Papers of James Meenan – Move of UCD to Belfield

14 U.C.D. and the Future

faculties and comprehensive changes in the regulations now governing the training of barristers and solicitors.

Science and Engineering

In these faculties the staff is mainly whole-time but, in the engineering subjects in particular, College staff engage in consultative work, and senior members of both faculties give valuable service to State and semi-State bodies, e.g., Bord na Mona, Institute of Industrial Research and Standards, special commissions, etc.

Arts, Philosophy and Celtic Studies

Only in the cases of the faculties of Arts, Philosophy and Celtic Studies could it possibly be said that the faculties are self-contained. It is just these 'self-contained' faculties, however, which will at staff and advanced student level feel grievously their removal from their proximity to the National Library, T.C.D. Library, the Institute for Advanced Studies, the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Irish Academy.

General Considerations

The Faculties of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine are special cases and separate arrangements are being made for them. Wheras the Commission devoted considerable attention to the question of reuniting the third and fourth year agricultural students with College, no consideration was given in this or in any other respect to the veterinary students.

In concluding this section we wish to point out that U.C.D. depends to a far greater extent than do other universities on professors and lecturers who are part-time either in name or in fact. These part-time teachers hold appointments outside the College in the medical, legal and commercial world. We assert that a university college which depends on such a system for a substantial part of its teaching programme must do everything in its power to facilitate the attendance of its part-time teachers, and that a move to Stillorgan Road will aggravate the position in this respect. We foresee that there may be a reluctance on the part of professional people to accept part-time appointments at U.C.D., if it moves out, because of the deleterious effect their academic duties would have on their professional practice.

In such a situation the College might have to appoint many more full-time staff in the professional faculties, a very expensive undertaking.

All faculties without exception would suffer by removal from their present fortunate position in the city centre. We believe that the Commission has not given sufficient weight to the points outlined here and that it has dismissed the objection to the removal on these grounds far too lightly.

The College authorities appear to hope that by going to the Stillorgan Road site the students will be induced to spend more of their free time within the College precincts, and that the 'nine-to-five' attitude held by some of the students will be broken down. There is, however, a distinct possibility that the move would in fact intensify this attitude for the majority of students. Even if some halls of residence are eventually built on the site, they will cater for only

Problems in the Proposed Move 15

a small minority -- such halls cost from £1,500 to £2,000 per student place. The tendency might well be for the average student to get back 'home' or into town as quickly as possible and once there he would be unlikely to travel out again for the evening meeting, hop, or other leisure time activity.

B. THE PROBLEM OF THE MEDICAL SCHOOL

A signal failure of the Commission's Report is that it makes no attempt at producing any solution to the problem of the U.C.D. Medical School. It accepts the space requirements proposed by the College for medical buildings (which do not include provision for clinical teaching) viz. 112,150 sq. ft. nett (say 150,000 sq. ft. gross) to cost an estimated £1,075,000 at 1952 values, or allowing for a 15% increase in cost, a sum of £1,236,250 at to-day's prices. This does not include the vaguely mentioned 'Clinical Institute' of which no details are given, although it does appear on the site plan. There is no information given as to its nature, function, relation to the College or to medical education, or to its source of finance.

With regard to the clinical teaching of medicine the following quotation from p.27 of the Report indicates the Commission's position on this vital question (comments and italics are ours): 'In this branch of the University teaching of medicine there is an accommodation problem which requires attention. Its extent is not a matter that we can now determine.' We believe it was their business, to do so, even within their own restricted view of their terms of reference. 'Involved in the problem is the question how much and what part of medicine can be more satisfactorily taught in hospital lecture theatres or laboratories than in the College. But we think that we have seen enough of each of these affiliated hospitals (the Mater and St. Vincent's) to say that the minimum requirements for clinical teaching are lacking. We are not in a position to indicate whose duty it is to see that these requirements should be provided. If for lack of co-ordination among the several authorities nothing is to be done the results for the clinical teaching must be serious. Accommodation for the teaching if clinical medicine is not less important than accommodation for the teaching of other branches of the subject.' This of course is merely to reiterate one of the things that the General Medical Council inspectors and the various official American inspectors to our schools have long been saying.

The College's Architectural Advisory Board spent some time in ascertaining how long it would take a student, by various routes and various means of transport, to travel from the proposed university medical buildings to the site of the proposed Elm Park Hospital and the Commission provides a table of the results (See Appendix II to Appendix Iv of Chapter I of the Report). But in regard to the other teaching hospitals used by U.C.D., all the report has to say is that 'a new College at Stillorgan Road will add to the distance students have to travel to and from the teaching hospitals, and for the general body of students Stillorgan Road is not as easy to reach as Earlsfort Terrace. But these inconveniences are not great.'

Some vitally important points are however ignored by the Commission in this assessment of the situation. At the moment U.C.D. has signed agreements with three 'affiliated' general teaching hospitals, viz. St. Vincent's Hospital (c. 190 beds), the Mater Misericordiae Hospital (c. 435 beds) and, subsequent