Underfunding of universities leading to blind spots on human rights

June 12, 2021 | By Breda O’Brien

President Michael D Higgins gave a stirring address at an online conference on academic freedom this week. He suggested we are in danger of losing not just academic freedom at the level of the individual scholar but of losing the institution of the university itself.

In melancholic lines reminiscent of Philip Larkin’s poem Church Going, he wondered whether the world’s great universities, rather like the stones left behind on the monastic sites, would become in time merely tourist attractions? Will visitors be told tales of where lectures were once given, and brilliant expositions encountered, rather like tourists tramping through the cloisters of abbeys being told of where vespers was once sung?

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