Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I am glad we are having this debate, however brief, because what is happening in higher education, particularly in the context of Senator Quinn's contribution, deserves more attention. I share his view that the Minister's attitude to the universities is destructive, negative, unhelpful and the antithesis of what one wishes to be the outcome of the review. One can wish for all the wonderful things in higher education, with which I agree, but the Minister delights in taking cheap shots. The cheapest of cheap shots is the suggestion that somehow it is the universities' fault that levels of participation by disadvantaged groups is less than we would wish when pre-primary, primary and second level education is underfunded. Where one has under-funded primary, pre-primary and second level education with the generous distribution of State funds to fee-paying second level schools, the privileged, pampered children of the rich will be able to buy the quality of second level education which will guarantee their presence at third level. Whoever is at fault for that, it is most assuredly not the universities.

While I am not an unqualified admirer of the universities, the line the Minister for Education and Science is adopting is the most manifest nonsense. Since arriving here more years ago than we need to elaborate on, I have been an advocate of spectacularly increased investment in research. I have not simply been an advocate of the focused research much beloved of some State bodies, I believe we must invest heavily in fundamental research which does not have a clearly demonstrable, immediate commercial benefit. We must accept that by its nature fundamental research will not have commercial spin-offs in the short term.

We must be very careful when talking about the universities of the USA. While the USA has some of the best universities in the world, it is also home to a considerable number of the worst. We should be very careful to ensure we do not end up aping a model which gives us the worst of the US system without any of its quality. A former lecturer of mine in UCD, Dr. Paddy O'Flynn, addressed one of the nonsenses of the HEA in a short letter to The Irish Times when the issue of privatisation of some of our universities first arose. He pointed out that it was not Harvard's private status which made it so successful, it was its extraordinary wealth of the order of $30 to $40 billion in endowments. With that sort of money, it does not matter if a university is public or private. While they are fine institutions, we will not succeed in turning any of our universities into Harvard or Yale unless we undergo 100 years of prosperity during which a long list of benevolent philanthropists appears seeking to donate large amounts of money. We had one Mr. Chuck Feeney, but we will not get another one. He did a fine job while he was in the humour to do so.

I have one reservation on the motion, which disappoints me. Senator Minihan may correct me, but on examination, it appears largely to rehash the introductory paragraph of the Government's terms of reference for the OECD review. The word "teaching" is not mentioned in the motion at all. I was careful when I stated that I recognised the importance of research in third level education. We have a system of third level education in which there is no formal preparation of teachers to teach. When the RTCs were established, the steering committee responsible recommended that every person recruited to teach in the colleges should undergo a training period. The Department of Education and Science dropped that requirement, presumably, because it was too expensive to implement. People are being asked to teach who have never been trained to do so. Anybody who suggests that people who were never trained to teach should be evaluated 25 years later on the basis of their ability to do so is being profoundly unjust.

Most of us in the sector have learned how to teach the hard way. Nobody showed us how. I have supported the universities which have tried to a degree to create a mystique of research according to which it is suggested that in the absence of a high-powered research function, an institution will not be in a position to teach undergraduates adequately. If no research were being conducted anywhere, that would be true because no change or improvement would occur. The argument that fine researchers in a Department make for well taught students is wide open. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology in the United States of America has begun to signal that the obsession of universities with the generation of publications has caused them to neglect the teaching function. In the case of my own profession, the board has argued that while this practice has produced engineers who are extremely highly qualified academically, their skills are of little relevance to the work they will do on leaving college.

I am seriously concerned about the issue of quality assurance, not because I disapprove, but because we may find ourselves rediscovering the wheel. A considerable amount of quality assurance is in place at every level of performance.

While the HEA places us in the third band of those countries in which public funding of higher education is below 80%, the Department of Education and Science, interestingly, states that figure is closer to 90%. It is disturbing that the HEA and the Department cannot agree about how much money we are spending. A good number of the European countries in which the public sector contribution to higher education is higher than ours are those which are identifiably more competitive than us. We would be extremely well advised not to allow the deceptively low figures of the USA, Canada and Australia to lead us along a certain route.

The Democrat candidate for the US presidency, Mr. John Kerry, has adopted in his manifesto the aim of making college affordable for working families once more. US universities have been removed from the spectrum of ambition of working families.