Tom Collins: Ulster University award cannot disguise its neglect of north-west

It would be churlish not to applaud Ulster University which has been named ‘University of the Year’ by the Times Higher Education magazine.

So congratulations to the students and staff who put in the hard work that grabbed the judges’ attention. They deserve their moment in the spotlight.

The world of higher education today is a challenging one – not least for staff on the frontline. They are no longer just educators, they are administrators, therapists, mental health workers, social workers and social entrepreneurs among many other things. And that is not good.

Over the course of my lifetime, university has gone from being a mentoring experience with small classes to a system of mass education.

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Fewer and fewer staff, with heavier and heavier workloads, try to manage large numbers of students – each with their own set of needs.

Workflow models devised by university bosses don’t reflect the effort which goes into preparing lectures, seminars and tutorials; nor include the huge emotional energy many academics expend dealing with students with increasingly complex needs.

While the expansion of higher education is a good thing – heaven knows the world needs more education, not less – the cost has been enormous, and much of that cost has been passed on to the students.

The burden of debt has been excused on the basis that graduates tend to have higher earnings. As anyone with friends or relatives who have graduated in recent years knows, this is not the case.

More and more graduates are in jobs that don’t match either their skills or their ambitions.

So although there will be a sense of pride across UU’s campuses this week, staff will know that the win will do little or nothing to make their day-to-day challenges any easier.

In its self-congratulatory press release, the university said it had been “hailed” as a “force for good in fostering peace, prosperity and cohesion” and described itself as “an anchor institution in a region that has undergone rapid change in the quarter-century since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement”. Really?

Both universities here have been good at jumping on the Good Friday Agreement bandwagon; but the reality is that, firstly, the heavy lifting was done elsewhere; and secondly, our society remains as divided as ever – if not more segregated – and levels of educational underachievement are shocking.

We know too from the Northern Ireland Poverty and Income Inequality Report – released earlier this year – that the proportion of people living in poverty is increasing, with shocking increases in child poverty.

These most recent figures show that, in the course of a year, “children living in absolute poverty rose from 15 per cent to 19 per cent”.

UU also made much of its record in “Derry-Londonderry”, noting it had “secured a multi-million-pound Shared Ireland investment in a new teaching and student services building” and pointing to developments in health sciences and graduate-entry medicine.

How can I phrase this? That will have gone down like a bucket of sick for people in the north-west who believe that UU, in cohorts with a Belfast-centric education department, has failed to live up to its obligations to Derry.

UU denies this. But if you want to know what’s really going on you should ‘follow the money’. In this case ‘the money’ is the £364 million the university has lavished on its Belfast campus.

Actions speak louder than words.

The new campus may well be “a beacon of aspiration and an engine of innovation” as UU says. But Belfast already has enough beacons of aspiration.

It is unquestionably a fact that the university’s failure to invest properly in Derry has hampered the social, cultural and economic development of the city and the wider region – including cross-border partnership and development.

Welcoming the award, UU vice-chancellor Paul Bartholomew said: “Today, we are a university of and for the world, attracting the attention of presidents, politicians and changemakers.”

The attention of presidents is much overrated. As for ‘of and for the world”, yes – a university needs to be working for the common good, to be knitted into national and international research networks, and giving home students a sense of their global connectedness and responsibilities.

But it also must be “of and for the region” it is there to serve. And the jury is out on UU as far as the north-west is concerned.

Finally, for transparency, I should note that I am currently associated with one of the unsuccessful shortlisted institutions. But this is not a case of sour grapes.

It’s just that that, as a UU graduate, I expect a lot from the institution that gave me my degree.