In an email to all staff members, Dr. John Hughes has just revealed that NUI Maynooth is The Sunday Times university of the year.
From the email:
The award is based on an analysis of all 22 third level universities and institutes in the Republic and across 26 criteria including, grades, retention, research, student services, access for disadvantaged students and contribution to development at local and national levels. The data was collected from each Institution, the CAO, HEA, Dept of Education and Science, and interviews with students’ unions.
Within this analysis NUI Maynooth was shown to have won the highest level of research per academic in the country (followed by UCC and TCD). The University also achieved first place for graduate employment and has, according to the Sunday Times, the best access programme for disadvantaged students in the country.
I think this is no mean achievement, particularly since NUIM is the smallest of the seven universities.
Truth to be told, there has been something of a velvet revolution within the university over the past five years. We moved to a modular teaching system, without any real difficulties, implemented it and changed all our rules with a lot of positive sounds coming from the staff. We felt that it was in the interests of the students and even though it involves some more work, there seemed (to me, at least) to be little resistance.
Our ‘new’ president (he is in the job about two years now), Dr. John Hughes is very well clued-in. He comes from a computer science background, has strong links with China and has a very positive attitude towards getting on with the job. He has been very supportive of Biology. He had a stand-off with another president from one of the larger universities about a year ago over the poaching of staff - the poaching of a LOT of staff and that kind of thing is not done anymore. Why should it? Moving staff from one university to another to do the exact same job, but on a higher salary, paid by the taxpayer?
So, it seems that on a per-academic scale, we do the most research. That’s interesting and I would never have guessed it. Being a small university, you tend to look at the ‘big three’ in terms of research - TCD, UCD and UCC and see the phenomenal output of high-quality papers from these places and you tend to think “wow”. But, I guess when it is all scaled by the numbers of academics, we must be holding our own.
Oddly, in one of the fast-food restaurants in the village last night, I had a conversation with one of our prize-winning young technologists, whodeveloped a kit to convert diesel cars to vegetable oil powered cars and it got me thinking that perhaps with a bit of ambition, Maynooth will do as well as anybody. So, it is good to hear that today we get this recognition from The Sunday Times.
Being university of the year is simply recognition for outperforming - our performance is higher than might be expected. However, overall, The Sunday Times has moved us into 4th place among the universities. I’m presuming this is behind TCD, UCD and UCC. This is indeed amazing.
I feel all happy about this.
Comments are, of course, welcome. Otherwise, have a great weekend.
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