Remarks at the EU 2013 Coimbra Group Annual Conference
24th May 2013
President of National University of Ireland Galway, Dr. James Browne, Rectors and Presidents of participating Universities of the Coimbra Group, Commissioner Geoghegan Quinn, distinguished guests, staff and students of the college, I am very pleased to have been invited to join you here today. In particular I want to thank Professor Jim Browne for affording me the opportunity of speaking to you on the occasion of the Coimbra Group Annual Conference.
Is pléisiúr i gcónaí domsa é cuairt a thabhairt ar ollscoil, an ceann seo ach go háirithe. Is iomaí bliain a chaith me in Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh, i mo mhac léinn agus ina diaidh sin mar léachtóir, agus is le cion nach beag a thugaim na blianta sin chun cuimhne. Caithfidh go bhfuil an ollscoil seo, ina suí ar bhruach na Coirbe, ar ceann de na suíomhanna ollscoile is tarraingtí dá bhfuil san Éoraip: agus le breis is seacht míle dhéag scoláire anois inti, is campas fíor-idirnáisiúnta é le mic léinn tagtha as céad is a deich dtír.
[It is always a pleasure to visit a University and particularly this one. I spent many years in NUIG, both as a student and then as a lecturer, and I recall those years with great fondness. This University, situated on the banks of the river Corrib, must be one of the most attractive university sites in Europe; and with its over 17,000 students, it is a truly international campus with students coming from 110 countries around the world]
Many of you will all be aware that since its foundation the university has had a distinguished record of achievement in research, in teaching and in service to the community. Its scholarship is to the highest international standards and distinguished graduates from its faculties are to be found as leaders in their fields in the public and private sector.
For example, the noted astronomer and physicist Alexander Anderson graduated from Galway with an MA in 1881 from where he went on to further studies at the University of Cambridge. Anderson returned to Galway in 1885 and is widely credited as the first person to suggest the existence of black holes. Other notable Galway scholars include Alice Perry the world’s first female engineering graduate (1906) and the distinguished economist J.E.Cairnes (1823-1875), whose influential work The Slave Power shaped the thinking of notable intellectuals of the time including Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin & Karl Marx.
The noteworthy are not all of the distant past either; many of Ireland’s most renowned performance artists studied at NUI Galway, including Mick Lally, Marie Mullen, Seán McGinley, Garry Hynes. I would also like to pay tribute to Dr. Séamus Mac Mathúna, former Academic Secretary of the University, for his leadership in the early stages of the Coimbra Group and for his work in strengthening the Group over the years. Thank you, Seamus.
MAJOR GLCHALLENGES
You will all be aware, that we live in exceptionally testing times for many Europeans, including our citizens in Ireland with many economies across the Union in recession, unsustainably high levels of unemployment, 115 million Europeans are in or at risk of poverty[1], and there has been a significant loss of trust in many States in our institutions and their policy response. Twenty six million citizens across our Union are without work. Promoting health, preventing disease and ensuring health and social services are equipped to meet the changing needs and demands of our population is yet another key challenge across Europe and one that will increase.
Networks like Coimbra, of European Universities committed to creating academic and cultural ties, working together to promote collaboration and excellence in learning, research and service to society, are essential now in ensuring a coherent, reflective and appropriate response to these challenges.
A European Union confident of its intellectual tradition has a real contribution to make to the realisation of some of our global challenges which are of such a scale as to require a collective response. The major challenges in our global society such as poverty, inequality and food security remain with us and will deepen unless we commit our time and intellectual capacity to finding solutions.
The potential of education to unlock new answers and new opportunities is undoubted; with its’ 4000 universities and other Higher Educational Institutes, with 19 million students and 1.5 million academics the possibilities within the European higher education system is unprecedented. I believe, now more than ever, at a time of economic crisis and loss of trust in so many institutions and decision-makers, that Universities have a central role to play in, informing a new discourse with all the energy, concern and creativity that the times demand.
I concur with the Commissioner when she says “Creativity, Research and Innovation are exactly what we need for our universities and indeed for society more generally.” The European Commission and indeed all of us are fortunate in having a Commissioner who is striving to place such issues at the centre of the European Union policy and budgetary negotiations. Her communication to the European Parliament that achieving the target of spending 3% of E.U. G.D.P. on Research and Development by 2020 could create 317 million jobs and increase G.D.P. by close to €2800 billion by 2025 is both challenging and positive. It also recognises the greatest problem in the E.U. unemployment will be its potentially delegitimizing potential of high youth unemployment.
I agree with the European Commission in its policy statement that a strategic plan for investment in our knowledge foundation is of fundamental importance.
There now exists a strong consensus about the need to foster creativity and innovation, if we are to create the jobs that will give stability and sustainable growth. But it might be helpful to attempt some definitional clarity of such concepts as innovation, creativity and growth.
The creative industries have been the subject of recent industrial study and one rightly seen as a rich source of wealth and employment. The turnover of the European creative industries amounted to €654 billion in 2003, growing 12.3 percent faster than the overall economy of the European Union and employing over 5.6 million people.
As to innovation, what does it mean? Is it the same as novelty, which carries a superficial resonance? It must be something more profound. Again, is the act of innovation always forward looking or can it also relate to the retrieval of what is valuable, but may have been lost, from the past. Surely it must include both. We all have a good understanding of what innovation means in the area of communications technology – smarter phones, lighter computer devices, more sophisticated apps. However, for some it is a polite code word for increased quantitative outputs and mechanisation that may well be at the expense of environmental sustainability and jobs.
Not all innovations are invariably a good thing, it might be valuable to reflect in a holistic way on the long term impact of these changes on our society and from an ethical perspective. These are issues for reflection by each individual as well as by society more widely.
At a wider level of society, the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act in the United States was also considered an innovation that would facilitate modern banking and investment. Without taking adequate account of the lessons of history, and the reasons why Glass-Steagal was enacted after the Great Crash in 1929, the legislation was effectively repealed during the 1990s – thereby undermining traditional prudential banking in favour of more speculative and less risk-averse model. The global consequences of this innovation were certainly not benign.
But this innovation did not come about by accident. As Alan Greenspan put it “The market was screaming for product.” Again, that particular innovation changes the relationship between democratically elected parliaments, regulatory bodies, Central Banks, investment funds and rating agencies with the latter acting as underwriters for the launch of derivative products for their clients, evaluating risk in an allegedly scientific way and going on to define State policy as so many Central Banks had put their states at risk through involvement in the non-collaterised products.
We have in the environmental field, similar difficult questions to ask about recent innovations. For instance, the main drivers behind policies supporting the production of bio-fuels have been objectives of energy security and climate-change mitigation.
However, it is now the case that despite the positive goals of investing in ‘green and clean’ energy, UNESCO reports that land conversion for bio-fuels in Asia and Africa has resulted in deforestation, threatened biodiversity via monocultures, increased food prices and decreased food stocks. We need an innovation that is based on sustainable and inter-disciplinary scholarship.
And of course it is not just technological innovation that we require – we require innovation in how we provide services, do our business, and distribute resources and above all in administration skills and managerial theory and practice. As UNESCO has pointed out regarding the growing global water supply crisis: technological progress should go some way towards reconciling supply and demand but ultimately, the solution will lie in better water governance.
Let us acknowledge that the speculative mind is not the open mind of philosophical work, nor is it a font of creativity. It lends itself far easier to cunning.
Creativity too requires definition. Being socially acquired it demands a recognition of and respect for its sources in the person and in the society. There are certain realms – for instance the arts – where creativity is inextricably linked to the talent and genius of the individual. And yet, even here, the release and expression of that talent is dependent not only on the inherited contribution of those in the genre but also on the collaboration of fellow artists and the engagement of a public.
Creativity is as much a social endeavour as it is a personal one. Any person who has worked in corporate environment will know that the magnet of the silo mentality is always very strong. Experience tells us that the quality of the solutions advanced for any problem are always more robust if they are the fruits of a sharing and collaborative team effort. This assumes, of course, that the team ethos is genuinely open, inclusive and pluralistic and is not subject to the tyranny of any single or dominant conceptual model. Certainties, old and new, have after all a covert as well as an overt influence. Innovation require imagination but also the salutory respect that is due to the creative potential of doubt.
Universities have a major role to play in promoting this type of collaborative creativity. First, by encouraging their students to exercise their creative talents; to be open to fresh and imaginative thinking; to question orthodoxies and perceived inevitabilities and to share with each other this appetite for learning and intellectual exploration. In addition, by working and inter-acting with each other in a more inter-disciplinary way, academics can significantly enhance the resources of creativity that are coming from our Universities.
The nature of the current economic and social crisis in Europe is far too difficult and complex to be resolved by the application of any narrow framework. It requires a sophisticated approach that takes account of the best thinking and practice from a plurality of disciplines – political economy in its widest sense history, philosophy sociology, anthropology. The knowledge and creativity that is created by academic teams working in this collaborative and inter-disciplinary way will always offer to exceed the sum of their individual scholarly outputs.
There is also a further somewhat neglected fact in the discourse of creativity – it is that real originality has been shown with the exciting results where there has been interaction between paradigms of knowledge between, for example, musical composition and information technology, between botany and medicine and pharmacology.
We cannot avoid, except at great cost such profound questions as to why we are innovating, what are we ultimately attempting to achieve with our efforts? What kind of society are we seeking to create and what are we willing to do, or to concede to realise such goals? These are citizenship questions of the first rank; and they must be answered with a sense of intergenerational justice and global responsibility.
Thus I argue for the pursuit of innovation to achieve an explicit goal of a new connection between economy and society that is based on ethics, one that serves our shared humanity, in which all of our citizens globally can live in dignity and equality. To achieve this, Universities must enable their students with the tools to think critically, analyse rigorously and to respond creatively.
How is an atmosphere of creative work and discovery to be achieved and sustained within our Universities?
We might find some suggestions for ourselves in the art world. While it is true the arts do not have a monopoly on creativity, the arts do develop discreet functions of intelligence. These include the marriage of reason and feeling; the centrality of imagination and symbolic representation; the dialogue between ideas and materials; the tolerance of ambiguity; the linking of innovation with archetype. These are valuable characteristics we should seek to nurture within our Universities.
I do want to congratulate N.U.I.G. for all its work in resourcing the integration of culture, science and its public world with its investment not only in science but in library and theatre faculties as well.
In addition we need to ask how well do our Universities create a capacity for exploration, for failure and the need to start again. Recently I was celebrating with a young Irish writer whose 224 words describing Dublin have been immortalised on a new postage stamp issued by An Post. This young writer had been supported by the Fighting Words Centre, established by author Roddy Doyle.
Doyle has written that fear of failure is the death of creativity and that such fear also paralyzes innovation. It is also addressed by the Co Galway innovator Mike Coolley, an aeronautics engineer who responding to redundancies as Lucas Aerospace in the U.K. proposed ways of utilising weapons manufacturing technology for the development of socially useful goods, like solar heating equipment, artificial kidneys, and systems for intermodal transportation. On receiving the Right Livelihood Award for Outstanding Vision and Work on Behalf of our Planet and Its People Coolley said:
“it is important when you’ve been defeated either in your private life or in your community or in whichever group you belong to, that you look realistically at that defeat, and you analyze it, and see how you can handle it more creatively next time around.”
We need to ensure that we cultivate a tolerance for creative tension and failure, and resilience, among our students and future researchers. In addition, the policy environment and public attitudes to entrepreneurship and adversity are resolutely constructive.
Many of the students in University today are preparing for jobs that do not yet exist; will be using technologies that do not yet exist and will be attempting to solve problems that are as yet not even recognised in their full significance. This is a very challenging context for the educator, and society would be poorly served by those who favour a short term utility from our graduates at the cost of deeper intellectual formation or preparation for citizenship.
It is often said that there are three key steps to innovation – idea generation, implementation and adoption. To achieve in all three steps we need to broaden our approach. Interdisciplinary work as I have said is critical to underpin the sharing of ideas, approaches, and solutions. However, it is not sufficient to work across disciplines within the university. Academia must also engage industry, government and citizens all working together to resolve those challenges which threaten our shared lives. Scholarship has to recognise the problem that exists and that has to be faced with a shared approach. The society reveals the problem. The model as the instrument has to specify the limits and the assumptions of its approach.
I would like to agree with Carol Becker who said earlier that not everyone may appreciate that using the imagination and our creative potential ‘goes hand in hand with a radical critique of existing societal and institutional structures.’ We must be willing to accept that by thinking imaginatively, we may find ourselves subverting received inevitabilities and in that way our ability to imagine and create anew is both profoundly human and profoundly democratic.
In conclusion, I believe that our Irish education system and European education systems in general, if allowed can produce highly skilled graduates that have the breadth, depth and range of skills and knowledge appropriate to a 21st Century society, a century in which we will see world population reach 9 billion people. It is for all of that population that not only our universities but all of us are challenged to provide the rich and encouraging environment so that high quality original thinking and fresh multi-disciplinary answers can flourish and bear fruit.
This future of ethically applied technological innovation requires an infrastructure of sustainable support for fundamental science in our universities and acceptance and encouragement for the ethos that makes it possible in terms of time, space, patience and physical resources.
Ta ról ag na hollscoileanna, ní amháin chun eolas nua a aimsiú laistigh dá cuid ballaí, ach chun tuiscint don fhreagracht eiticiúil a chur i gceann a mac léinn. Tig leis an earnáil ard-oideachais ról tábhachtach a bheith aici i bhforbairt na ceannaireachta sin is gá le sochaí uilechuimsitheach a chruthú agus a neartú, a bheidh tógtha ar bhonn inbhuanaithe sóisialta agus eacnamaíochta.
[Universities have a role in, not just creating new knowledge within their walls, but for inculcating their students with a sense of ethical responsibility. The higher education sector can play an important role in developing the leadership necessary for the creation and strengthening of an inclusive society built on a sustainable social and economic foundation.]
I would like to salute the conference organisers for all of the hard work in putting the programme of events together. I very much look forward to having the opportunity to reflect on the conference proceedings. Thank you. I hope your stay in Galway has been both stimulating and enjoyable.
[1] Bonesmo Fredriksen, K. (2012) ‘Income Inequality in the European Union”, OECD Working Papers, No 952 OECD Publishing