Ferdinand von Prondzynski has been writing about Bat O’Keefe’s allegation that some university academics only work 4 hours per week, or at least teach only four hours per week.

It is not clear why this figure came out from Bat O’Keeffe’s mouth, but it smacks of a ’softening up’ of the third level sector in an effort to reduce funding even more than before.

In my department, we have a total of 15 permanent academic staff right now and 14 who have a full teaching load.  We are dealing with about 750 students.  It is relatively easy to do the maths and see that this is really not a good way to try to teach.  We have massive classes and any degree courses that have small numbers are being shelved, even if they are, arguably, useful degree courses.

We put together demonstrations for the Young Scientists exhibitions, we constantly visit schools, hoping to inspire young people to go to university, we deal with student issues - both academic and personal, we write grant proposals (almost endlessly), we read research papers (day and night), we write research articles (http://bioinf.nuim.ie/pubs.html), we mark exams (almost all of January was taken up with this), we design new courses, we deal with endless administration, audits, quality reviews, benchmarking exercises…

And now we endure being demeaned and denigrated by the government minister who is tasked with building and improving the education sector.

O’Keeffe might have worked in the third-level sector once, but clearly either he wan’t suited for it, or it wasn’t too kind to him.  Either way, he didn’t make a lifelong career out of it.  Clearly, either he has no idea what is involved when you are working in an Irish University, in which case he is a fool, or he does know and is being dishonest.