On reading Mark Anthony Falzon’s interesting article, ‘The university that never was’, (The Sunday Times of Malta, January 14), my first reaction was that if the rector of the University of Malta had the unbridled right to hire and fire both academic and administrative staff without external interference, then, with the dead wood and the self-centred cleared out, the university would be a better place and even more successful than it is now.
Prof. Falzon’s main point, that despite “flirting” with “kings, presidents, and captains of industry”, universities should start with teaching and scholarship” is well made. Thus, in 1209, Oxford is said to have been “utterly discomforted”, both “legally and practically”, when the university teaching masters closed their schools in protest at the execution of “two or three” scholars involved in the accidental death of a townswoman. They had then dispersed, with their students, to Reading, Cambridge and Paris, and, without them, there was no academy.
In 1231, King Henry III acknowledged the “no small profit” and “honour” (in that order) that the recruitment of overseas students brought to his kingdom. Two years earlier, on learning that the masters and scholars of the University of Paris were leaving the city because of unrest, he sent them an open letter, expressing sympathy for their predicament and offered to lead them back to “due liberty”, should they choose to “migrate to our Kingdom of England and stay there to study, and that We will assign to you whatever cities, boroughs and towns you may choose…”.
This generous offer of “whatever cities, boroughs and towns you may choose” presumably included areas which, today and in Maltese terms, would now be classed as ODZ. However, the Count of Toulouse made a better offer, which was backed by a Papal promise of “scholastic freedom… in a land flowing with milk and honey”, and most of the Paris scholars accepted.
Institutions of higher education, if not expected to produce a direct economic profit, have almost always been ‘market driven’, having been founded or supported in order to serve the interests or economic needs of a specific group, patron or locality. The Babylonian ‘Examination Text A’ provides evidence that institutionalised higher education, directed at economic personal advancement, existed early as 1720 BC, when the Master Scribe told an indolent student: “If you study day and night, and work modestly and without arrogance, you can still become a scribe! Then you can share the scribal craft which is good fortune for its owner…”, sentiments now shared by accountants, architects, doctors, lawyers and others.
The redbrick universities in England were founded by local merchants, industrialists and philanthropists to provide manufacturing and commercial skills to benefit their town.
Many of the early colleges of North America, although ostensibly religious in intent, were actually ‘booster’ colleges for the economic, as much as the spiritual, benefit of the local community.
Even the University of Malta was founded as a Jesuit College, but later assumed broader intentions.
Prof. Falzon is spot on when he argues that it was a good idea to “give over the dockyard buildings in Cospicua to education” and that “all that was needed was some homeless scholars (as opposed to greedy constructors)”.
The problem is that Sadeen did not provide scholars or attract students, and its true motives are concealed by a dense haze of construction dust.
If the government is really interested in providing competition for the University of Malta, then the inducements should be withdrawn from Sadeen and offered to a genuine university, which has an academic reputation that will draw eminent scholars and students to the ‘land flowing with milk and honey’, that is Malta.