Sir, – While it is good news to see Irish universities, including UCD, where I teach, climb up the QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) rankings (News, June 10th), it is equally important to remember that some of the reasons that they have risen, as well as for the fact that they have not risen higher, have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the education that they offer.
Not even an immigrant to Ireland like myself should believe that there is something inherently better about being taught by someone who is not an Irish citizen, yet the internationalisation of the faculty is the metric in which Irish universities perform best.
Nor should anyone believe that “institutional research impact, or citations per faculty” has any validity in the humanities, the area in which many Irish universities have historically been strongest (many would also doubt its validity in the sciences, but that is another matter).
Of the top six institutions on the QS list, three do not even pretend to offer a liberal education.
Moreover the top four are private, with large endowments and tuition fees that provide resources that even the best-funded universities in Europe cannot hope to match, although they regularly turn out graduates who make at least as great a contribution to the welfare of society, including their local economies.
Rankings – and the QS rankings in particular – are taken more seriously in Ireland than almost anywhere else in the world, and the degree to which administrators at our universities, as well as the Higher Education Authority and the Department of Education, use them as benchmarks actually undercuts the quality of the education our students receive.
No academic wakes up in Boston or Berlin, Leiden or Uppsala to see them given the press attention accorded them in Dublin; indeed most of the universities that have topped these tables have not even trumpeted the fact on their websites because it means so little to them.
And yet we run hiring schemes that actively discriminate against Irish citizens and shift resources towards fields that are likely to generate citations.
Our community (I am not going to write competition), which consists of other publicly funded universities in the EU, knows better and so should we. – Yours, etc,
KATHLEEN
JAMES-CHAKRABORTY,
Professor of
Art History,
University College Dublin,
Belfield,
Dublin 4.