HEA Act 2022: Presidential views

Criticised as “essentially a government takeover” and an erosion of independence by Trinity Fellow Dr Sarah Alyn-Stacey; defended in the name of “accountability” and “transparency” by the ‘mastermind’ behind the Act, Minister for Further and Higher Education Simon Harris; the Higher Education Authority (HEA) Act 2022 comprised the biggest transformation of university governance in Ireland in five decades. Though met with significant student and some university opposition, the Act was signed into law in October. Alex Payne spoke to two TCDSU presidents, outgoing and incoming, about the consequences of the Act for students and universities in Ireland.

Student representation on the College Board, the transformation of College into a business, and ignorance of students’ needs; these are the primary concerns expressed by outgoing president of Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU), Gabi Fullam, and president-elect for 2023/24, László Molnárfi in separate interviews with Misc.

Fullam deplores the “overall mindset” of government to view education “not as a good in itself, not as a right”, but as a system from which “to make money or upskill the current populace”. According to her, the state “fundamentally” views education as a business rather than a place of “innovation, expertise and creative learning”. Mólnárfi echoes these sentiments in describing the changes to come as an example of the government’s “corporate agenda”.

The new Act sets out that there will be three ‘student representatives’ on the Board. When the Act was in its early legislative stagesthe Bill stage it stipulated two. TCDSU lobbied for an increase from two to three student representatives on Board, and for them to be democratically elected. Fullam stated that the latter change was because “the quality of that representation wasn’t safeguarded”. “We are not totally reliant on management”, she says, adding that the TCDSU funding from the Capitations Committee is “safeguarded” through statutes. Although the TCDSU is relatively self-reliant, other universities around the country are in more vulnerable situations regarding appropriate student representation and funding. Consequently, an ambiguity between elected and “selected” student representation within university governance (as well as threats to funding) could lead to students’ unions struggling to remain an effective representation of students’ needs.

The HEA Act increases the minimum number of external members of The Board from six to nine and reduces the minimum internal members from nine to five. Of these external members, three are nominated by the Minister, with the remaining six recommended by the Board to be approved by the Minister. Molnárfi describes these external members as having “typically corporate leaning biases”.

This amounts to a greater level of “control of higher educational institutions” according to Fullam. Molnárfi describes this as a “neoliberal takeover of academia”, ridding College governance of “internal” democracy.

Through the supposed increased government control, “no responsibility for their (universities’) long-term funding or their ability to actually see how that will progress into the future” appears to Fullam in the Act. Mólnárfi warns of an increase in the number of “casualised” academics (those without a permanent contract) and tuition and rent fee increases.

The president-elect has previously raised concerns in an opinion piece for Trinity News about the low pay, insecure contracts and lack of promotion amongst “casualised” academics. He says that “staff working conditions” are “student learning conditions”. Fullam similarly states that “harm to staff is harm to students”. She raises concerns about the model of “taking in more students to take in more money”, without provision of the appropriate infrastructure to cope with increased demand. She cites the staff to student ratio increasing as an example of this, as well as raising concerns about other teaching staff. Ireland’s current average student:staff ratio sits at 23:1 compared to the European average of 15:1.

According to the outgoing TCDSU President, a “lesser quality of education” results from the poor working conditions of PHD Researchers and Teaching Assistants. She highlights no reimbursement of teaching materials and issues with paid teaching as detrimental to the undergraduate experience. Paid training is also not a feature of the staff experience at Trinity. In other entities, Fullam points out that workshops around equality and diversity may not be voluntary and would most likely be paid. If unpaid and involuntary, she believes that they are mostly attended by those with a “pre-existing interest”, leaving significant gaps in the appropriate delivery of teaching and welfare services.

Accommodation fees at Trinity have slowly increased, epitomised by the weekly price of the new Printing House Square rooms – €245 to €270, including €19 per week for utilities. These accommodation charges, Fullam says, are a result of the College being “chronically underfunded”. In 2021 Trinity received 41% of its funding from the government, down from 70% in 2008.

Peter Reynolds, the Chief Financial Officer for TCD, stated in the 2020-21 Financial Statements that “the financial outlook for the University will continue to remain uncertain” without government commitments to long-term funding or a lift on the cap of student fees.

Mólnárfi perceives the Act to be hypocritical in nature. Set against the background of decreasing state funding, he argues that the “idea” of saving costs is what the Minister for Higher Education, Simon Harris, used to “push through this bill”.

“You’re not spending your money effectively. Your internal governance of students and staff – of community expertise –is not working” is how the president-elect summarises Minister Harris’ arguments in favour of increasing the number of “ministerial appointees”. He describes the situation of the last few years as “enforced austerity” and concludes that the Act is an attempt by the government to fix an issue that it has created all by itself. Questions therefore arise, again, about the increased number of governmentappointed members of The Board, and what effect this will have on the choices made about who shoulders the cost of funding the College into the future. If students were to shoullder this cost with increased tuition fees and accommodation charges, Trinity becomes less accessible and students that do attend face a future potentially saddled with debt. This may be in the form of student loans, says Mólnárfi, who also draws attention to the rising food and drink prices at the college catering services.

Student loans are a feature of third-level education in the UK, a place the president-elect also uses as an example to express his concerns about the direction of academic funding.

In the summer of 2021 the UK government announced a 50 percent cut to funding for arts subjects in higher education. Roehampton, Wolverhampton, and Sheffield Hallam are just some of the UK universities that are having to reduce offerings in arts subjects. The Academy of Live & Recorded Arts (ARLA) closed last year and, symptomatic of the wider cuts to arts funding across the UK, the closure of the Oldham Coliseum has attracted plenty of criticism.

Mólnárfi is concerned that similar events may follow in Ireland. He suggests that this is because the government is focused on funding “marketable” research, ignoring education that you cannot integrate into the labour market as a “commodity”. It is not just the arts that are affected; STEM research is also under threat. In 2015, 1,000 scientists signed an open letter to the Irish government to raise concerns about the lack of funding for ‘blue skies’ research. As reported in the Irish Times, Tristan Mcloughlin, an associate professor in mathematics here at TCD, said that “basic (‘blue-skies’) research is essential for applied research in the long term”. He went on to explain that fundamental advances in research provide the bedrock for more practical advancements. Therefore, not only is the student experience at risk of becoming more limited academically, but College, and Ireland as a whole, risks falling behind more of its European counterparts in scientific development.

Mólnárfi says he plans to put up “one hell of a fight” in order to protect “community democracy”, the College from “corporatisation” and students’ needs. The HEA Act has begun to be implemented by the Board, with changes to the College statutes to take effect at the beginning of next academic year. Can Mólnárfi mount an effective resistance to the steady tread of government machinery? To be continued…

Alex Payne is Deputy Editor of Misc.

How AI can help you cram for exams (without cheating)

Tom Comer

One semester worth of laughing, breathing and generally wasting time - look where it’s brought you. The long metal barrel of exams stares you dead in the face, no extension will save you now. We have crossed the rubicon of the R rate, long gone are the golden days of online exams completed from your comfortable bedroom. Welcome all, the wooded vale that is exam season is no longer in the distance, but rather its roots gnarl your Doc Marten adorned feet. You cannot see a light past its thick shrubbery, nor hear the echo of your fellow coursemates through its thick fog. But fear not. We are in the new era of exam preparation. Unless you have paid as little attention to the news as to your lectures, then you will by now have heard of the infamous ChatGPT. The fresh-faced large language model to beat them all. Worse than the one person who does the readings in tutorials, this artificial intelligence is limited in its capacity for problem solving – but can be infinite in assistance to your learning.

Prompt #1: “Explain X to me like I am five”

Example: “Explain differentiation to me like I am five”

Response: “Okay, imagine you have a toy car that can move forward or backward. When you push the car forward, it moves in one direction, and when you pull it back, it moves in the opposite direction.

Differentiation is like figuring out how fast the car is moving when you push it. If you push the car a little bit, it moves slowly, and if you push it really hard, it moves quickly.

But sometimes, you don’t know how fast the car is moving just by looking at it. That’s when you need to use differentiation to figure it out. It’s like asking the car how fast it’s going and then using that information to help you push it just the right amount.

In maths, differentiation is a way to figure out how fast something is changing. If you have a curve, like the line on a graph, you can use differentiation to figure out the slope of that curve at any point. It helps you understand how the curve is changing, just like how you can understand how the toy car is moving by knowing how fast it’s going.”

Wow, what a journey.

Now a more arts-based example.

Example: “Explain the concept of viewing films through a Marxist perspective to me like I am five”

Response: “Okay, imagine you and your friends are watching a movie. You’re having a good time and enjoying the story, but then you start to notice something strange. The characters in the movie seem to be separated into two groups: the rich people who have everything they want, and the poor people who don’t have much at all.

“When you watch the movie from a Marxist perspective, it means you’re looking at the movie through the ideas of a philosopher named Karl Marx. He believed that the world is divided into two groups: the people who have power and money, and the people who don’t. He called these groups the “bourgeoisie” (boo-jwah-zee) and the “proletariat” (proh-luh-tair-ee-uht).

“So when you watch the movie from a Marxist perspective, you might start to see the characters in a different way. You might notice that the rich characters have all the power and control, while the poor characters have to work hard and struggle just to get by. You might also notice that the rich characters are treated differently by the other characters in the movie, almost like they’re better than everyone else.

Be very aware that ChatGPT can often simply make stuff up. The nature of large language models is that they are just probabilistic representations of human language, they don’t understand like we do. They cannot replace human judgement and your own first-hand knowledge of a topic. With that in mind, I am going to give you some prompts that will help develop your understanding of content in your course and hopefully aid your studying.

“Watching a movie from a Marxist perspective helps you see how the movie reflects the real world, where some people have more power and money than others. By understanding how movies and stories can show these ideas, you can start to think about how the world works and how we can make it a fairer place for everyone.”

I don’t know much about arts, Marx, or films – but that seems pretty good.

Example: “Help me draw parallels between the Solow Growth model and unrelated domains, promoting a deeper understanding and the ability to apply knowledge in novel situation”

Response: “The Solow model, which is a mathematical model used to explain economic growth, can be compared to other unrelated domains to promote a deeper understanding of the model and its applications. Here are a few examples:

“1. Environmental science: The Solow model can be compared to the concept of carrying capacity in ecology, which refers to the maximum population size that a given environment can sustain. Just as the Solow model predicts that an economy will eventually reach a steady state where the growth rate of output per worker will be zero, the concept of carrying capacity predicts that a population will eventually reach a level where it can no longer grow sustainably…”

It went on to give me four other comparisons but I won’t bore you with the details. I particularly love this one –customise it to explain concepts in fields you are more interested in. Like anything but your degree.

Prompt #4: Now a silly one. “Explain X to me in the voice of a cowboy who’s being chased by a dinosaur”

Example: “Explain the beginning of the War of the Roses to me in the voice of a cowboy who’s being chased by a dinosaur”

Example: “Formulate effective questions related to linear algebra that will promote deeper thinking and stimulate curiosity.”

Response: “How can we use linear algebra to analyze the behavior of a system of differential equations?”

“What is the significance of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a matrix, and how do they relate to the geometry of the matrix?”

“How can linear algebra be used to analyze and optimize complex networks, such as social networks or electrical power grids?”

“What is the geometric interpretation of the cross product of two vectors, and how can this be used to solve problems in physics and engineering?”

“How can linear algebra be used to solve optimization problems, such as finding the minimum or maximum of a multivariable function subject to constraints?”

Thought deepened and curiosity stimulated, for sure.

Response: “Well howdy there, partner! Let me tell you about the War of the Roses. It all started back in ol’ England when the Lancaster and York families were fighting over who should be the king. These two families had been feuding for years and it finally came to a head in the 15th century. It was like a stampede of bulls, with each side charging towards the other, ready to take the crown.

of the Roses

“But let me tell you, that wasn’t the only thing causing a ruckus. Out of nowhere, this mighty dinosaur appeared on the horizon and started chasing me like a bull at a rodeo. I had to high-tail it out of there before it gobbled me up like a tasty morsel.

“Anyway, back to the War of the Roses. It was a real mess, with battles all over the place and nobody quite sure who was winning. It was like a game of poker, with each side holding their cards close to their chest and waiting for the right moment to strike. Unfortunately for me, that dinosaur was getting closer and closer, so I gotta mosey on out of here. But let me tell you, the War of the Roses was a real doozy, and it’s a story that’ll make your head spin faster than a lasso.”

You get the picture with this one. I am sure It’ll lighten up a neurotic study session in Kinsella hall at 2am, or maybe drive you completely insane. I would encourage you to experiment with this one; cowboys, samurai, aliens, celebrities – ChatGPT can do it all. Always remember you can be as specific as you like – don’t hold back.

This one is for the real crammers. A customised study plan, just for you. Feel free to set a time limit on this study, and inform ChatGPT of what you’re most and least familiar with.

Example: “Break down French Grammar into smaller, more manageable chunks or units, and provide a structured plan for mastering each one. I have two weeks, and know most of the irregular verbs.”

Response: “Sure, here’s a breakdown of French grammar into smaller, more manageable chunks, along with a structured plan for mastering each one in two weeks:”

French Grammar Study Plan generated by ChatGPT

Week 1:

Nouns and Articles: Learn the gender (masculine or feminine) of common nouns and how to use definite and indefinite articles. Practice identifying the gender of nouns and using the correct article in context.

Pronouns: Learn the different types of pronouns (personal, possessive, demonstrative, etc.) and how to use them in sentences. Practice substituting nouns with pronouns in context.

Adjectives: Learn how to agree adjectives with nouns in gender and number. Practice using adjectives in context, with different noun types and in different positions within sentences.

Verbs: Review regular verb conjugation in the present tense. Learn how to conjugate and use irregularverbs in the present tense. Practice using regular and irregular verbs in context, with different subject pronouns and with different verb types.

Week 2:

Adverbs: Learn the different types of adverbs (manner, frequency, degree, etc.) and how to use them in sentences. Practice modifying verbs and adjectives with adverbs in context.

Prepositions: Learn common prepositions and how to use them to express location, time, and other relationships between words in a sentence. Practice using prepositions in context with different verb types and sentence structures.

Pretty sweet if you ask me.

In summary, ChatGPT should be your new library crush. Stop looking at that person from across Ussher 4. Acquaint yourself with ChatGPT’s wiley ways and searingly intelligent takes. Be wooed by its mastery of language and resourcefulness; but beware - it lies like a rug. It will make stuff up, so check to make sure with relevant resources. It can be your best friend and guardian angel in this exam period if you let it.

We are entering a new frontier of artificial intelligence and assistive technology unlike anything we have seen before. Change your approach to education and learning, and leverage these new tools to gamify studying and supercharge your “productivity”.

Tom Comer is a Junior Sophister maths and economics student

Conjunctions: Learn different types of conjunctions (coordinating, subordinating, etc.) and how to use them to connect words and clauses in a sentence. Practice using conjunctions in context with different sentence structures and clauses.

Syntax: Learn the basic word order in a French sentence, and how to form questions and negations. Practice constructing sentences in different forms (positive, negative, interrogative) and with different grammatical structures.

Structured Plan:

Week 1:

Day 1-2: Nouns and Articles

Day 3-4: Pronouns

Day 5-6: Adjectives

Day 7-8: Verbs

Week 2:

Day 9-10: Adverbs

Day 11-12: Prepositions

Day 13-14: Conjunctions and Syntax

“For each grammar topic, you can use a combination of textbooks, online resources, and language learning apps to learn the rules and practice using them in context. Try to focus on one topic per day, and set aside time for practice and review. By the end of two weeks, you should have a solid foundation in French grammar that will allow you to communicate effectively in everyday situations. Good luck!”