INAUGURAL ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE IN THE SERIES OF LECTURES
INAUGURAL ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE IN THE SERIES OF LECTURES ENTITLED ‘THE UNIVERSITY IN SOCIETY'
It is both a pleasure and honour for me to have been invited to deliver the inaugural lecture in this Millennium series of lectures hosted by University College Dublin. I want to thank the University for the invitation, and compliment Dr. Art Cosgrove, President of University College Dublin, and his colleagues on the series itself and the theme -‘The University in Society: the Moral Power of Knowledge’.
More than four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon wrote that ‘even knowledge itself is power’. To be the owner of power is a formidable thing. Those who have power have access to control, authority, influence, strength. Hardly a day goes by without an opportunity to marvel at the economic power of scientific or technological innovation and the social and cultural downstream consequences they produce- the ringing of the mobile phone in buses, theatres, weddings and maybe even inaugural lectures is just one classic and obvious example.
But power is always problematic and not always exercised morally or benignly. History, and indeed our contemporary world, is littered with examples of the devastating legacy of the immoral exercise of political, economic, cultural, spiritual, gender and many other kinds of power, which had at their core an assertion of ownership, a monopoly over knowledge. Often the critical challenge to that unjust exercise of power came when those outside the privileged, powerful elite equipped themselves with the kind of knowledge or education which gave them self-confidence, a new language of self-assertion, gave them their own kind of power. But ironically it is worth reminding ourselves that formal education, itself an important though not the sole pathway to knowledge - it too has its history of misused power.
Seosamh Mac Grianna in ‘Mo Bhealach Féin’ says:
‘Tá babhun dimheasa idir an té a theid chun coláiste agus an té nach dteid.”
(There is a barricade of contempt between those who are educated and those who are not).
In the world we now inhabit, the so-called Information Age, we cannot afford those barricades, we cannot afford those distinctions. The morality of a republic of equals demands that the power of knowledge be offered as a birthright; the ambition of today’s economically and culturally dynamic Ireland to remain successful, is crucially dependent upon our need to keep growing this thing we call knowledge and widening its accessibility.
It is the capacity to generate, manage and commercially apply knowledge which now drives economic success and competitive advantage, for both individual enterprises and nation-states. Traditional models of economic growth have been amended to include ‘human capital’, or the knowledge which generates new ideas, new fashions, new technologies, as a central factor of production. There is growing acceptance of the concept of knowledge as a form of equity, just as finance, money or property are forms of equity.
This puts an interesting slant on how we view knowledge - indeed how we view our education system, especially our universities, as generators of knowledge equity. Education has traditionally been highly valued in Ireland and it is rightly seen as the garden in which this knowledge equity grows. The phrase ‘investing in education’ trips easily from our tongues. Looking at knowledge as a form of equity adds a new dimension, however. It highlights very clearly that failure to exploit the full knowledge potential of our people, failure to equip every person with the education that will enable them to contribute to our national knowledge equity, is the equivalent of burying a financial fortune, leaving it in the ground to slowly decay.
We pride ourselves that we now have a good education system, and we have. It is a system many other countries would envy. It is a system our parents envy, growing up as they did in an era when they knew the powerlessness that came from poor educational opportunities. This system which we are growing all the time, is their legacy to the kind of empowered future they wanted for their children and through them for their country. The evidence is in - that their faith in education as a liberator is paying off well.
Here in this university as in any university on this island we meet the success stories of our education systems, North and South, and we take pride in their accomplishments. But there is still a world on the other side of MacGrianna’s barricade which, whether the contempt is intended or not, feels the cold atmosphere of exclusion. In that world lives are lived where the absence of the power of knowledge creates questions and responsibilities for us as a people. In today’s highly literate world thousands of Irish people, who have gone to primary and secondary schools are unable to read and write either at all or only very poorly. I have met quite a few of them. The shy man who was too terrified to ask his bad-tempered teacher anything in class; whose working life on the building sites was a misery because, as he said himself in the first thing he wrote after adult literacy classes gave him power over his life:
“I loved the buildings but I had terrible problems with reading and writing. Sometimes the men would have a newspaper, so I would always get out of the hut quickly in case I was asked to read. When you can’t read you live in fear always. Many times I could be out for a day and go hungry because I wouldn’t go into a restaurant. I was always afraid people would look down on me. When you can’t read and write you feel you can’t talk to people who are more educated than you.”
Imagine how scary a simple visit to the supermarket can be for the illiterate mother who wanted baked beans but brought home tins of yellow-pack cat food. Luckily she had a sense of humour and the sense in adulthood to get help from the National Adult Literacy Association. Every person who has gone through NALA could tell you a story about the moral power of knowledge, about the liberation that comes even from the most basic education, about the surge of confidence, the sense of inclusion and belonging that comes from joining that powerful circle who can read and write. One man even told me of the sheer joy he felt the first time he wrote the names of his wife and children on a blank piece of paper.
They could also tell us of the lives, still lived in their thousands, drained of confidence by a childhood where either home or school or both just did not work for them, filled with a profound sense of inadequacy, condemned to a life-time in unemployment or low paid work where no literacy skills are required, facing the humiliation of never being able to read a bed-time story to their child, never being able to help him or her with homework - and the sickening realisation that another generation is being lost all over again.
For those people, the education system has led not to a release of potential, but to a frustration and even a destruction of it. It has failed to hand on the knowledge needed for a humanly decent life and it has compounded that powerlessness through the generations. It is that cycle of disadvantage, fear, discouragement, that exclusion from the power of knowledge, which we are called to address effectively as part of this huge question about the moral power of knowledge.
We know the best time to start is when children are very young, when their inherent capacity and need to learn has not yet been damaged, when their minds are still like sponges, capable of absorbing a world of knowledge. We also know that where there is life there is hope and so we keep on offering the chance of fresh starts, long after childhood and school years are over, to keep the door of hope open to those who, with a bit of support, encouragement and courage, will begin their own journey to knowledge and its power.
The transformative power of knowledge and learning for even a single individual cannot be measured only in enhanced earning power, though for many people access to better paid employment itself opens up a more satisfying experience of the world. It is also, essentially, a matter of human dignity, of allowing people to be independent, fulfilled, to achieve their own potential, their own dreams, however modest or ambitious.
The transformative power of knowledge starts with the individual human person, but it also radiates outward, to family, to community, to country. It brings economic benefits, but also a vital social dividend in the form of healthy, self-reliant, self-confident and dynamic communities – communities which foster social stability, independence, creativity and entrepreneurial activity. And those resources in turn feed back into a successful, knowledge driven economy.
Where does the university fit in with all of this? The past few decades have seen an unprecedented transformation in the focus and remit of universities, and in the level of access. Once the privilege of the elite, access to universities and, increasingly to other third level institutions, has become the norm for large swathes of our young people and we now dare to imagine a time, soon when eight out of ten of our young people will go on to college education. Despite the fears of the elitists of previous generations, education has not been tainted, ruined or devalued by this opening up of access. Instead we have found that the store of collective knowledge, and indeed our third level institutions themselves, have been enriched by this inflow of new blood and new energy. Their individual and combined creative genius has helped to move Ireland into a new gear economically and culturally just as across the world a new generation of educated young men and women have made this the most exciting era of discovery in the history so far of humankind.
We see its benefits all around us from the e-mail to heart transplants, from space travel to longer life spans. But we also see how unevenly distributed the access and the benefits are not just on our own island but globally. One of the benefits of easy globalisation is that we know that some have it all. Others have nothing. Some have legitimate hope that the future promises to be better. Others have no such hope at all. That is precisely why we need to ask questions about the ownership of the power of knowledge and reassure ourselves about the morality, the justice of its use.
In many disadvantaged areas at home the attainment of third level qualifications remains much of a rarity. The inhibitions, the reasons why this is so, are complex, much more complex than money and open doors alone can address. Years ago I was involved in one university’s attempts to outreach to some of the people who lived on its doorstep but who never crossed its threshold. No child from this particular area had ever gone on to university. One woman told me that she walked her grandchild to school each day - a journey which would have been well over a mile shorter had she gone through the campus. Although the gates and doors were open to the public and hundreds of people were manifestly entering and leaving, she had always gone the long way round, afraid in case she would be told that she did not belong.
The collective horizon of expectation in her community and so many similar poor, disadvantaged communities has been dulled by generations of underachievement, by layers of deeply experienced, even if at times unintended, exclusion. Shifting all those inhibitions, fuelling those communities with a fresh new imagination about themselves and a realisable ambition for their children, is a challenge for our generation with its insight, its affluence, its egalitarian impulse, its constitutional obligations. Changing that reality requires a fluent and dynamic partnership between policy makers, community leaders, local schools, parents, universities, business, industry, the arts and all those who have a vested interest in pushing to the limits the knowledge equity of the next generation of Irish people.
In this generation we have seen many innovative developments emerge and inch their way towards creating that dynamic partnership. Third level institutions have recognised the huge motivational role they can play by linking up with local schools, opening their doors to the community, widening access to second chance education, and simply demystifying third level education. This is not paternalism at work, this is the crucial work of fully mining this country’s rich veins of talent, some of them easily accessed, others forcing us to dig very deep.
That approach of broadening access to education, of increasing our knowledge equity, has obvious utilitarian benefits. But knowledge has a transforming reach well beyond the world of economics, vital though that is. Exercised morally, and used well, it can emancipate or develop tastes, sensibilities, interests, talents, passions, enriching the life of the person and of society. It can help us harvest all those yet undiscovered or forgotten fields of knowledge. To exercise it morally we also need to know where knowledge resides, where it can be harvested.
There is a tragic wasted opportunity in the absence of dialogue between the people on both sides of MacGrianna’s barricade. These two people need to know each other differently, understand themselves differently. The message has to be that every person has their own personal, potential store of wisdom, their own experience of life, perhaps their own undiscovered genius, which can add to the sum total of this thing called knowledge. It does not get smaller the more people you divide it around. Quite the reverse.
In his poem ‘An Tobar’, (The Well), the Donegal poet Cathal O’Searcaigh more than hints at some of the things we need to be careful of in this world which can barely catch its breath with the speed of change:
“But this long time, piped water from distant hills
Sneaks into every kitchen
On both sides of the glen;
Mawkish, without sparkle,
Zestless as slops
And among my people
The springwell is being forgotten”.
Surely here is a place for the university in society- a place where water engineer and poet both have space, where we keep moving towards the future, unafraid of innovation, but where we also see the past as a springwell of cultural animation and enrichment and we can count our losses as well as our gains.
We expect a lot of our universities - to produce top-class graduates for the employment market at home and abroad, to support the research and development needs of our small indigenous companies which are often severely stretched and rely heavily on university support; to compete globally for research and consultancy contracts taking on the best in the world; to look confidently to the wide world but to be ultra-sensitive to the society in which they are located; to be fresheners and refresheners of the culture and ambition, maybe even the soul of that society. Yes we expect a lot and with good reason. The people have invested a lot of that hard equity, money, in our university sector. With that money they have invested the hopes of a people who believe passionately in the power of knowledge, and who want that power exercised morally, exercised well, to build a country, a civilisation to be proud of.
On this, the anniversary of Cardinal Newman’s birth, his vision of what a university should be has now an urgency about it. ‘Knowledge’ he wrote ‘is capable of being its own end’. We need to remember that when we are tempted to load the university and indeed the world of education with utilitarian demands, with product line measurements. We are after all still dealing with people, not machines. We seek a balance and maybe in part that is what the words moral and society add to this debate. Newman saw the main purpose of a university as the provision of a liberal education,:
‘the cultivation of the intellect….to open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression’.
There has never been a period in history when we have had greater need of people empowered to debate wisely and intelligently the growing litany of weighty dilemmas which our scientific sophistication confronts us with. From the recent advances in genetic research and cloning to the unruliness of the world wide web, from breakthroughs in the treatment of AIDS to the poor availability of those treatments in the Third World where Aids is rampant but money is not. We need an educated and articulate public fully engaged in the debates which help frame coherent and appropriate social, legal and political responses to these testing times. And in the coming generations a much greater proportion of our young people will go on to college than ever before. The social influence, the moral power of our small number of universities and colleges will be enormous.
With so many disciplines exploring the world of knowledge the universities are uniquely placed to ensure that there are no unhealthy barricades inside the world of research and intellectual discourse, that cross disciplinary and multidisciplinary debate is kept fluent and easy, that the vanity of the ivory tower is consigned to history as MacGrianna’s barricades come down.
It has been said that ‘Mankind now has God’s skills, but not God’s wisdom. Herein lies the problem’. Universities will continue to be at the centre of creating new capabilities, new technologies and an ever-expanding body of human knowledge. But perhaps their greatest contribution to our society may lie in their capacity to help us ground that knowledge in a wider philosophical, moral, social and ethical framework, to be the early warning system when the power of the world of knowledge loses sight of ethics, of principle, of morality, to be a credible voice of reason, reflection and reassurance when people shun change out of morbid and irrational fear, to be a trusted, steady guide to the new future we are not yet sure of.
Cardinal Newman, would, I believe, have strongly approved of a university which starts the 21st century, the third millennium by reflecting broadly on knowledge as power. But he would be especially proud of this university for its insistence that where there is power there is scope for good and for ill. The more power, the greater the scope. We are closer than ever before in our history to tapping comprehensively into this natural national grid of knowledge based power. Used well it will lighten and enlighten. It will change our country’s destiny, change its peoples stories - and in changing our story, other small places and small peoples across the world will dare to dream of knowledge as their causeway to power and used morally it will be ‘Their Liberator’ too. For ultimately the moral power of knowledge is its power to convince the human person that he or she is born free and the equal of all - and its power to vindicate that freedom, to champion that equality.
In this poem, entitled The Liberator dedicated to Mairtín Ó Direan, Cathal Ó Searcaigh puts it well:
"You are the Emancipator
Who fired and steered with your coming
The Rising of the Words.
From the fortress of amnesia,
You loosed them from bondage,
With your cerebral key.
Now they are free,
Who have their charter enshrined.
In the Republic of your song".
(Translated by Frank Gilligan)