Dáil debates

Thursday, 27 January 2022

Higher Education Authority Bill 2022: Second Stage (Resumed)

 

5:05 pm

Photo of Ivana BacikIvana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to speak for the Labour Party on this important Bill. I am grateful to my colleague Senator Hoey, who is our spokesperson on higher education, for giving me the benefit of her insights. Obviously, I too have a strong interest in this area, having served a number of terms as a Senator for Dublin University.

I am also very proud of my long association with the law school in Trinity College where for many years I taught and carried out research and administration, which is an important part of any academic job. I am passionate about higher education and teaching. I miss my students and the role of an academic. It is a job that many people go to with a real vocation for teaching and engaging with students.

It was very appropriate that the Minister started his speech on the Bill by acknowledging the enormous adaptability and significant work that has been put in by staff, students and administrators in third level institutions over the past 22 months in adapting to Covid-19. We all acknowledge that it has not been easy. It has been a major burden, especially on students. All of us have heard from parents and students who have been distressed at the lack of face-to-face interaction, the lack of ability to be present on campuses, the lack of capacity to mix with peers and lecturers, and the major disadvantage they have been placed at as a result. There has been a detrimental impact on their studies, but also on their personal and social development. Any of us who are parents, or who know young people who are students, will be well aware of the huge difficulties and problems that has caused for many students and their families. We also acknowledge and commend the staff who have done their very best in very difficult circumstances to provide high-quality teaching, albeit not face to face but remotely. It has been very difficult for everyone so it was appropriate that the Minister acknowledged that. I also want to join him in commending all those engaged in college communities at every level of further and higher education, including universities, colleges and institutes of further education, where we have seen such enormous effort put in to adapt to Covid-19. It is so good to see campuses coming alive again and to see staff, students, administrators and all the communities on college campuses being able to engage face to face and be present again.

I will also refer briefly to the gendered impacts of Covid-19 at third level. This is something many of us will be very conscious of. I should say that I have had engagement through the Athena Swan programme. It is a great programme that we have seen being rolled out across the university sector in this country, as it has been elsewhere, which seeks to ensure that women have equal opportunities to men on campuses for promotion, in particular. We know that Athena Swan has now gone beyond gender. It is also looking at equality, diversity and inclusion programmes more broadly. We knew even before Covid-19 that there were real problems with discrimination against women at third level. Micheline Sheehy Skeffington, who brought a case against the National University of Ireland, Galway, highlighted inbuilt difficulties for women seeking promotion. I again pay tribute to the Minister's predecessor, former Minister of State, Mary Mitchell O'Connor, who brought forward women-only professorships, somewhat controversially, although I defended her very strongly. The evidence of the need for such professorships was so clear as was the provision of positive action measures at third level to address the inbuilt obstacles facing women in career progression.

That brings me back to the point about Covid-19. While gains have been made through those professorships and the Athena Swan programme, with Covid we have unfortunately seen a particularly detrimental impact on women academics whose research output - numerous studies have shown this - has suffered more than that of male colleagues. Across all professions and careers, women have borne the disproportionate burden of home schooling to the detriment of career progression. In any debate on third level and the updating of its governance models, let us focus on the need to ensure we have not rowed back on progress made in addressing gender inequality. Figures on women in professorship positions at higher levels are still very skewed against them. We have seen, very happily, a woman provost elected in Trinity College Dublin and women are now heading up other higher education institutions. It is great to see that progress being made, but we are all very conscious that there is still a lot to be done to ensure we do not have gender inequality in third level.

There are clearly other issues around diversity, especially in respect of economic disadvantage and class bias, which is something I have worked on in Trinity's law school scholarship programme. We have got a very strong model with the Trinity access programme, as have other universities and colleges, in trying to address the problem of inbuilt lower levels of progression to third level from students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. That is something that has to be addressed. I do not think any debate on third level governance should take place without reference to that. There are some specific provisions in the Bill where more could be done on diversity.

A debate is needed on third level governance. As the Minister said, this legislation seeks to bring the statutory framework for the HEA up to date, given that the current legislation is 50 years old and has been in place since 1971. We need to acknowledge that despite the need to update that legislation, the higher education sector has played a major role in the development of our society and country. The contribution made by academics from all colleges and universities to civic engagement and public service has been immense. We have seen that throughout the pandemic but also long before it. For that reason, it is critical that this legislation must emphasise the principles of autonomy and academic freedom that have served us so well. We need to be very clear that in bringing our statutory framework for higher education governance up to date we are not creating more problems, in particular by creating a one-size-fits-all model that is overly bureaucratic and treats all higher education institutions as alike when they are patently not. It is very good and very positive that the differences are acknowledged in the legislation.

The Minister referred to the different sectoral Acts. The universities Act is very different from the legislation under the 2018 Act that set up what are now the technological universities. Even within the university sector, Trinity College has a very unique governance structure that is acknowledged by the Minister and the legislation. Concerns around preserving autonomy of institutions must be addressed and brought into the legislation. There are very legitimate concerns among many of the higher education institutions, universities and colleges about a lack of regard for autonomy and difference and too much centralising of power with the Minister. Consequently, that could have a detrimental effect on academic freedom and creativity and could see a stifling of the kind of creative endeavour that has brought so much value, not just monetary but social, to our country. That is very important.

There is much to welcome in the legislation. Clearly, the greater emphasis on the role of apprenticeships, and the need to update and modernise governance structures for apprenticeships and training, is very important. We would all acknowledge that, but it is also valid to speak of particular concerns. I might go through a few specific ones. I know we will speak more about them on Committee Stage. Conradh na Gaeilge has raised concerns about an insufficient emphasis on the Irish language, which is one particular point. While the provisions in sections 15 and 16 for the composition of the board of the HEA to be gender balanced are welcome, there is still a missed opportunity to create more provisions around recognition of diversity other than gender diversity. For example, if only one board member has direct experience of conditions for students, that may not be sufficient to represent the experiences of perhaps the most important stakeholders in this sector. That is crucial.

We also need to ensure the legislation provides adequately for the views of academic staff, research staff and others to be heard. Trade union representation is crucial too. There is a frustration for many in the sector who feel they might be demoted to poorly defined stakeholders and that their concerns might not carry the same weight as others at the table whose voices are more clearly enshrined in the law. Having due consideration to equality, diversity and inclusion should come through and underlie all the provisions in the legislation, especially those around board membership for the HEA.

There are also issues around the tone of the legislation.

Section 9 enshrines as a function of the HEA that it should provide value for money for funding provided to third level institutions. There is concern among many of those in third level with regard to placing undue emphasis on monetary values of degrees and of outputs. The word "output" has a terribly bureaucratic connotation. It is often very hard to measure the output from universities or colleges in monetary terms. Some of the most important discoveries by researchers in history were made as a result of what would have been seen as intrinsically less monetarily valuable projects. Insulin, penicillin and Viagra are three products of immense value to Ireland's economy and the biopharmaceutical sector. These products, as we know, were all discovered by accident, as was quinine, which many of us enjoy in an occasional gin and tonic. There are lots of examples throughout history of products that were discovered as by-products of unrelated research and experimentation. I refer to the pacemaker, artificial sweeteners, Velcro, the X-ray and Play-Doh, which are all examples of discoveries that were made often as a result of projects that were being funded for completely different purposes or that were not seen as fundable. We need to be careful in this legislation that we are again giving due cognisance to the idea of creativity at academic level.

President Michael D. Higgins has, given his background, spoken extensively about academic freedom Last year, he delivered a particularly good speech at the Scholars at Risk conference on academic freedom and the value placed on education. He stated: "Academic courses are now viewed as economic units whose success is too often judged in terms of arbitrary quantitative outputs of graduates, as opposed to the quality of the courses and the standards of academic excellence achieved by those participating in them." He also wondered if, in future, tourists would tramp through universities and be told tales of where lectures were once given and of disputations, brilliant expositions encountered or books consulted, and if all of this would be consigned to history with the new model of more bureaucratic corporate language that many people see as underpinning this Bill. In the explanatory memorandum, there is extensive reference to economic utility of universities and further and higher education institutions. We need to be clear that we are also talking about much more intangible and less easily quantifiable benefits to our third level sector.

The Labour Party had a successful programme in education under former Minister, Niamh Bhreathnach. Nobody knows better than us how the provision of high-quality third level education can usher in economic prosperity. It can raise the standard of living. I remember Ruairí Quinn, as Minister for Education, speaking glowingly about the growth in numbers referenced by the Minister and the enormous benefit to society. We can be so proud of the proportion of our population who now go on third level or further and higher education. It is really outstanding in Europe. We need to make more of that. It is such a huge benefit to society that so many of our young people now have the opportunity to go to third level. That is important. It is beyond a monetary value. To define education purely in economic terms places in peril courses which are not seen to attract foreign direct investment or which do not neatly fall into the provision of economic benefit to industries which might form our most lucrative exports. Typically, courses in the arts and humanities are seen as less intrinsically or economically valuable in this way, and yet they have enormous benefit to us as a society. It is important to emphasise that.

I want to refer to general funding concerns. Again, any debate about governance in higher education must take seriously the issue of funding. The Labour Party welcomes increases in and changes to the SUSI grant scheme for undergraduate and postgraduate students, but we still are anxious to see more done. We are conscious in particular of the extremely high, in many cases impossible, cost of accommodation for students. It costs between €7,000 and €11,000 per annum for accommodation on campus for those lucky enough to get it in UCD and Trinity College. These are exorbitant costs for students. All of us have heard stories of students sharing unsuitable cramped spaces due to unaffordable rents and competing with paid professionals for scarce rental accommodation in cities. Developments designated as so-called student accommodation are often still too costly. Again, this is a crucial issue because this cost on top of the €3,000 annual student contribution charge means students are paying very highly for their education.

I have spoken with the Minister previously about the Cassells report and the need for the nettle to be finally grasped with regard to the big question of funding for third level. The Cassells report is now nearly six years old. The Labour Party has called for the key option of State funding to be adopted by the Government rather than either of the other two options set out. The Minister said he is against the loan option, which is a welcome announcement. I do not think anyone could argue in favour the loan option. It is crucial that we move now to a situation where students do have access to free third level education. We can be very proud of the numbers who go on to third level, but the high cost of accommodation and the €3,000 charge clearly constitute a deeply off-putting deterrent for many.

My final comment is in regard to an issue that has been very much topical in universities and third level, namely, the issue of non-disclosure agreements, NDAs. My colleague, Senator Ruane, has conducted a survey on the prevalence of non-disclosure agreements and confidence agreements and her concern that they are being used to suppress the sharing of information about harassment and bullying across third level. I have spoken with constituents in Dublin Bay South and with those I served when I was a Trinity Senator. These people told me of their experience of non-disclosure agreement in different institutions. I will not name any institution. There is a concern that NDAs may protect those who have engaged in unacceptable behaviour. I have submitted a parliamentary question to the Minister on how the HEA will address the practice relating to NDAs, as well as addressing concerns around incidents of bullying and harassment across third level.

The Labour Party will support this legislation, but we have concerns about the tone of it and around the need to ensure adequate protection for autonomy of institutions and for academic freedoms within all third level institutions. We believe these are critical points to be considered in our debates on the Bill.

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