London Branch of the Trinity College Dublin Association and the Trinity College Dining Club, London

Brooks's Club, London

27th September

 

Good evening,

It’s a great pleasure to be here and a privilege to be giving the after-dinner address. I thank you for inviting me. It’s always wonderful to meet with graduates – and this is, I believe, the longest-established Trinity alumni branch and Dining Club.

This year, as some of you may know, is Trinity’s 425th anniversary since the foundation of the College in 1592.

We wanted to commemorate this occasion. And we thought it a good opportunity to take stock of where the College is now, where we have come from, and where we want to get to.

So yesterday evening we held a “Trinity 425” Symposium in the Dining Hall. We invited six historians to give addresses, looking at key historical periods, and I myself gave the final address on the College in its fifth century - which began in 1992, so that’s the last 25 years and projecting into the next 75.

It was a great event, opened by An Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar. The significance was lost on no-one that, in this historic 425th year, we have, for the first time ever, a Trinity graduate as Taoiseach.

There was a lot of press coverage of the event this morning because in his speech Leo said explicitly that he did not want to saddle students with ‘enormous debt’.

To quote him exactly, he said “I think it is difficult enough for young people these days to buy their first homes and pay the rent without being saddled with enormous debts in their 20s and 30s in a way that is the case in England and the United States.”

This comment has been broadly welcomed in Ireland. I certainly welcome it as an indication that the government is prepared to invest more in higher education. And I’m delighted of course that our symposium evinced such a strong statement.

All the symposium talks were marvellous – they will be uploaded on our website if you want to hear them. I was struck to learn that the conventional view that Trinity was established by Queen Elizabeth the First to proselytise – to spread the Protestant religion - is wrong. It was established following a lengthy campaign run by a Dublin guild of Catholic and Protestant merchants, who felt that a university would boost the commercial potential of their city of Dublin. Which indeed it has done! The merchants had the right idea. Their guild was called the “The Corporation or Guild of Merchants of ye Holy Trinity Dublin”, it is the name of this guild that is now thought to be the origin of the name of the College.

I much prefer this origin story to the proselytising one. I was also greatly struck by John Bowman’s talk. He looked at Trinity in the first 70 years of the 20th Century and it’s a very sombre story. Trinity went from being promised 39 thousand pounds per annum, recurrent revenue, by Lloyd George in 1920 to receiving a cheque of just five thousand pounds from Michael Collins in 1922 and being told, ‘that’s all we’ve got’. Trinity received no more money until 1949. How on earth did it survive?

Speaking after John, I had a happier task – instead of having to delve into the difficult, terrible decades of World War One, and civil war, and the McQuaid ban on Catholics attending Trinity, I got to recount what is essentially a success story of Trinity’s recent 25 years.

In our short time together now, I’d like to share with you how I think we achieved this, and projecting into the future, how we can continue on the path of success. I know how invested you all are in Trinity’s future.

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Looking at the past two and a half decades, they do not – thankfully – compare with the dramatic violence of some of the earlier years. But it’s my contention that in terms of transformations in research and education, they are as momentous as any 25 years in Trinity’s history.

If we go back to 1992, things certainly differed on campus compared to 25 years earlier, to 1967: there were far more students, and many more of these were women, and Catholics, and Trinity was much more embedded in national life. All significant social changes.

But in terms of pedagogy and research, not so much had changed. While there was excellent scholarship on-going in the College in 1992, Ireland was still a poor country by European standards and there was minimal investment in laboratories and research programmes.

Essays were still hand-written, and student exchanges were within Europe and mostly taken up by language students; the college was beginning to develop links with industry, but there was just one remarkable spin-out, Iona Technologies.

The difference with today is all-encompassing. By 1992 the groundwork had been laid, and it is a pleasure to recall Provost Lyons’ and Provost Watts’ great work here,  - we were on the cusp of rapid change, and the past 25 years have been the years of:

• new and emerging disciplines – I was lucky enough to spearhead one of them, Bioengineering;
• huge investment in research;
• growth in innovation, entrepreneurship and industry collaborations;
• a revolution in information and communications technologies, and in digitisation and online education;  
• growth in international students, and in student exchanges and global research partnerships;  
• and, on the negative side, taking the last decade, they’re the years of reduced state funding on a per student basis.

This revolution has been global – all universities are experiencing the transformation in technology and communications. But it has also been driven internally – for instance, Trinity emerged as a research leader in many disciplines, within Europe and internationally, in driving interdisciplinarity through subjects like Digital Humanities, Nanoscience, Deaf Studies, and Neuroscience.

I’m speaking as if this is a great success story. Which I believe it is. Not in every sphere. There were mistakes, inevitably. But if I look at where we were, and where we are now, and what we had to come through, and compare us to other universities, I think “Success Story” is a fair summation.

I see these two and a half decades as a cohesive period of transformation during which the College responded to the challenges and opportunities to become Ireland’s research flagship.

You could see the last 25 years as a tale of two halves: the Celtic Tiger and the Downturn. Maybe if I were giving this talk a few years ago, that’s how I’d see it. But happily, the country is in a better place now and we can have perspective. I think future scholars of the College will see a continuous sweep through, rather than disruption.

I say this because the exciting developments of the 1990s – like the huge investment in research through national and EU programmes and the pedagogical use of technology – these developments were continued and strengthened through the downturn. We could have responded with panic to austerity: ramping up student numbers to generate revenue, or hunkering down around a limited number of research programmes. But we chose not to sacrifice quality or plurality. We scaled up ambition.

Specifically, during the downturn we focussed on two areas which have proved crucial: global relations and commercial revenue, including industry collaborations, spin-outs, and philanthropy.

The major legacy of the recent economic downturn is perhaps that it focussed our determination on the importance of having control of our own revenue. To further this, we have created a Provost’s Council which provides an external leadership group for the university.

Now on our 425th anniversary, Trinity is fortunate in being in a strong position:

• we have gone up in all the rankings; this is the beginning of the reversal of the decline that set in in 2009;
• we’ve been accepted as one of only 24 elite universities in LERU, the League of European Research Universities;
• the Trinity Business School will open next year and will be a game-changer in terms of business education and research in Dublin;
• within the next few years our Engineering, Energy and Environment Institute, E3, will open in two phases: the E3 Learning Foundry and the E3 Research Institute;
• we’ve gone from creating one campus company a year up until 2008 to creating an average of seven a year, and we’ve just heard that, for the third year running, we’ve been rated Europe’s Number 1 university for educating entrepreneurs;
• the Trinity Access Programme is being piloted in Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford University. The Access Programmes are about combatting inequality – ensuring a level educational playing field for all.

This is just a sample of our successful initiatives. These achievements were brought about thanks to staff working together across the university, and thanks to the invaluable support of friends and alumni.

May I take this opportunity to thank you all for your commitment to Trinity. You give financial support; you help fund scholarships and access programmes. Many of you help with mentoring students and graduates; you attend College activities and take a keen interest in college developments.

We’re most grateful. Quite simply, the university could not have developed in the way it has without your support. The successes of which I’ve been speaking are your successes as well.

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So, from this current position of cautious optimism in 2017, projecting onwards - how do I think things will develop for the rest of the fifth century? What will the College look like for the Quincentenary celebrations in 2092?

Of course, there’s no answering that. In 1912 no-one foresaw what was round the corner, let alone what the next decade would bring. The future will always take you by surprise.

Not to mention regional challenges, like Brexit.

To the extent that these are external challenges, our future is out of our hands, and picturing the College in 2092 is only giving hostages to fortune.

I know what I hope it will be like. I can identify higher education trends which, if they continue, will bring about positive transformation. Trends in:

• technology, revolutionising how we educate, research and innovate. Technology has the potential to level the playing field in a way that will allow all abilities to participate;

 

• and the trend towards breaking down barriers – that’s barriers between disciplines, and distinctions between science and art and empiricism and creativity.

Ideally, by 2092, technology and the removal of barriers will give us a world notably freer from inhibition and restriction, releasing the flow of discovery and knowledge. 

We want to bring this about. We understand that it’s not all in our hands. But as individuals and as institutions, we can ‘show an affirming flame’ as Auden put it. Which is a poetic way of saying, ‘we can be part of the solution, not the problem’. 

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I want to finish today by looking at what ‘being part of the solution’ might mean for the rest of our fifth century.

It means taking right decisions. And, perhaps more importantly, not taking wrong decisions.

I say, ‘more importantly’, because doing right is often well signposted. For instance, launching an initiative like E3 is a good decision, but not a difficult one. It’s clear that universities should direct their ground-breaking research towards the challenges of a liveable planet.

You can plan to do right. Avoiding mistakes is trickier, because you can go wrong while trying to go right. Let me give an example of what I mean:

We’re proud of the increase in international students – this brings cultural richness to the campus, and international fees offset the decline in state investment.

But there are dangers: first, these students tend not to come from disadvantaged backgrounds – they come from families who can pay the fees or know how to access loans.

Second, Ireland still has the youngest population in Europe and the Department of Education estimates that the demand for third-level places will rise by 25 percent by 2028. If Irish universities reserve multiple places for international students, who will educate the Irish school-leavers?

These are serious issues to consider: in Trinity, we have a deep commitment to Dublin and Ireland, which we’re not prepared to compromise, and however great the research we do, if we embed inequality in the way that we educate, then we can’t claim to be part of the solution.

This is just one example of how a decision taken in good faith might go wrong. There are many others. In most cases, the responsibility to address them is not the university’s alone.

Trinity cannot address global challenges unilaterally. But by identifying undesirable outcomes before they become entrenched, we can be part of the solution.

I think the key to getting it right is to adhere to our values. They are our compass and our steer. Considering all decisions in the light of our values will help prevent us going places we don’t want to go.

Our values are encompassed in our mission. This mission incorporates:

• independence of thought;
• a diverse student community and transformative student experience;
• research at the frontiers of discipline, making a catalysing impact on local innovation and on addressing global challenges; and
• fearlessly advancing the cause of a pluralistic, just and sustainable society. 

This mission captures our commitment to the local and the global, to future discovery and to strong traditional values. It balances what we owe to students and staff, to the local region and to the planet as a whole.

This mission keeps us on a steady course. It reminds us that we cannot become, for instance, a research think-tank – that would be to sacrifice our mission in education; nor can we rationalise around a few disciplines which offer momentary economic value – that would be to sacrifice our mission in diversity and pluralism.

Trinity has flourished through the centuries because we have been resilient and flexible while holding onto a firm sense of mission and a sense of place. This remains our way forward.

I will close with Edmund Burke’s great words on society. He is talking about society, but since a great research university is a kind of micro-society, and certainly a community, this captures, I think, our mission in plurality and our kinship with the past - our sense of drawing strength from our history to lead us to the future that we seek:

"[Society] is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

Thank you.

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