It's midday Monday. Outside, the sun kisses the green grass of the Quad at the University of Galway. There is a sense of calm before the storm here. A whiff of change in the air.
I am here to chat to the outgoing President of the University of Galway, Prof Ciaran O hOgartaigh. Tomorrow, (Friday ) he finishes up, almost seven years into the decade-long term.
In Galway, there are certain ancient hierarchical posts that traditionally hold a mystique for the city. The City Manager (now CEO ), the Bishop of Galway, the manager of the football and hurling teams, and the President of the University of Galway. They are deity-like posts that invite discussion and intrique in their coming and going. Invariably, they are held by people from other places.
In 2018, much was made of the fact that Prof O hOgartaigh was returning to his alma mater, to the institution right across the road from his family home in Newcastle, but as I allude to later in this piece, the 'boy from across the road' narrative was not as helpful as it might have seemed initially. Since he was that boy, he had travelled the world, excelled in academia, spent many summers away. His post in the university was his first time to work and live as an adult in the city. And while he enjoyed the experience, the context of his association with the place has changed.
The academic world was surprised by his stepping-down announcement earlier this summer, uttered right at the end of the meeting of the University Governing Authority held in the bowels of the Connemara Coast. Outside, the waves crashed against the rocks as the meeting pedestrianised to its end, but then, right before its denouement, was a tidal wave of its own, when Prof O hOgartaigh dropped his bombshell that he would be leaving this summer. The timing he put down to the timeframe for the new Strategic Plan for the next five years.
But perhaps too, there were frustrations that made the decision easier.
We sit down to tea and biscuits. I notice the delph bears the previous branding of NUI, Galway. Or maybe the new stuff is not handed out to scruffs like myself.
So what’s next?
"Everybody wants to know where I am off to, but that is just this week. Next week, there will not be any interest in what I do next," he says to my gentle probing.
He is equally forthright in our discussion. He tells me that the job was not as he thought it would be, and that in his efforts to be fair and open, he lost friends because of the manner in which he approached it.
He stressed though that he has enjoyed his time in the role and emphasised that he is particularly proud of his many achievements, when set against the challenges that preceded him and greeted him on his arrival to the post in early 2018. The gender discrimination cases; the pandemic and the cyber attack — and his successes with all three.
When I ask if he foresaw not seeing out the full term, he states that he has served a significant period.
"It is almost seven years, and seven years is a good stretch of time." he says. "I mean, I had other irons in the fire at the time, if you like. So seven years is probably the full term in the sense. Secretary Generals do seven years. American presidents do eight years, if they get the chance. So seven years is a good period to be here."
After a round of photographs for which we parade up and down the Quad, his last official shoot as President, we retire inside to the reflect on his tenure — a dramatic few years that included the pandemic and the failed cyber attack, both of which altered the way education was provided and consumed. He recalled the reality of that time and that situation.
“We were trying to get students back on campus and lot of students were reluctant. They felt the technology was serving them well, but we also knew that there was a sense of dislocation, and a belonging that was missing, and the students needed to be back on campus, as the campus was where the the action was.
“So that was a challenge for us in that transition, and then the cyber attack made that difficult, because all the technology we planned then, we couldn't use."
At the height of that disruption, life on campus was as it had never been before.
"At the time too, the Bailey Allen Hall was made into a field hospital which was never used. Those were the depths of the thinking that we were in at the time. We had also just launched our strategic plan in January 2020, so a lot of that plan, a lot of the actual ideas we had, didn't come to fruition as a consequence."
Prof O hOgartaigh often spoke of the values of the university, a theme he initiated when within days of his arrival on campus, he released a video espousing the need for solid values to be at the core of all of its thinking.
"When I got there, I did a video when I came in first, on the first day, I remember people complained about the lighting on it at the time, but this was a video with a purpose. Among what I mentioned was the word kindness. I could have said anything else on the video, but the word kindness was what people heard and remembered.
Kindness a two-way street
"And that set a tone, became the tone, but there is still a lot of work to do on that front. I think, my challenge always is that the lived life of the university isn't necessarily the same as what I talk about. So the danger is that people say, 'oh, there's your man talking about kindness. But I don't see it here.' And that's still a challenge. I think that the values that we talk about still, in some cases, need to play out a bit more. And also, kindness works both ways. Yes, so there's kindness towards and against. I show kindness, but do people show kindness back? I do think the emphasis on it made a difference for the tone of the place," he recalled.
"I think openness in particular was also one that we did well on. We opened the gates. I wanted to knock down the wall at Newcastle Road there. Just imagine the view of the Quad from Newcastle Road. But there were all kinds of challenges to that, so we just opened the gate. That made a difference for people passing Newcastle suddenly looking to say, gosh, there's the Quadrant. There's a garden there. And it symbolically opened up the gates too. My own feeling is that the university is more willing than Galway thinks it is in many ways.
In his tenure, he was surprised at the sort of reluctance by local authorities to engage the University in plans to improve the city. He feels he was a willing recipient to approaches, but that more often than not, such approaches were not made.
”There was a Academy of Urbanism conference there early in the summer, and Wulf Daseking, (who you may remember last year talked about Galway being like a set of broken teeth ), addressed it the day after I had. And when Wulf spoke, he said ‘I heard the President from the university was all very reasonable. The University should lead out on a lot of these ideas about Galway.’ Did anybody ring my phone to offer or to ask? No? So there's a sense, I think in Galway, that the University is not willing to do a lot more than than people think, whereas the reality is that it is willing to do a lot more.
"Another frustration I've had since I came would be regarding the Greenway. Have I got a phone call about the Greenway? No. Same with Nuns Island, we have great plans for Nuns Island, but never a call. Fisheries Field likewise. So there's a sense that the University is making the effort to be open, sometimes Galway doesn't see that.”
"I think we did, you know, things like sustainability, standards, quality, upping our game, ambition. We raised our sights there and then sustainability. We've done a lot of work on that, both on campus, research, teaching, awards, recognition, on sustainability.
"It did make a difference. The one that captured the imagination as well, was the concept of the university for the public good. And that should go without saying, like a public university funded by the taxpayer should be for the public good. I think people found that that was something they could associate with. But also that means something deeper, which means we're not here for ourselves, and we're looking for funding. We often need to make that case is that the funding isn't for us, it's for students, it's for research, it's for societal benefits.”
As a child, he used to consider the University to be part of his local furniture. This vast park at the end of his road. So for Ciaran, the privilege of walking through seemed like a right that he assumed everyone had. But that was not the case. In his time, he saw it as a key project that more people would access university from marginal groups; people who never felt they had an entitlement to university (as opposed to those who feel too much of an entitlement ).
“I hope we try to bring in more groups who now think that the university is part of their furniture who didn't before. I still think there's probably work to be done on the sense that there's a contradiction, because the university wants to have an international ambition and outlook, but still serves its region.
“But I don't think there's a contradiction there, because the best way we can serve the region is by having international ambition, and the best way we can make ourselves distinctive internationally is by having that regional difference that nobody else can replicate.
The decision to rebrand the then NUI Galway as University of Galway got a mixed reaction among staff, but it is a decision he stands firmly by, saying it was good value and symbolic.
“The most important word in the rebranding was the smallest one. The word ‘of’. So we weren't in Galway only. Yes, we weren't for Galway only. We were actually OF Galway. This is much more outgoing, indeed, that sense that we're of something, yet, not all our graduates will ever be. We stay here. We're not always here. We're all also elsewhere.
“The branding was, contrary to some commentary, actually good value for what we did. But secondly, I think it's worked, people understood what we were trying to do. You could argue that it never should never been changed from UCG, but we couldn't go back into that which could be abbreviated.
“So if you're in the UK in particular, and nobody says UC for Cambridge, yes, they say Cambridge or UO for Oxford. Durham. Liverpool, Bristol, yes. All of these, they are of their places.
Boy from across the road
While the narrative of being the local boy from across the road rising up to head the University may have been twee, Prof O’hOgartaigh now feels that the manner in which this was portrayed was a bit naive, and that the expectations from ‘a local lad’ were different from what would have been expected from someone who had never been in the place.
"I think that, and that was the way it was portrayed, even by myself at the time, is that was a little bit naive, because I had left here when I was 21 and spent 30 years elsewhere. So this was the first time I've been here as an adult. I was in Dublin, I was in Wellington in New Zealand. I was in Boston. So in a way, I wasn't the boy from across the road.
"Maybe there's a nostalgia there that was, that was maybe misplaced. And so I think people thought I was one of them, and I wasn’t and part of my ethos as president was to be fair and open and transparent. So there was no ‘in group’ trying to make sure, which I probably lost friends over that. People thought they might be in, but they weren't. Yes, that was something that was a very, very strong feeling, in my own sense, that we should be more; that we should be bigger than that.”
“So the fact that I was the boy from across the road, in one way was an advantage, but another way that it was not. Bill Bryson has a great line in Notes From A Small Island that ‘culture clash is coming home’. Because people think you're the same as you are, when you're not exactly. So I had never been here as an adult. I'd had a whole different experience elsewhere which possibly was discounted because people felt ‘sure he's the guy from across the road.”
I detect a strong frustration in him that the pace of change he expected in Galway was not matched. He mentions that since the Quincentenary Bridge was built back in the 1980s, the next significant piece of infrastructure was the pedestrian bridge at the Cathedral just last year. That the needs of a city are not served by the thinking of a town.
“Galway needs to decide if it's a city or a town. If we're a city, then the traffic isn't that bad when you compare it to Dublin. The tendency for drivers to always let one or two out from side roads and junctions also adds to the problem. People on the main roads have a right of way for a reason because it is busier. People constantly letting people in and out adds to the problem.
“I also ask how many small theatres do we need in Galway. The answer always seems to be more, as evidenced lately by the new development planned for Nuns' Island. So the answer is not to have one place bigger which is the vision I had for Fisheries Field. Nobody picked up the phone and said 'you know what, let's think about that.' A city like Galway should have a bigger image of itself whereas a town does not have that sense of scale.
"Now maybe people are happy being a town. I think there are lots of benefits. But if you're a town and see yourself as a town and act like a town, you'll be a town, and that's a challenge for Galway.
He does not have a role in the selection of his successor, but says that from experience he knows that whoever is selected is likely to have traits that he does not have or will aim to do things that he has not. But he is pleased that there are aspects of his presidency that will form part of the University’s ethos from here on in.
"There are genies out of the bottle. One is the sense of openness that we have encouraged; another is the encouragement of the contrarian and the third is the development of the Irish language."
Difficult decision?
Was it difficult to come to the decision to step down?
"No, I've been thinking about it for a while. Yeah, and I think it was difficult to get the timing right, but it wasn't difficult to make the decision in the end. Since I've made it, I feel a sense of relief. People who have spoken to me have shown a respect for the decision having been made. They have said 'isn't it better to decide yes, rather than to sit there and hang on to money or power or whatever?
"I'll send a note out on Friday to colleagues, and I'm gonna say there that we pass through life. Make the journey together. Help each other as best we can, hopefully leave the place better than we found it. And I think people respect that sense that you know, if that's the effort you made, that you should make a decision based on what's best for you and for the institution.”
He feels that the job as President was much more internally focused than he imagined it would be. I'm reading a book at the moment by Nicholas Dirks, a former Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley. “So that was a challenge for him, and he also felt it was much more internally oriented.
“There was much more dealing with issues and people not happy with how things are. I know other presidents who didn't let that bother them, but it did bother me, perhaps more than it should have.
“Funding too. Had I ever thought I'd be the President going around looking for money all the time? Yes, even when I'm not looking for money, people think I'm looking for money.And even other presidents I've talked to, mention the amount of committee work inside, how the role is much more internally focused than you anticipate. And then the fourth thing Nicholas Dirks mentions, which again, I associate with, and to my surprise, was that he lost a lot of friends.
“Yes, when he was president, people who disagreed with them, people who he would have recruited, people who he had intellectual friendship with. He lost their friendship and that's something I've been surprised at as well here in Galway.
"So the role did not meet expectations in that way, but it did in the sense of then-public role and the ability to set the tone.
If he knew then what he knows now, would he have viewed the role differently. Does he have any regrets?
”I don't do regrets. I mean, how do you regret being older and wiser? I suppose that way I look at how it’s worked out is I've made a difference in tone more than I expected, and the difference in geography or in town, less than I expected."
He leaves the University in good shape.
"Yes, financially, we're very strong. Research wise, the note sent out to staff mentioned the research income is higher than it was, but I would say there's a challenge on demographics in Galway. So you can't rely on Galway alone or the region alone. So we must internationalise in order to be of scale, because the country is so small, it has to internationalise.
“I think there are danger risks there in some of the narrative, for example on the accommodation front. We have been told that we shouldn't invite international students because of the accommodation problem, and so I ask what about students from Dublin or Ballina or Bohola?'", he adds.
Prof O hOgartaigh's family have made a sizable contribution to civic society in the city for decades. Through their promotion of the Irish language through Gaillimh le Gaeilge, and his late father's work at Galway Chamber of Commerce.
He leaves the University in fine fettle; The institution he leaves behind is stronger for the challenges ahead, and retains its role at the core of Galway's attractiveness.
The initiatives he conceived reaping benefits in the decade to come and those thereafter. We wish him well.
