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#20 This Town Ain’t Big Enough…

Trinity was in the happy situation of moving up 10 places in the QS World University Rankings for 2018, to 88th in the world. That now makes Trinity not only the highest-placed Irish university in the QS rankings, but also the only Irish university placed in the Top 100.

However, if Irish academic institutions move down the worldwide rankings, an idea that is occasionally mooted is the “merger” of Trinity College Dublin (the sole constituent of the University of Dublin), and our friends/rivals University College Dublin (the National University of Ireland, Dublin), into a super university capable of taking on emerging Asian institutions as well as the old guard in the UK, Europe and the States.

See original at http://digital.ucd.ie/view/ucdlib:47306. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This isn’t a new notion – in fact, it’s fifty years old. As the Berkeley Library got ready to open its glass doors in the summer of 1967, the then Minister of Education Donogh O’Malley had proposed the two should merge and this was avowed Government policy for a number of years.

To say this went down like a lead balloon with both institutions would be an understatement. The general idea was that departments would move to one or the other rather than being replicated in both. Some limited movement *did* occur – for example, TCD has the only Dental School (designed by ABK) on Lincoln Place, and UCD the only Veterinary School over at Belfield. While the two institutions now often co-operate on joint ventures such as the Innovation Academy, they are happy to lead their own separate lives; the days of a “cold war” between the two are happily long over.

See original at http://digital.ucd.ie/view/ucdlib:47307. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

UCD has a School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy out at Richview – in the top 150 for architecture/built environment in the QS rankings for 2017. The excellent Department of History of Art and Architecture at TCD has its focus primarily on Art History, however. While TCD produced Berkeley fan and “starchitect” Níall McLaughlin, he wasn’t educated as an architect at Trinity. However, as the conferring body for degrees at DIT until 1998, we can claim leading Irish architects such as Donal Hickey as Trinity architectural graduates, awarded a Bachelor of Architectural Science at TCD, even though they would have primarily studied at the School of Architecture at Bolton Street. UCD has produced the likes of Valerie Mulvin and Niall McCullough (who designed the Ussher Library), Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey (John built a scale model of the Berkeley’s foyer as a UCD student and their firm is currently working on a new DIT library) and many more – including Níall McLaughlin, after he finished at TCD.

The libraries of TCD and UCD are long accustomed to receiving donations of archival material from the public, but also from large firms such as Collen Construction (TCD) and G. & T. Crampton (UCD). In 2017, Trinity is set to receive a very substantial donation of material as a “gift” for the Berkeley’s 50th birthday from a mysterious benefactor – more details later in the year!

The norm now is to digitise interesting material from these donations, and both Trinity and UCD do this on a regular basis. Which led to finding images of the Berkeley in the UCD Digital Library, from the G. & T. Crampton Photograph Archive, uploaded in 2016.  UCD have made these images available under Creative Commons, and we are happy to feature any interesting images of the Berkeley, no matter what their source… so thank-you to UCD Library for making these great images available.

See original at http://digital.ucd.ie/view/ucdlib:47269. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.