Whoever leads will face a cross-border university challenge
The state of higher education in the north-west means a cross-border university would be welcomed, says Breandan Mac Suibhne
‘A Taoiseach who appointed Eoghan Murphy to deal with housing cannot be said to be overly bothered by “the better angels of our nature...”’
“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here...”
WELL, indeed, might Leo Varadkar have been thinking of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as he rose to speak at the Alliance Party pre-conference dinner in Belfast last March.
The world did little note what he said there and more is the pity, because he said something of significance. And the world not having noted what he said, he has said it again elsewhere and he has done so more than once. Specifically, Varadkar has said that he would “love to see” deeper cross-border cooperation in the north-west, including a “cross-border university across two campuses”, meaning one in Derry and one in Letterkenny. And Varadkar envisages this cross-border university as part of “a new deal for the whole region”, meaning Derry, Donegal, and west Tyrone.
The sorry story of higher education in that region is well known. In the 1960s, the unionist regime in Stormont balked at the idea of locating a large campus of the New University of Ulster in a predominantly nationalist city with the bulk of its catchment area across the Border in Donegal. A new campus was built, not in Derry, but in the safely unionist town of Coleraine. Derry’s Magee College later became part of the multi-campus University of Ulster (later rebranded Ulster University). However, the university never properly developed it, consistently favouring Belfast (the city and suburban Jordanstown) and Coleraine in the allocation of faculty and staff, courses and resources.
Bluntly, the north-west has been left to suck on the hind tit. Only last month, Ulster University secured a £126m “loan” from Stormont to cover a £164m over-spend on the development of its Belfast campus and reneged on promises to develop a medical school in Derry.
In fact, Ulster University appears committed to asset-stripping its Derry campus. Among the subjects which it no longer offers there are English, foreign languages, history, international politics, peace and conflict studies, psychology, sociology, and restorative justice. To study those subjects one must go to Belfast or Coleraine. Extensive library holdings to support teaching in those fields have been sold off. And bizarrely, with peace and conflict studies no longer taught in Derry, the John Hume/Tip O’Neill Chair of Peace is now de facto in Belfast — not the city of Hume nor the region of O’Neill’s forebears.
In 1995, in the early stages of the peace process, Bill Clinton delivered a famous speech in Derry at the announcement of that position (originally, the O’Neill Chair).
Does Clinton know? Comparison illuminates the scale of failure. In the 1980s, Ed Walsh led the development of a university in Limerick that quickly established itself as an engine for regional growth. And Limerick, which is about the same size as Derry (both with populations just under 100,000), is closer to two cities with long-established universities (Cork and Galway) than Derry is to Belfast — or Dublin, Maynooth, or Galway, where most university students from the north-west now study.
Limerick now has about 16,000 students. UU has just over a quarter of that number in Derry — 4,313. The direct and indirect consequences for employment in the two regions are immense. So, too, are the consequences for social and cultural development.
Joe McHugh was appointed Minister of Education in October 2018. His Donegal constituency is part of the border-severed region, centred on Derry, that remains deprived of the economic and cultural driver that is a successful university. His constituents travel long distances to pursue higher education. And it is they who spend large amounts of money far from home — not least paying exorbitant rents in Dublin. Indeed, McHugh was once himself one of them — taking the bus up to Dublin in the early 1990s and then another out to Maynooth.
McHugh, then, doubtless deserves credit for Varadkar’s conviction that the north-west — “the whole region”, as he put it — would benefit from a “cross-border university”. Still, McHugh has yet to explain, to his own constituents, to the wider region, and, indeed, to the country what he envisages and what steps are being taken to deliver it.
The recent General Election brings some urgency to the matter. So, too, do developments in higher education. The humanities and social sciences are currently under severe stress in the academy, with pressure on students to see their years in university not as a period for “further education” but rather as training for the workplace. In Britain, the University of Sunderland recently cut politics, history and language courses and announced that it would henceforth be “career-focused and professions-facing”; in place of politics, history, and languages, Sunderland will develop strengths in health-related disciplines such as medicine, physiotherapy and occupational therapy. You can translate that as “teach geriatric nursing”. It appears that Ulster University has a similar fate in mind for its neglected Derry campus.
And so, does Joe McHugh envisage a “cross-border university” where students will have opportunities to study the humanities and social sciences? Is the region of Brian Friel and Frank McGuinness, Seamus Deane and Susan McKay to be denied an English department, and that of John Hume and Martin McGuinness a politics department? Will the Troubles not be studied in a university in the city where they began — in part because it had no university? Will people from the region that comprises the most populous Gaeltacht district in the country (Gaoth Dobhair) be able to study Irish?
In other words, is the northwest to be sold the pup of a “technological university”, that is, not in fact a university at all? Technology without humanity even sounds ominous — it would be a very bad idea. And the humanities and social sciences thrive in many universities with a technological focus. Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is one example: it is one of the world’s leaders in technology yet boasts first-class humanities and social science programmes at graduate and undergraduate level. And, of course, many existing Irish universities have solid reputations in research and teaching in technology while also excelling in the humanities and social sciences. NUI Galway is a fine example. So, too, is McHugh’s alma mater, NUI Maynooth. Could the Humanities and Social Sciences not co-exist with Technology in a notional NUI Derry?
Mention of an NUI Derry raises other issues.
First, what relationship do McHugh and Varadkar see their “cross-border university” having to accreditation and funding agencies North and South? Second, have they spoken to the DUP’s Diane Dodds, the Stormont minister with responsibility for higher education; what is her attitude to a “cross-border university”?
And third, do they propose to send lifeboats for the faculty, staff and students of the HMS UU campus in Derry?
For sure, Leo Varadkar is no Abraham Lincoln. A man who appointed Eoghan Murphy to deal with the housing crisis cannot be said to be overly bothered by “the better angels of our nature”. But, again, he and Joe McHugh do deserve credit for identifying what needs to be done for higher education in the north-west. What can the region expect from Micheal Martin, who refers to anything north of Dundalk as “up there”?
A “cross-border university” — or to give it a more meaningful name, a borderless university — is a great idea. But the devil will be in the detail and, as always with Varadkar’s great ideas, the devil will be in the delivery, too.
Breandan Mac Suibhne is author of ‘The End of Outrage’ (Oxford University Press), which the Royal Irish Academy awarded the inaugural Michel Deon Biennial Prize for Nonfiction