“This strategic plan sets out to secure Trinity’s future so that it will continue to play its pivotal role in helping Ireland to become a most productive place in which to invent, work and learn and a most civilised place in which to live and contribute to local and global society.”
This statement, set out in Trinity’s published Strategic Plan for the five-year period between 2014 and 2019, lays out the ideals of the university and thereby its commitment to uphold its educational promise to its students.
The question becoming increasingly pertinent, however, is how such traditional ideals can exist alongside pedagogical innovation in a rapidly monetising academic field.
The corporatisation of academia has undergone a clear progression over the past three decades, with the obvious example being higher education in the US, where the balancing of a well-rounded core curriculum with targeted profit margins and enrolment figures has become increasingly precarious.
It is easy to feel as if the traditional educational experience has become marginalised by institutions obsessed with metrics, wherein the individual student is reduced to a systematised input-output value.
“Education has become a consumer good, thus eroding the value of education as a means in and of itself but rather as a means to an end.”
Arguably, this neoliberal approach has it roots, at least in the UK, in the increase of tuition fees. An increase to £9,000 in 2012, coupled with the subsequent uncapping of student number quotas, has led to the accelerated expansion of higher education programmes.
The problem with this is twofold. In order to maintain this rapid acceleration and development, universities have been forced to lower entry requirements to keep enrolment artificially high. Alongside this country-wide phenomenon, a standardisation of student outcomes has occurred, whereby the government has imposed a teaching framework aimed at quantifying and evaluating education as a corporate product. By and by, the curriculum is being diluted, and the autonomy of universities is suffering.
The very existence of tuition fees depends on the notion of education as a service: the student recognises the private benefits of higher education, and thereby enters into a contract in which the beneficiary contributes to the cost of providing such benefits. Herein lies the second problem; this kind of interaction is arguably not in line with the ideals of education as a means to better oneself.
Perhaps the need to pay for education has the effect of prompting students to focus more seriously on their studies. However, overwhelmingly it seems that fee increases cause students to take a somewhat utilitarian view of higher education. One obvious manifestation of this has been a reduction in the number of students studying humanities in the UK and Ireland, and the core liberal arts curriculum has suffered as a result.
Education has become a consumer good, thus eroding the value of education as a means in and of itself but rather as a means to an end.
“Students of universities such as Trinity have never been merely passive consumers, and both UK and Irish institutions have witnessed in this past year the culmination of these frustrations with the education system.”
Nearing the end of the Strategic Plan’s outlined five-year period, it seems timely to review Trinity’s progress against its objectives. Essential was the task of securing a sustainable financial basis for the future. Nevertheless, there seems to remain a healthy dose of resistance towards the neoliberal approach to education which favours a profit-driven direction. Students of universities such as Trinity have never been merely passive consumers, and both UK and Irish institutions have witnessed in this past year the culmination of these frustrations with the education system.
In the UK, for instance, academics went on strike over the end of defined-benefit pensions. In Trinity, College administration sparked mass protests over the controversial proposed implementation of supplemental exam fees. The student body was unanimous in its rejection of the fees because it seemed fundamentally wrong to place a price on exams which would have a monumental impact on our futures.
Perhaps, then, this energy and outrage should be harnessed into combatting the marketisation of higher education, and in ensuring that Irish universities do not follow the same path as their US and UK counterparts.
Having just expressed this sentiment, however, we are brought to the core dichotomy of the debate surrounding universities and profit. On one hand, it is easy to shout from the roof of the Berkeley Library about how education should be a free and accessible liberty for all, but only the naive would believe that it is always so simple in practice. The question here is not whether universities are becoming more profit driven, because they undoubtedly are, but rather if the traditional learning space of universities is no longer a workable model, and whether its demise is necessary for any one university to develop at a sustainable rate.
Trinity has always aligned itself with the academic needs and ambitions of Irish society as a whole. Imperative to this vision is the economic means to both invest in its existing and future infrastructure, and to continue to research and innovate in order to remain a contender on the global stage of academia.
Included in Trinity’s published Strategic Plan are the words “we will be true to our identity of innovation within tradition.” Indeed, one hopes that Trinity will continue to strive for development, whilst maintaining and upholding its educational ideals, as this is the only way that higher education can survive in the form that we, the students, want it to.
