Imagine this:
Times are hard. A business gets into trouble, and begins to scale back its costs by telling its various departments to do more with less. Where last year, you had X for your budget, now you have 75% of X. No bother, the departments say, and off they go, doing more with less.
Now let's say the CEO of the business says 'actually lads, in addition to the doing more with less stuff, we won't let you go out and get funds from elsewhere--certainly not the head division--which might actually make the business some money and take some of the pressure off others. Not only that, we'll make sure any incentive you had to do more with less is taken away. In fact, the
Sorry, what? That's insane. Why wouldn't they want a situation where the best people in the business did what they did best and brought in funds to allow it to grow? Why wouldn't they incentivise non-core expansion with promotions, bonuses, and back slapping opportunities? Why wouldn't the business accept that you can't cut too much too quickly, especially at the bottom otherwise the business will die at its roots?
That's exactly what is proposed in the revised and expanded Higher Education Authority's Employment Control Framework (ECF), signed by the last Minister for Finance as he was cleaning out his desk. Ireland's universities receive a block grant from the Higher Education Authority on behalf of the government. The HEA has the purse strings, and the ECF is its way of tightening them.
In a nutshell, the ECF plans to reduce staff numbers in the university sector in Ireland, reduce the types of employment contracts to fixed term or temporary contracts, ban any promotions, and impose fines on any university that breaks the rules of the framework.
Let me say this clearly: The ECF has nothing to do with cost reduction. No one doubts we are in hard times, and state-funded organisations like universities needs to do their part, by doing more with less. That can be achieved by simply telling every university to do the job it does today with less money than it had yesterday. End of. Let the universities decide how they would like to spend their reduced allowances as they see fit.
But no. The ECF is a direct, unashamed assault on the autonomy of the sector. It centralises budgetary power within a quango--the Higher Education Authority-- and allows the incursion of a bureaucracy into Ireland's universities, already choked with bureaucracy.
Check out the twitter hashtag #ecf11 for the latest news, as well as Paul Walsh on Irish Economy, Colm Kearney (business prof running for TCD provost) and the University Diary of Ferdinand von Prondzynski, and finally Prof. Colm Harmon. The fulltext of the ECF is here.
There's a lot in those posts, but all agree the following:
1. The ECF will damage scholarly output, which is a major contributor to the Smart Economy.
2. The ECF will damage teaching, as student/staff ratios decline.
3. The ECF will harm PhD students, a core part of the Smart Economy strategy, and one of its key metrics.
4. The ECF is a direct attack on academic freedom.
Any one of the above would be a good enough reason for stopping the ECF in its tracks.
This is not doing more with less. This is doing more of what the HEA tells us.
In the UK, David Cameron is waging a war on bureaucrats in the public sector. Cameron argues the bureaucrats get in the way of productive people being productive. Some might think this is a misplaced notion, but here in Ireland, a bureaucracy is trying to do just that. Watch this space.
To be fair (sort of), I don't think this is the fault of either the HEA or Brian Lenihan. This particular framework has been pushed by officials in the Department of Finance, and from the start the HEA tried to have it diluted. Brian Lenihan will simply have signed this along with 100 last-minute papers as he was leaving. But there is now an opportunity for the in coming government to show some strength of purpose. Let's keep up the pressure.
@FvP,
I don't think Brian Lenihan had a smile on his face when he signed the papers, but it doesn't really matter, does it? The point is this document is part of government policy that will, hopefully soon, be reversed.
Stephen, my point was that it may not be that simple, because it wasn't particularly a policy of the FF administration, but a construct of the permanent civil service in the Department of Finance, who may be hard to budge on this one... But as we have both said, let's keep at it!