HomeThe Irish music scamAcademic tenure?Medialabe-voting

See "Being human: The search for order"  Exeter; Intellect Books, 2004, Pp 8-16

for the general state of affairs up to 2003. It can be found on the first entry of the blog cited below.


The following are excerpts from the blog academictenure.blogspot.com, currently being reconstructed, with apologies for the lack of decent format:

Of libel laws and jurisdictions

Regular readers will note that I sign all my entries here. To post them anonymously would allow me shelter under Section 230(c) of the Communications Decency act of 1996. I do not want to do that, as that would be cowardly. I therefore can be sued in the USA if any of the statements here is false; had I remained anonymous, I could not be sued

So let us revisit some of the themes here;

1.In my opinion (and I do have a B.Sc/M.Sc in psychology) Ferdinand is a danger both to his staff and his students. The contradictions in his statements on very important matters show that he either a liar, or severely dissociated. In either case, he should resign.
2.There is no innocent explanation for SIPTU's behaviour in 2003, which endangered tenure. Since Paul Cahill took over as shop steward, much progress has been made
3.The only people to break the law are F. and those in the college view who promulgated the recent article. Without revealing our legal strategy in the forthcoming Irish libel actions, it is worth pointing out that I am a “former lecturer” in exactly the same sense that Paul is “no longer a member of staff”; that is, in F's imagination

Anyone who feels maligned by this site can post a reply. If their complaints have merit, I will take down the material and pay myself to services like Reputation defender and eVisibilty to make sure the material cannot ever again be googled. No, that does not include senior counsel who forget what they said at a meeting attended by my own lawyer (and then back out of a High court action against DCU the day before the case) or junior counsel whom I coached, gratis, for their bar exams in Irish who enunciated opinions about F in front of witnesses in my own house.

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 5u Marta 2009


The problem, in a nutshell 18 August 2009

The President of DCU just underwent cross-examination at a tribunal. He conceded, finally, that the 2001 statute does not apply to staff tenured pre 1997. How much suffering and ruined lives would have been avoided had he said that earlier!Of course, the President didn't mention for good reason that DCU defined academic tenure before his enactment of Statutes in 2001.

Tenure was defined as follows: A probationary period shall apply to all new employees of one year from commencement of service. The Governing Body reserves the right to extend the period of probation for a further period of one year. Within this probationary year the Governing Body shall have the sole and absolute right of deciding on the suitability of an employee for continued employment and employment made be terminated by the Governing Body at any time during the probationary period. On the Governing Body being satisfied with the performance of the candidate the appointment shall be confirmed by the appointee and shall continue in office to the age of sixty five years subject to conditions and term of employment set out herein


No change to this contract has been authorized by the union; yet, post 1995, DCU promulgated an utterly illegal changed contract that got rid of

1.Academic tenure
2.the right to work away from DCU, which has been a building site since the 1990's
3.Academic freedom

They transferred the signatures from the 1985 agreement to give this one the appearance of legality; unfortunately for the, at least one of the “signatories”, Pat Cullen, had been out of office for 5 years (as was, in all probability E. Higgins of SIPTU).

The trick was then to constrain tenure to the “3 months' notice” clause in the absence of an explicit definition in the illegally changed “agreement”. Up to now, this trick has cost management a vote of no confidence, and the Irish taxpayer millions in legal fees – not to mention the perhaps billions in inefficiency due to spoiled industrial relations.



Tenure is dead – Long live tenure!

Though it may be hard to believe at this stage, the Irish trade union movement had a distinguished role in the republican struggle. The 1916 proclamation was printed in Liberty Hall; on a less symbolic level, the British war effort during the war of independence/tan war was greatly hampered by the magnificent courage of the union train drivers. The union directive was not to transport any British troops or material; on several occasions, with a gun to his head, drivers so refused. (On this, at least, the movie “The wind that shakes the Barley” is historically correct). The drivers were summarily dismissed; the policy of the union was to accept these individual sackings without striking in what was a time of crisis, suspending the “one out - all out!” ethos of unions.


The 1990 industrial relations act, written in rather less charged times, reintroduced individual dismissals , with the reference to sections 10, 11, and 12 below being to the possibility of strikes;


“
Where in relation to the employment or non-employment or the terms or conditions of or affecting the employment of one individual worker, there are agreed procedures availed of by custom or in practice in the employment concerned, or provided for in a collective agreement, for the resolution of individual grievances, including dismissals, sections 10, 11 and 12 shall apply only where those procedures have been resorted to and exhausted.
“


Let us be clear; this was the end of academic tenure, or any job security, in Ireland. Anyone can be sacked, at any time, for anything or nothing. In this Prondzynski is absolutely correct(as distinct from the common law Cahill/Fanning cases); everything else is window-dressing. Can they be reinstated? Well, it is now 7 years since I got a paycheck, despite a Labour court, EAT, two high court, and one Supreme court decisions on the issue. Why did SIPTU allow this ?There was momentum for a strike on the STATUTE, one that is legal within the terms of the 1990 act, and one that would have ensured that the Cahill, Howarth, and Kearney cases, inter alia, would have been won on the spot. (As readers of this blog know, I have developed a hypothesis about the motivations for SIPTU's non-action)

The notion “ individual dismissal” is itself peculiar. Let's look at some pseudocode in a fictitious block-structured computer language for the sacking of employees numbers 1 to 100;

For i=1 to 100

Begin

Dismiss (employee (i))

End

The function dismiss

Defun dismiss (a)
begin
Print 'Employee (a), “here's three months' salary, now go clean out your desk”'
end

So each of these ex-employees is an individual dismissal, and will be subjected to appeals lasting up to several decades. No procedures are necessary. Furthermore, regardless of the speed of the processor, there is a time lag between the dismissal of each employee. (If it's vista, it may be days). The geniuses at Arthur cox may not think of it in precisely these terms; my best guess is that the structure of their argument is;

“You're an individual, are you not?”

“Yes”

“This is therefore an individual dismissal”

The criminality of the procedures that both staff and students have been subjected to by DCU management will be appropriately responded to in time. For the moment, we need tp protect ourselves, so that nobody else is forced to undergo what Paul Cahill, his family, and my own went through as these cretinous criminals and their political masters drove Ireland over the cliff's edge.



Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 7u Bealtaine 2009

The strange case of Senator Alex White

As this case unfolds, a veritable freak show will emerge from SIPTU; the laughable move of putting an utterly unqualified branch secretary to go mano a mano with an extremely aggressive barrister will be utterly in keeping with the rest of their handling of this case. Yet the disastrous appointment of Alex White to mediate the talks possibly takes the biscuit.

In March 2003, after the scuffle with management described elsewhere on this blog and SIPTU's unilateral agreement to let DCU's appeal be heard (thus dooming me and my students, as they damn well knew) , Alex White was appointed as mediator. As a producer within RTE, Alex was a formidable operator; however, his relative inexperience as a barrister is probably what doomed us all to the current shambles. The Labour court brief was simple; get a revised statute within 2 months. One would have thought that the following was a sensible course of action, and each stage could have been publicised to staff;

1.Day 1:Write to DCU members and management
2.Week 1; Familiarize oneself with the legislation, which is not complicated, and the DCU statute, at all times referring to precedents
3.Week 2; Write a legal brief summarising the position and cc to DCU members and management. In particular, it should have made clear that, as the Supreme court has ruled, the new procedures could NOT be applied to staff tenured pre-1997. Tenure had to be specified for those post -1997
4.Week 3; collect response from DCU members and management
5.Week 4; Respond in turn; arrange a meeting for week 5
6.Week 5; Make it clear to SIPTU that their agreement was not necessary after DCU had produced a proper definition of tenure
7.Finish with 3 weeks to spare

So what went wrong? Why did everything drag out for years, and in secret? Was it not Alex's job to make sure this did not end up in court again ever, let alone for 5-7 years?

Seán Ó Nualláin 11/11/08



Intimidation and attempted bribery of students by management at DCU

DCU is an unsafe environment for students as for staff. While details of the Dail proceedings, including an adjournment debate, occasioned by one of the more egregious events are likely to be posted here shortly, I will for the moment simply post two pages of the 2004 edition of “Being human” and leave two urls. “Being Human' was launched at Stanford, and the fact DCU has gotten away with its behaviour is a cause of astonishment in the US.

Finally, I wish to offer my humble thanks to my students, and promise them that they will be compensated when we get rid of these people; specifically in this case, Morris, Pronz, and Smeaton.

http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/D/0569/D.0569.200306190019.html


http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/D/0559/D.0559.200212180025.html





Fragment 30 June 2009

The Supreme court; Academics, Businesmen, and Soccer players

The sheer brute fact of having a country's Supreme court adjudicate on a routine personnel matter is eloquent testimony to a management gone wild, as to a “union” simply gone. We convened yesterday with fully 10 legal staff (6 on Cox's side) and three judges – Geoghegan, Denham, and (worryingly, given her rightwing reputation) Macken. All of this will eventually be paid for by the taxpayer, as will the loss of about 5 years of a great Irish scientist's career. Macken actually was very sympathetic on pure business efficiency grounds

As the jumped-up little KKH ( a cork reference) Sreenan began to speak, it was clear that we were in for no great surprise. From my point of view, I wondered that such a little non-entities should be allowed to trifle with the lives of those of us who are attempting to drive Ireland's science and culture forward.

30 Meitheamh

The state, civil society, and academic tenure

I am about to break up a very busy schedule, in which I work daily with the most talented and most generous-spirited people I have ever met in the world's attested crucible of symbolic creativity in order to attend Paul Cahill's Supreme court case, at my own expense. One of the reasons for this is that Paul is a truly great human being ; he has taken on forces beyond the ken of 99.9% of humanity and won. Not just the congeries of globalized corporatism and catholic nationalism which defines DCU, the Irish Times and its acolytes at DCU; what is at stake is a totalizing view of the state and society, which must be resisted. Another reason is, of course, the sheer consequentiality of this issue. Let us explore these in turn.

Civil society is a paradoxical concept. It refers to a rule-based set of functions which (as yet) do not have the legislative imprimatur of state. Due to its colonial heritage, Ireland is full of benign civil society structures; the Irish music session; the GAA; the intensity of the democratic process which, unlike that in the USA, survived electronic “voting”. Italy is full of benign such, as well as malignant such like the Mafia and Camorra (see the movie and read the book “Gomorrah”; this is what FF would have become, had they not been domesticated; the 1990's saw them revitalize this antinomial dream). The work we Irish people, and our allies from other countries (many of whom were married to Irish people, surely the ultimate vote of confidence in a country) did in setting up DCU, while paid by the state, was largely civil society; we went every day beyond the call of duty, which Danny O'Hare nevertheless attributed to his own Roman Catholic genius. (He never taught there)

FF's impetus has always been to bend the state toward its scams, and then extend the state so that no competition is possible. And now, of course, the Irish state under FF has bankrupted itself, and the IMF calls the shots, as already predicted on this blog:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2009/0619/1224249121979.html


DCU takes lawsuits against its staff rivalling anything from the Munster circuit at its most extreme;


http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/issues/the-10-most-ridiculous-lawsuits-of-all-time-1775679.html

So what will happen next? Well, IMHO the Supreme Court will throw out DCU's appeal, and comment that it should never have gotten this far. Wrt the EAT; an offer has been made to DCU to obey the law, and deal with all the issues internally. The central issue – of education, and the organic formation of young women and men – was historically made in Ireland through the hedge schools, an a fortiori civil society construct. It is my opinion that we are heading back there from this miasma of criminality, incompetence, and ripping-off taxpayers to pay for perhaps the most laughable self-elected elite since the Hapsburgs . We even have a Prussian – one not married to an Irishwoman - involved.

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 18u Meitheamh 2009



Industrial relations, Nazi style

Regular readers from outside Ireland may be shocked at what has happened in this doomed state (arguably the result of a classic Fanonian postcolonial transition from nation back to tribe). Wrt this blog, the fact that students were offered a bribe of extra marks to give evidence against a tenured lecturer is attested by parliamentary proceedings, and the subsequent bullying of one of these students who refused to do so has the subject of correspondence between that (now ex-) student and Prondzynski. I have refrained from publishing this because the ex-student wants to take matters into his own hands. Sean Ruth and co discovered that the bullying at DCU is systematic. Prondzynski's attempt to restrict tenure to 3 months is now the subject of a supreme court case, which he will lose as he has lost at the Labour court (twice), Eat, equality tribunal and high court. For his sake, if not ours, it is just as well he never attempted actually to practise as a lawyer.

The economical explanation is that he is vicious, utterly incompetent, and bonkers. That indeed is my opinion. And yet, and yet. Prondzynski's father, as it happens, was manager of a cement factory synonymous with one that used Jewish slave labour. Christopher Browning of Chapel hill started his review of these enterprises with the 1972 case of Walter Becker, who walked scot-free from the courthouse after dozens of witnesses had identified him as a major concentration camp operative, not the only such strange judgement. This Irish state type immunity from the law aside, Browning did an analysis of Nazi industrial relations, epitomised by the camps at Starachowice in Poland and Treblinka.

The nazi war effort needed camps like Starachowice to continue producing munitions. The initial contract was that the SS hired their possessions, the Jews, out to private companies, who were requested to provide separate Jewish accommodation. That they did, of a standard that resulted in typhoid. The initial response was to do performance reviews, involving running the workers up and down hills and shooting the stragglers. After this initial definition of tenure, in 1943 the business authorities announced that no-one else would be shot, and that Jewish guards would be appointed for duties within the camp, with the Ukrainian guards outside to shoot at the infrequent attempted escapes.

Things went rather swimmingly for a brief period, with Jewish families actually paying to be allowed to perform slave labour since this guaranteed their lives. Then came the Russians, so everyone had to be shipped to Treblinka. And now we see that the rule of law did exist beneath the apparent chaos; business is, after all, business. So Mengele was not there to meet the children, many of whom survived the war with their parents. Unfortunately for them, 20 of the Jewish guards were strangled to death by their co-religionists en route.


Given the background he is from, Prondzynski is a heroic humanitarian. Several of his perhaps more blameworthy acolytes at DCU have been mentioned here. Let us focus for the moment on Chance(llo)r David Byrne. One of the plums given by FF to their brightest and best (the standard, admittedly is low) is chairmanship of the National concert Hall. (A predecessor of Byrne's in that role, Shay Hennessy, is responsible for the theft of many musicians' copyrights – see seanonuallain.com). Who better to suspend the rule of law, and any human decency at DCU, than Byrne, an ex-attorney general? Who more appropriate as a target of criminal proceedings in this post-Ahern world when the dust finally settle of this revolting attempt to set Ireland back to an era and modus operandi from which history mercifully delivered us?

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Aibrean 23 2009


Will Prondzynski face a murder charge?


Funny the bits of law one picks up as the Slattery's mounted foot of Arthur cox and the state assail one. The facts that there is no statute of limitations, or institutional protection (a la “only obeying orders, mein Herr”) for acts of fraud and murder will be relevant below. For the moment, the disproportionality of powers between us and them should result in changes to the statute.

The 1985 comprehensive agreement allowed the grievance procedure to be invoked in the course of a disciplinary procedure. While DCU management to my knowledge has never actually honoured a grievance procedure, and it aborted several, including mine, that should be reintroduced. A second sine qua non is that DCU management should be forced to accept a form of double jeopardy in that they should not be allowed appeal verdicts for us against them outside the university, be it on equality legislation, IR, or high court judgements. Remember they have all the money, the support of the staate, and we can't even strike (for now).

Finally on this point, continuing Paul Cahill's and my case is now frivolous and vexatious. Since there is agreement the statute will be changed, Paul Cahill's is over and all that remains to be done is for him to be reimursed and his magnificent contribution hailed by his colleagues. In my case, the Fleming judgement is the law as stated by the supreme court. Here in the US, a la the case of Zamos vs Stroud, Arthur cox would now be facing criminal charges (instead of the civil ones, coupled with a Law society complaint we will bring against them in due course).

Speaking of which; my judge friend ( and jazz Saxist) Jeff Tauber recently explained a wonderfully relevant piece of legislation from a case over which he was presiding. Two guys in a meth lab accidentally started a fire which killed someone. Though there intent was NOT murder, they were tried for felony murder as the death occurred as a result of an illegal act.

Prondzynski and cox knew all along the statute, even if it was legally valid (and it is not) was not applicable to anyone tenured before 16/Jun/1997 concerning their tenure unless they consented . So P's harassing letters to me explained it was about tenure and then asked me to arrange a meeting. When I refused, criminal as he is, he invoked plan B; throw Nuallain off campus anyhow, and to hell with the law.

I will be back, and we will then see if that is what happened to Josh Howarth. If so, and given Josh's tragically premature death after the massive stress of DCU's criminality, P will face murder charges. I think he knows I have a habit of carrying out my threats


More unforgiveable waste at DCU: De Other Bono

It would perhaps be impossible to convey what a skinflint operation DCU had to be in its early days were it not for the fact it will soon be one again. To respond to the David McWilliams concern that a generation will have to emigrate a second time, what will happen it that this of us who stayed will have to repair the mess a second time.

It may have been forgotten that my friends and I set up the first undergraduate degree at DCU. With the help of the mainly Irish staff in 1990 DCU, and instidiud teangolaiochta, we created a degree document that was accepted by the universities of Saarbruecken, Bielefeld, Nancy 2, and Goteborg as suitable for teaching to their students. The DCU administration, as is its wont, turned an extremely low-cost, successful degree which students flocked to and loved to a ruinously expensive, debauched capitulation to software localization that no longer exists because students voted with their feet.

The degree was deliberately designed as a precursor to a more general cognitive science degree. This subject studies mind as an informational system; it incorporates elements of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, AI, ethnoscience and - increasingly – neuroscience and other biological sciences. With that in mind, I have had visiting positions in biology, neuroscience,, and computer science at UC Berkeley, AI at NRC Canada, and philosophy at Stanford. It could be the case that I am slow, and the correct response was to use Irish taxpayers' money to create adjunct positions for Edward de Bono and various already well-paid UCD academics. At the same time as bringing in these guns for hire, a savage attack on tenure is being implemented, as documented here.

Having read as much of the work of these adjuncts as I could, I failed to get the point. Again, I may be slow; but my GRE results indicate that, if I am, so is 99.92% of the American population. If the problems of cognitive science can be solved in the way that de Bono proposes, the scientists who have sponsored my work in various ways (publishing and teaching with me, endorsing my courses) at both UC Berkeley and Stanford are equally slow, Yet the international consensus is that they are not slow.

So where does this leave us? The opinion of this writer is that, just as the pathetic self-indulgence of our financial sector has disgraced Ireland for at least a decade, so this feeble-minded adjunct system at DCU has destroyed what made DCU, if briefly, an excellent institution – a delicate combination of teamwork, and individual initiative done, as we felt, for the sake of our country.



Prondzynski's primal fear

In Gregory Hoblit's brilliant 1996 movie “Primal Fear”, Edward Norton plays a character feigning multiple personality disorder (mpd) in prder to get off a murder charge. He divides himself into the stammering, damaged Aaron and the psychotic farmboy Roy. Just as mpd is of recent origin and is perhaps an artefact of 20th/21st century civilization, it turns out that the Norton character is merely manipulating his defence team.

Pron's behaviour shows extreme dissociative characteristsics, described in this blog below – and just as well, given the political environment, as we shall see. So Pron -who unlike Aaron/Roy genuinely needs psychiatric help – can genuinely write that statute no. 3 was never used on anyone, after genuinely using it, and genuinely telling SIPTU that it supercedes the 1985 comprehensive agreement. Similarly, he genuinely could convince himself that Prof Paul Cahill was no longer a member of staff after a high court Judge ruled that he was and indeed libelled Paul – for which he may indeed pay, and his vast estate in westmeath is something of a temptation to us (a primal fear of Pron's?).

It is extremely clear now that the Zanu/FF permanent govt was planning something truly outrageous at DCU. I will confess that I believed that the first credible report of bribery and intimidation of students (particularly one from Ireland's diplomatic elite) at DCU brought up in the Dail would provoke a visitor's visit and quick resolution of the injustice. On the contrary; the state apparatus instead decided wilfully to misread the universities act to allow such behaviour. Pron could continue in his mad, mad world.

SIPTU had a mandate to strike, or whatever was necessary, to reflect the unanimou will of its members. It elected not to do so. .

The 1985 comprehensive agreement allowed the grievance procedure to be invoked in the course of a disciplinary procedure. While DCU management to my knowledge has never actually honoured a grievance procedure, and it aborted several, including mine, that should be reintroduced. A second sine qua non is that DCU management should be forced to accept a form of double jeopardy in that they should not be allowed appeal verdicts for us against them outside the university, be it on equality legislation, IR, or high court judgements. Remember they have all the money, the support of the state, and we can't even strike (for now).

Dismissal of management

1.The President delegates to the staff the power to dismiss any member
of senior staff, including the President, subject to the following
procedure;

a. A vote of no confidence must be convened at which over 50% of those
voting support the no confidence motion
b. The academic shop steward must certify clear breach of management's
legal obligations to its staff to dismiss the registrar; the section committee
likewise to dismiss the president, secretary, or head of “human” resources

2. In the event of an attempt to impose a senior manager on staff
without their explicit democratically voiced approval, the staff can
rescind the appointment if over 50% of those voting support the recission motion.


The Fleming judgement 30 Jan 2003- 30 Jan 2009 (and beyond)

This is an anniversary posting of Fleming's superb anticipation of what the supreme court eventually confirmed. Would it not have been easier simply to do the right and legal thing and comply immediately with it? The 2nd anniversary of the Paul Cahill case, with Judge Clarke's equally categorical statement, is coming up soon. Just what is DCU trying to do in delaying the inevitable?

In the meantime, the work of many brilliant young Irish women and men has been lost to Ireland; I name 9 of them on p.1 of my “search for Mind” third edition (P.1). Not one of them is currently active in academia in Ireland; they are as far away as Slovenia and in as dead-end careers as the kind of false promises held out by the likes of Bear Stearns. This is a scandal, and small wonder that the country loses E55 million a day.


The future of DCU

A few robust weeks lie ahead. It is important for us to remember that what we are trying to do is to continue the possibility of responsible, open, and high-standard teaching, learning, and research at a state university. Had either Fanning or Cahill lost, that chance would already be gone. As it is, the chances are high that we will be able to change the culture of DCU to a far more democratic and open one. There are obviously certain matters, described on this site, that require a formal complaint to the Gardai. It is also clear that SIPTU seem finally to have seen the light, and we will see how they perform. Finally, Arthur Cox a solrs. re due a complaint to the Law society.

Following are some proposals for restructuring. Such restructuring is necessary, because the current “top-down” centralization of power in DCU ensures that these problems will come up in another guise, sooner rather than later. The reductio ad absurdum was a president who insisted in the high court on his right to sack all staff with 3 months' notice. While the arrogance is breathtaking, the consequences for the running of the institution have been catastrophic and would have been even worse if he had got his way. Only specialized academics understand the work of other academics. The notion of a feudal lord summarily dismissing staff and breaking up labs that took perhaps a score years' skilled hard work to set up is, to use the rather kind word that came up in the High Court, “audacious”. Not for nothing do advanced societies have tenure for judges and academics, inter alia.

It is important that it is understood at all levels that the activities of teaching, learning, and research are what the whole community is there for. It is necessary to have an administrative infrastructure to maintain the physical campus, deal with finance, and so on. The problem has been that this tail has increasingly wagged the dog.

Academic staff

The current nonsense at the Supreme court etc must end, and Paul Cahill reimbursed. As the university strives to define tenure, it should extend a vote of confidence to all staff currently there, and assert the 1985 procedures and general union-management agreement to them, whether they were appointed before or after 1997. The current path will end in disaster

The Irish state invests hugely in salaries and facilities to promote teaching, learning, and research at DCU. The university should be driven by the community of teachers and students which essentially comprise it. Academic appointments should be done through a search committee consisting mainly of academics, as is international best practice. All facilities paid for by the taxpayer should be within the gift of the community of scholars at the university. That means a registrar with a real budget. That registrar, and all executive academics, should be appointed by a democratic process, with the possibility of recall elections.

One consequence of the above is an attenuation of the current powers of the president, and the executive

Non-academic staff

The secretary should similarly be an elected position, with franchise extended to all full-time members of the university. Again, a recall process should be drawn up.



Mayday, Mayday!! Or: How to save Ireland

One is truck by the parallels between Prondzynski and Pamela Izevbekhai. The lies; the use of taxpayers' money to take a doomed case all the way to the Supreme court; the certainty that sliocht a sliocht, their seed and breed, will feel that the Irish people owe them a living. 62% of Nigerians in Ireland, like Prondzynski , are not working. This is worse in prospect than the affirmative action that California got rid of by referendum

Before this goes further, it is worth noting that, in contrast to the mad campaign against tenure and academic freedom, Pamela is fighting what would have been the good fight, had she not lied. There is no question; Ireland should comply with international refugee law, and so should the applicant refugees. On a personal note, we are the only Irish group ever to do live African-american jazz radio, and the only non-black band of any ethnicity to attend the Oakland meetings to lend support to the campaign against white jazz hegemony.

It is interesting to hear the apologists for high immigration, called the Doheny and Nesbitt school in Ireland in honour of the pub in which they draw up their plans to reshape the country after suitable refreshment has ensured that their already modest intellectual capacities are irrevocably impaired. .
So I just lost 40 minutes of my life hearing Sara de la Rica at UC Berkeley economics dept explain, given the theoretical work of Borjas, Peri, and Sperber, inter alia, why immigration is still such a great idea. She first of all denied the well-attested Spanish programs to send unemployed immigrants back to the their place of origin, then produced a baroque mathematical argument.

Notwithstanding the previous dispute of fact, we were duly impressed until Figure 3 of her paper showed a per hourly wage rate of E1.15 for immigrants. This she defended tooth and nail until it was pointed out that the top rate was E2.27, and she didn't know what she was talking about, like our local heroes. . The economization of life due to neoliberalism is often misspelled as it takes flesh a la the CDOs, default swaps und so weiter that ensured this mess will continue for a decade.

It is time for a reality check. The IMF is imminent; even if it wasn't, what has happened in Ireland is less nationalizing the banks than bankalizing the whole state. This follows the attempt to create a pure (Milton) Friedmanite experiment in Europe I described on California Progress report in 2007. There are many savings that can be made and, fully aware of the barrage of PC BS I am about to face, here goes;

1.Cap civil servants' salaries at 100k. Savings in the 100's of millions pa. This includes the Doheny and Nesbitt financial wunderkinden, as indeed does the next section.
2.Do a review of all civil servants that do not deal directly with the public. For example, start at the HSE employees (3 in many small hospitals) who allocate beds, a task that used be done by the matron with some help. Good teachers, doctors nurses etc are safe. Get rid of 90% of the appalling HR staff in state institutions like DCU. Scrap the HEA, root and branch; they have allowed financial corruption, and – far worse – a situation where neither staff nor students at universities have any rights against management. Savings – perhaps 15 billion per year.
3.Get rid of SFI, PRTLI, and ( a state or rather FF institution)IMRO. Billions pa saved
4.Fire Appleby, the DPP Hamilton, and everyone associated with the banking debacle. Introduce proper adherence to the law, and watch the economy blossom again
5.We have about 100,000 immigrants each costing the state at least 10k a year on unemployment assistance. Do what Spain is doing and offer anyone not an Irish citizen wrt the 2004 referendum a way out. Billions pa
6.Ditto for any immigrant doing a job that can be done by an unemployed Irish citizen
7. Forget this Nama nonsense. Ask the ECB if our banks can borrow 100 billion which they are to pay back. If not, leave the Euro and make a single "take it or leave it" offer for our debt a la Argentina, nationalize all resources, and watch a competent set of politicians take over as the EU recedes. .

Yes, I'm serious. Time to decide if we want a country or not

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Lá Bealtaine 2009
Is IFUT the only hope to save tenure at DCU?

Certainly, they think so


To repeat; it's my opinion that SIPTU must call a strike (about the statute)or leave DCU. It is BS to suggest IBEC would stop them; that related only to law concerning the firing of a single employee, not the statute, and in any case IBEC are gone from the case.

I have not trusted SIPTU since they eschewed the strike option in 2003 without consultation. All their behaviour since is open to the interpretation that they are simply obstructing the will of DCU staff to protect themselves, while wringing their hands, creating jobs for underemployed labour party barristers (White), and so on. In the meantime, the nov 2008 vote gives the union a mandate for a strike.

Even, as is probable, we both win our upcoming cases, there is an infinite amount of room for management to manoeuvre, absent real pressure from the union.



Journalism at the University

On the face of it, Irish journalists leave us academics in the shade. They get to speak and write authoritatively on a vast range of subjects, versus our pathetic little micro-specializations. Moreover, they do so in the public domain, adding the luster of “public intellectual”. They often do this with zero academic qualifications, or indeed anything we would recognize as “knowledge” in our mean-spirited ways. Finally, they get paid extremely well, particularly if they already have academic jobs, and can hold those jobs without anything we call “qualifications” in our jealous little minds.

Why then in UC Berkeley and its ilk is the journalism department held in such contempt, rivaled in opprobrium only by political “science”? Indeed, on one occasion I remember a perfidious and now famous alumnus returning to say that all he had learned to do at college was type. However, recent events have proven that this would perhaps be the Ph.D. Program at DCU. As an inveterate curriculum writer, here are some modest proposals for rectifying what's lacking in the journo degree at DCU:

1.Telling the time. The big hand. The little hand. The numbers on digital timekeepers and what they mean.
2.Time zones. Why different countries have different zones.
3.Making an international phone call. Choosing the phone and finding out about its capabilities before starting (this is for the honours degree)
4.Interviewing. First of all, contacting the person. The various modalities of interpersonal contact; speech, writing, and so on.
5.Reporting. What a “fact” is versus what might suit oneself to believe a fact is. Thought and where it happens

We could of course go on. The issue would of course arise whether this is appropriate for a university. It does certainly look as if our colleagues in journalism at DCU are loosing out into the world many unethical, incompetent and dangerous graduates. Fortunately, the tenure issue is being decided by altogether more serious people.

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 3u Marta 2009

Let us now praise famous men


There are two reasons given for retirement of the great musical satirist (and, as it happens, math lecturer)Tom Lehrer from his brilliant work of lampooning hypocrisy in all its forms. Both are equally funny The first, that Werner Von Braun won a libel case, seizing future royalties, for Lehrer's pointing out in song the Nazi tendencies in Von Braun that time and historical research have fully attested, unfortunately reminds us of a certain prickliness in other apparently ennobled Prussians. The second is that Lehrer felt that he was out of business after Kissinger won a Nobel Peace prize in 1973. So-called reality had ventured far beyond the satirist's wildest fantasies. In fact, it looks like fiction may be an attempt to constrain reality.

Reality has shot its fetters and gifted us with the grotesque spectacle of an outgoing university president, the subject of a no-confidence vote by his staff, spending millions of taxpayer Euro to try and introduce summary dismissal at a state university. Further billions of Euro are being spent to demonstrate what everybody of any intelligence already knew; the state cannot mandate innovation, particularly through mechanisms as gargantuan and imposed as Medialab and SFI. In the meantime, the reluctance of the state to actually enforce corporate law, the sine qua non for innovation and in fact the state's only real role therein, has resulted in a collapse in the Irish financial system.

With the above in mind – it is very hard to write satire in 2009 Ireland - and noting today's date, here goes;


“Irish academia was fusty, fuddy-duddy and variations on the “fu' theme. In 2000, finally, a messiah entered to rectify matters with a truly radical agenda. “Academic freedom” was to be redefined as the freedom to submit absolutely to the whim of business. “Tenure” was to be restricted to 3 months. Tradition was to be rescinded at every opportunity; academic and research programs could be designed overnight with sufficient taxpayers' funds. Rationales could be fed through enlightened journalists working for the IT , and if necessary through the hacks on his own staff. (In extremis, through ethically challenged journalism students, ach sin sceal eile)

The brilliance in the plan lay in its execution. Our messiah knew that SIPTU would not strike, and cared only that E300k a year bled into its coffers from staff. So he, rightly, ignored them. He knew from his study of employment law that labour court and EAT recommendations were precisely that – recommendations – and could be ignored. Since SIPTU refuses to take court actions (and, given what we've seen of its legal dept., that may be just as well for staff), he knew that only single staff members would sue the university and that any high court decisions against him and DCU were effectively unenforceable. He knew also that the neoliberal Irish government would suspend the rule of law, including basic human rights for staff and students, in the hope of a payday for themselves and their cronies when DCU became privatized.

It is, however, the style of the man that demands our worship. Far be it from him to kowtow to the same bunch of contemptible paddies he kept at a safe distance in his youth. After an initial joke at conferring in 2001 that he was learning Irish, he let fly in later public declarations. . The goal was, he declared, to ensure that the Irish become an ethnic minority on the island of Ireland. Moreover, he declared that his own father fought for Hitler's Germany. His contempt was of course well-placed; at no point was he called to account for any of these declarations. The time when an irredentist group could point to this as “free state” perfidy and restart political violence was, he believed, past.

So he went further; it became clear that his protection was such that all he had to do was get away with whatever he was saying at any given moment, be it a dail committee, governing authority, or whatever. The contradictions with his previous statements and behaviour would never be pointed out, and he could joyously fragment into a set of disconnected mutually contradictory narratives without any regard for the terrible consequences in the lives of staff and students .

For is that not what a university president should do in our postmodern age?”


Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. La na nGealt 2009


McJobs, Pronjobs, and “No Irish need apply” jobs
Here in California we have an $8 per hour minimum wage. The kind of jobs offered at that rate is what gave utopian socialism a good name. At McD's, the slogan is “If you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean” . The workplace is of course not unionized, there are no pension benefits, security of tenure and so on.

DCU is effectively not unionized either; more specifically, SIPTU has repeatedly refused to engage in industrial action to enforce the very many verdicts that have been secured against management, who continue to do whatever they want. Indeed, they are continuing in the Supreme Court to try and create a new category of employment; state servants who can be fired without cause and summarily . The Pronjob is as insecure as McD's, and yet one pays a “pension levy” for the added security that no longer exists.

There is yet a third category; the “No Irish need apply” job. Here, extremely mediocre academics from extremely mediocre institutions like Sheffield University (and this writer is speaking from experience, as he had a visitorship there) are given the headship of important departments, which they do at a 30:70 timesplit with, for example, a Swiss dept. In return, they give personally insulting evidence that jeopardizes everyone's job security in court on behalf of management. Ni mor dom a admhail go gcuireann se sin isteach go mor orm.

Given what's happening in the economy, state salaries should be capped at E100,000. If itinerant academics think they are worth more than that, they can always do what Paul Cahill did successfully; compete with the big boys in the USA where they will earn more if they are more than just blowhards and parasites on the already stressed Irish state and its historically put-upon people.

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 17u Feabhra 2009



Openscience Ireland


“. Once you accept that profit and - practiced on a mass scale create the greatest possible benefits for any society, pretty much any act of personal enrichment can be justified as a contribution to the great creative cauldron of capitalism, generating wealth and spurring economic growth-even if it's only for yourself” (Naomi Klein, 2007, “The shock doctrine” P. 313 NY Picador)

So it has been in Ireland since the country first turned a profit back in 1997. As Klein describes, the rule of law has been suspended since about then for a variety of areas, including copyright legislation. See http://seanonuallain.com/id2.html.

Another of course has been employment legislation at universities, the primary subject of this blog. Let us be clear on a few points; first of all, everything DCU management has done since 2001 has been flagrantly illegal, and proven so at the relevant fora. Secondly, SIPTU initially colluded with DCU management in introducing summary dismissal, and backed off only when their own closed shop
at DCU became assailed in late 2008. since then, we have had the first ever vote of no confidence in a university management in Ireland, passed by a clear majority.


Thirdly, DCU management had the unconditional support of the state in introducing summary dismissal. The 1997 act has been wilfully misinterpreted to place the universities outside legal control every time the issue came up in parliament. Therefore, there is no guarantee that we will win – though we can be sure that if Paul Cahill cannot win, non-one can. Let us make it clear; there is no point in talking about the “future of the university” if anyone can summarily be dismissed because the boss does not agree with him. We have to solve this first, and then move on.

However, we have to look at the worst-case scenario; the Irish state manages to jettison its scholars (always the first to be shot when there is a violent coup), and create new entities that interact with business and unions as Klein describes. They will be generously funded with taxpayers' money and adopt coercive policies toward students and staff, as DCU management has done, described below. Indeed, we have seen that the media has allowed Pronazi to get away with describing capitulation to corporate interests as somehow fresh and exciting, “freedom” in the GW Bush/Rumsfeld/Gitmo sense.

The universities began as outgrowths of the monasteries. The current configuration whereby the state funds 3-4 years of its citizens' life to get acquainted with the higher achievements of human culture, and develop useful skills, is the result of many struggles like the one documented below. If we lose this particular one, we will have to grapple with the notion of what it is to be a scholar in a society that does not respect scholarship. Luckily, we defeated e-voting; the more thorough application of the “shock doctrine” contemplated from 2002-2008, beginning with the auto-da-fe in College Green in May, 2002, has been postponed (see http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/2007/02/irish_e-voting-.html)

So we may live in a country with freedom of thought outside the universities. In the following few days, I am going to outline what that might look like. The first thing is to re-invoke the spiritual goals underlying learning. So we can start by an as yet unrealised alternative to the ruinous SFI.






Open science Ireland

Literally billions of Euro have been spent on science in Ireland over the past decade. This spending is based on two absurd premises. One is that academics used to the privileges of their positions will throw all caution to the winds, give up their jobs, and attempt to commercialise discoveries made in the lab; the second is that corporations feel a need to give back. On the contrary; even in the unlikely event of discovery in the kind of hackneyed science favored by SFI funding, academics will of course hang on to their positions and try and find a middleman. The exploitation of their discoveries will then most likely be handed over to the R+D division of a giant corporation. Experience elsewhere has shown that the taxpayer will end up paying three times for SFI and its cognates; once through the direct taxes used to fund the salaries at universities in Ireland, again for the SFI projects themselves, and finally in royalties exacted by the corporations in any products developed. To add insult to injury, the acting head of SFI responsible for this enormous budget from mid-2006 was someone with no scientific training or commercial experience.

Since 1997, we have had the spectacle of perhaps the least scientifically qualified government cabinet in Europe trumpeting the virtue of science to the Irish public. We are told that gargantuan spending in science is necessary to keep Ireland from the dark ages, and the failure of the policy as attested in a 2005 ESRI report prompts demands for even more spending. The spectacular failure of Medialab is just the tip of the iceberg.

There is another way, one that does justice to the authentic thirst for scientific truth that motivates Irish people as it motivates people all over the world. We are fully aware of the pressure on scientists to publish in narrow fields, and to sign away their copyright to the likes of Pergamon and Elsevier. To adapt Pearse – The fools! They have spent all our money on a forlorn quest to develop new gadgets, and left us with the big, interesting questions, the ones that impelled Einstein to say that a human being who has lost the ability to wonder is already half-dead. Let us look at a few such from some of the sciences;

PHYSICS

Do the Copenhagen and ontological interpretations of wave-function breakdown reflect different psychological dispositions, or are they in principle formally distinguishable?
Why is there so little progress to a grand unified theory that string theory is starting to be derided?

BIOLOGY

Why was Darwinian evolutionary theory accepted even before there was a plausible theory of genetics, and is this premature acceptance underlying the intelligent design debate?
Does the very limited success of the human genome project imply that we need a new theory of symbol systems in nature, encompassing gene expression all the way to natural language?

COMPUTER SCIENCE

Why cannot we parse any complete natural language after a half-century of trying?
Will quantum computing change our notion of computability?



PSYCHOLOGY

Is consciousness best regarded as a property of the cosmos, or an epiphenomenon of mental processing?
Does this also go for emotion?

EDITORIAL POLICY

Openscience Ireland will be peer-reviewed, with reviewers in turn evaluated by their peers in a weighting system before a final decision to publish or not is taken. However, scientists from anywhere who have managed to maintain copyright of their peer-reviewed material can publish it. No copyright transfer to the publishers of Openscience Ireland is countenanced in either case.




The Arts/Humanities/Science/technology debate

First of all, let us clear the political ground. It is clear that there is a new, large, and very costly layer of bureaucrats in Ireland whose futures depend on furthering the application of the neoliberal model to various aspects of Irish civil society previously inviolate to the state. It also is clear that the pips are already beginning to squeak economically, and the future of this layer's privileged position will hinge on its ability to convince a new administration that it should exist. It is unlikely that this government can convince the taxpayer (and indeed the droves of newly unemployed) that the people should pay for its misdeeds as well as a spanking new set of expensive institutions like SFI with their eschatological hope of a future payoff..

So let the games begin! This writer is in an unusual position wrt this part of the debate (I have no intention of reading any of the garbage Prondz writes) in that the circumstances of his life detailed on this blog have resulted in his working as a professional musician (see www.mistletoemusic.com)and financing and consulting on radio shows. Therefore, a great deal of his current livelihood would seem to be dependent on excellence being maintained in the academies. Let us start with a few home truths;

1.The standard of musicianship in Ireland has at best stayed static since the Foxrock Folk club, whose 40th anniversary we are celebrating with the current radio show. This is mainly, in this writer's experience, due to the massive corruption in the music industry – see seanonuallain.com
2.The academies with their massive resources have done nothing to help.
3.At no point in the genesis of our recent award-winning show did we get an offer of help from any body of the Irish state outside RTE.

Let us continue. Internationally, the academic Arts/Humanities (AH) have in general been the authors of their own misfortune, and that battle has been lost a very long time ago. Better, perhaps, to say AH surrendered; the trendy preoccupation with postructuralism and postmodernism resulted in a situation wherein they lost their very topics in an all-embracing aesthetic and moral relativism. Into that breach stepped historical revisionism in Ireland. Internationally, bemused funding agencies asked whether, since the AH people regarded most of their subject as drivel, surely it was unethical to throw funds at it? (Of course, there are exceptions here like Helena herself, whom I assume is still a Marxist, and I welcome any similar AH/social science attempts to rescue the epistemological and metaphysical bases of their areas, which can then again become disciplines).

The line that we drew in the sand is tenure, and the first skirmish was science and society. This rebounded to Helena's benefit; it is unlikely that DCU would have reversed itself, absent the scuffle in the Dail on the subject, and it was most amusing to hear Minister Micheal Martin announce publicly this his gang were stressing science and society. Indeed, the issue can be phrased more specifically; the only substantive battle is that between science as purely instrumental, and science as what it actually means - knowledge. If the 19th century, a la Nietzsche, witnessed the triumph of scientific method over science, what we are now seeing is the victory of technology over science

The post Bayh/Dole office of technology and licensing (OTL) model has in general failed in the United states, with most such offices losing money. And now, finally, we get to the cynical part. Can it be the case that FF have worked out how to make money from all the new building projects involved with SFI, and see the opportunity for scams eternal? Indeed, is it possible to have anything like a debate, let alone a university, if one speaker can summarily dismiss the other? And how long will the Irish people put up with the gross criminality and incompetence of this new self-appointed elite, now that there are no goodies to give out?



Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Aibreán 27 2009