometimes at the cost of coherence.

The first subtitle I have is the idea of a national debate. I really think we need a national debate on higher education. It should focus on what Ireland wants from higher education. We have to make a distinction between higher education and further education. If one says "higher", one means superior, a higher order. It is a different thing. It is to educate at a higher level. What do we mean by "higher"? I think we might mean critical and creative thinking or, at least, a critical and creative engagement with detail and with depth in a given area. Of course, one needs a certain amount of knowledge and information to be able to engage in that way, but I think that is what we should be looking for from higher education in this country.

I took about two years out of my day job to write a book about what I think Ireland should be looking for from higher education. It took me about two years to write it and it was published in 2012. I called it Academic Armageddon: An Irish Requiem for High Education. I did not realise I needed to be in a witness protection programme before I would do something like that. It was to call attention to one major point - how making a business out of education, any education, including higher education, is really at the heart of our problem in this country, not just ours but in other countries too.

I think this is an organic problem which is starting to affect second level too. One sees it in all the language schools that we are forced to close in Ireland but one also sees the problems and tensions that exist between the private secondary schools and the public secondary schools, the fee-paying and the non-fee-paying schools, the grind schools and the institutes. Of course, education is an organic system. That is why I am appearing before the committee. The reason I called the book Academic Armageddonwas because what is happening in the western world, especially in the English-speaking or global world system, is that academic standards and academic integrity are being destroyed. What I mean by that is that in some cases a kind of a funny version of what is academic is being made into the be-all and end-all of everybody's life. It seems it has to be everybody's life. We have only one precious finite life, as Senator O'Donnell said. We all have finite lives. All our youth are being told academic success is the be-all and end-all. I really think that is what is destroying academic standards. It is curious. They are victims of their own sort of success. When that book came out, it came out to silence; no public refutation but no public response. I think that if even 10% of the analysis of that book was well-founded, it would have merited a national debate. I really do think that.

What do I think we should do in Ireland? We should stop allowing higher education institutions to be run as competitive businesses. Of course, they are not all run as competitive businesses but some are and there is a trend. We should stop pretending that it is possible to take the studying out of studenting, that one can be a student without studying. That is not possible. We should stop pretending that students are clients. We should stop letting them think that is what their contract is with the higher education institution and also stop pretending that 85% of Ireland's youth are academically inclined and should be going to university because these are all, in my view, damaging lives. I was going to point to Germany but we all know about how it avoids this damage and how, as a result, apprenticeships rather than degrees are so highly valued and why France is trying to imitate Germany. France points to Germany. In Germany why are such able people going into apprenticeships and France is trying to go that way? Either Irish school leavers are up to 50% more academically inclined and talented than their European peers or else they are being misdirected into further academic endeavour when they would be probably better suited to following a less pseudo-academic training, whatever that might be. I definitely think that England, the US and Australia, not Scotland, are the wrong models for us to look towards as a university because that is where the most intractable problems are coming from, the atrocious idea of exorbitant tuition fees, whoever pays them, included.

If, as I believe, the Anglo, aka global, brand is toxic, it is linked to the spread of a zombie culture in higher education wherever it is applied. We should be looking to more free, responsible, sane, healthy, independent northern European models instead. I do not know why we have chosen to copy the worst of the Anglo global world. All Anglo businesses, Anglo universities, are in common market competition with each other and they all see branding as the answer. We have it on the radio before the six o'clock news where they are fighting for customers.

Distinguishing the university from its so-called competitors is of the essence.

They are synonymous always with extortionary prices. That is what distinguishes those awful little shoes one can get in Dunnes Stores for a fiver. My children wear the Converse brand. They are just a brand but they ruin one's feet the same way as the little flat runners from Dunnes Stores. Be aware of branding.

If one is a business, one does not necessarily have time to focus on the education part but in so far as the corporate university focuses on education, it is bent on increasing student throughput and retention. What that means in practice is not awarding fail grades. There is also a focus on staff performance but I cannot go there because I do not have time. This is becoming a terrible problem. The real causes of poor retention figures are not just the plunging staff-student ratios - in other words, a funding issue - or an exodus of experienced staff into early retirement, etc., and recessionary cuts, but also the shameful codding of school leavers into university. What we see happening at the educational chalk face is an almost irresistible dumbing down of academic subjects. One might say, "So what?" In my subject there is an awful lot of "what" about that. I teach French and either a student can read French and understand what he or she is reading or her or she cannot. Either he or she can write French that someone else is going to understand or he or she cannot. Either he or she can speak and understand what somebody else is saying or he or she cannot. When one is awarding a D minus grade, one is saying a person can do none of those things but one is getting the student over the hump and one is not getting grief from the system that is bearing down on one to push the student through. Failure is just not acceptable. It is very difficult to do it.