QS World University Rankings
Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute, Trinity College Dublin
Tuesday, 11 September 2012
Thank you John,
Good afternoon and welcome to Trinity College Dublin for this important event. As Provost of Trinity and head of the university, I would like to say we’re honoured that the QS World University Rankings are being launched from our university today.
Allow me to take this opportunity to tell you a little about Trinity College Dublin.
Recently I was reading an interview in a magazine with one of our alumni, Tana French, now a best-selling, prize-winning author. She said: “What I love about Trinity is that sense that there are four hundred years of layers of memories - and that I’ve left my own little layers, together with those of the thousands on thousands of people who have been there before me.”
I found that an insightful quote. It’s the way I feel about Trinity. I was a student here in the 1980s before I joined the faculty, and I remember being hit by that sense of history when I walked under Front Arch, out into the great cobbled expanse of Front Square.
If you’ve any imagination, then you do indeed think of the great writer Oscar Wilde walking through that same arch - or,
- The Nobel Prize-winning dramatist Samuel Beckett
- The savage satirist Jonathan Swift
- The political theorist Edmund Burke
- The philosopher George Berkeley
- The mathematician William Rowan Hamilton
- The Nobel prize-winning physicist Ernest Walton
- Ireland’s former president and UN High Commissioner for human rights Mary Robinson,
and all the thousands upon thousands of other Trinity alumni, who as Tana French so poetically put it, have left their own small layers of memory on these stones.
Trinity is fortunate in its location, in the heart of Dublin city. That’s why we’re also the University of Dublin. It’s unusual to be at once an intimate college and a university in the heart of a vibrant capital city. Staff and students alike benefit from the dynamism of our location. And the city, in turn, benefits from our presence - it’s impossible to think of Dublin city centre without Trinity.
Behind the old college walls, the university is a hub of activity - of research and teaching, and of the activities of our student clubs and societies. We have over one hundred of them, covering just about every sport and interest you can imagine. Because, in Trinity, we believe in a sound education based on academic achievements for sure, but also the development of the whole person through student-organised extracurricular activities.
Trinity has always teemed with creativity and ideas, but in recent years it seems to be surpassing itself. So much so that the university is now literally “bursting its walls” - we have extended beyond our campus to build for instance, a new Academy of Dramatic Art, The Lir, which offers degree courses in acting, directing, and stage management. And we recently opened the Science Gallery, a pioneering public gallery ‘where art and science collide’.
Trinity - like, of course, all the high-ranking universities in the QS Rankings - carries out leading-edge research across numerous fronts. Trinity is a multidisciplinary university of many faculties, schools, and departments and all of them are engaged on great research, so it’s difficult to pick out one over the others.
But let me tell you about three of our research projects that really seized my imagination:
- First: As you know, the DNA of humans and chimpanzees is 99% identical. The distinctive nature of that elusive 1% has eluded scientists for decades… Now, for the first time researchers in Trinity’s Genetics Department have discovered three genes that are unique to humans. These specific genes originated during the evolution of humans following separation from chimpanzees. So thanks to Trinity researchers we’re one step closer to understanding the secret of what makes us human.
- Next: European countries share a continent and a history. To really research the spread of the Plague, for instance, you need to look beyond the national boundaries of your country, which probably didn’t even exist in its current form in the Middle Ages. But traditionally historians have concentrated on national history because it’s so difficult to access and compare sources from other countries. Now Trinity is leading an international digital humanities project, involving eight other European countries. The project will allow researchers to engage with geographically dispersed archives - via multilingual searches, custom visualisations, shared research spaces, and personalised virtual environments. This is truly revolutionising the study of history on our continent.
- In Trinity’s CRANN Nanoscience Institute, researchers are working on the industrial production of graphene, a non-porous material which is 200 times stronger than steel but a hundred thousand times thinner than human hair. It will be used to make lighter cars, engines that use less fuel, and computer screens that fold into your pocket.
This research is high-level, cutting edge, futuristic even - but in Trinity it’s not only members of Faculty that are engaged in research. For many centuries, a Trinity education has engaged students, including undergraduates, in research alongside their professors in a common enterprise of discovery.
Research-led education, which develops skills in critical thinking and innovation, will create the active and engaged citizens of the future.
We know it can be demanding of both staff and students, but it’s not something we’ll ever compromise on. Not only is it intrinsic to our core philosophy, but we know from employer evaluation surveys that it’s something employers particularly value.
Like other high ranking universities, Trinity thinks globally. What does this mean? It means that we educate students, from all over the world, who might then remain to grow the Irish economy, or else take their knowledge and expertise far afield. We currently have ninety thousand alumni living in 130 countries. Wherever you’re living, there is a Trinity graduate in your country, doing something useful, or at least, something interesting...
It means that our staff is international - half of them hail from countries other than Ireland - and that they collaborate on research projects with their peers round the world.
It means, in brief, that we believe in exchanging ideas, research, and people with peer institutions round the world. It means we believe in a world community of scholars, teachers, and innovators constantly striving for excellence.
And that’s why we support these rankings, and why we’re so delighted to be launching them. These are global rankings, which evaluate the world’s universities relative to each other. Through attempting to use objective criteria, they compare universities in Europe, America, Asia and Africa. With such objective rankings, no university can hide behind a mere national reputation. But then, no good university would wish to.
Trinity is Ireland’s highest ranking university, a position we take seriously. Ireland is a small country, with a huge diaspora, and an ambition to succeed as a smart, or knowledge economy, through using “the knowledge, skills and creativity of the people”. In knowledge economies, universities have a special place, and Trinity, like other Irish universities, takes proud responsibility in providing:
- the smart entrepreneurial graduates,
- and the leading-edge, internationally-competitive research and scholarship,
which will make of Ireland a global innovation hub.
Trinity thinks a lot of itself, there’s no denying that. You’ll have got that much from my talk!
One of our alumni, Denis Burkitt - a remarkable doctor who established a link between lymphoma and malaria in equatorial Africa - was famous for saying that he was:
“Irish by birth, Trinity by the grace of God”.
This suggests that a Trinity education is so special as to be obtained only through divine intervention - well, maybe, but we also admit students through the conventional routes...
Trinity is a place of contrasts - a juxtaposition of cobbled stones and nanotechonology, of the Book of Kells and biomedical sciences, of hundreds of years of tradition and of pioneering innovation - a unique place to which, I know, thousands more students and staff will - in this and in the coming centuries - add their ‘layers of memory’.
Not only through the study of Genetics, but in all of Trinity’s Schools and Departments, through different ways, we are constantly learning more about what it is to be human.
Thank you very much.