Terence Cosgrave , 2025-04-18 07:33:00
To compete with the other countries out there means a substantial investment from the Irish government in research and development, writes Terence Cosgrave
I don’t think the Pope has ever described the exact length that a woman’s dress should be. The Church was very worried for a time about women’s legs, and their ability to over-stimulate men – to the point where they might commit ‘sin’, but the Pope never declared (with infallibility) that no skirt should, say, never go above the knee.
Men’s skirts in the church, of course, had to run to the ankle, out of fear that elderly clerics might set off a sexual time bomb in the pews, leading to rampant fornication at the levels of Sodom and Gomorrah from Ballyferriter to Rosmuck.
Terence Cosgrave
And in the same way, Donald Trump can’t and won’t destroy the American university system without help from those within the system and without, who support the idea of the independence of intellectual pursuits and studies.
Trump has insisted that universities in the US drop their DEI programmes (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion), limit free speech on campus (particularly protests that Trump doesn’t like), and generally make American universities white again. Harvard has refused, and MIT has followed suit. Columbia has said it will resist any deal with Trump that negates or limits its own independence. Maybe.
Trump has said he will stop federal funding toward the university if it doesn’t comply with a list of his demands, and is relishing a fight with what many in America consider to be the ‘elite’ Ivy League universities which – like the media and judiciary – he believes are dominated by left-wing ‘radicals’.
The most egregious part of Trump’s actions in his battle with Harvard is the threat to use the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) against it by getting that agency to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status.
It’s difficult to see how he could do that, but then it was difficult to see how he might deport people randomly to El Salvador and that happened. Therefore it’s quite possible that Trump might want to penalise and degrade the best American universities, and also possible that he might be able to so.
As many commentators have pointed out, Trump has a particular loathing for universities – places he doesn’t understand where people are not necessarily obsessed with money. He even started his own ‘university’ which he ran out of a ballroom in New Jersey.
That ‘university’ wonderfully described by A.A. Gill in one of his articles in his collection of journalism pieces Lines in the Sand featured one of those tireless infomercial hosts jumping on a stage and shouting “I’ve got an MBA from Trump university, and you can have one too – a MASSIVE BANK ACCOUNT”.
He then proceeded to tell them more about how to get this bank account – many of the suggestions being either illegal, or likely to attract the attention of violent criminals. You know, the stuff Trump himself pulled in New York, back in the day.
Gill reported that many of the attendees were drawn from that same group of uneducated Americans who think that this is what ‘elites’ learn in college – financial tricks and fraudulent manoeuvres to enrich themselves.
And when that’s what you think happens in universities, destroying them is almost a patriotic duty!
But whatever Trump destroys about America, some parts of it will go on. The Arab empire was destroyed, but we still use their numbers. The Romans have gone, but we still worship the God they did (thankfully, they got it down to one God by the end). The 1,000 year Reich (that lasted instead for a dozen) had a lot of good scientists working on rockets, among other things, but the Americans arrived before they finished, so the German scientists all went to America to build their rockets. Same job, different employer.
Why is this relevant to us? Ireland and its government are in stasis at the moment – unable to do anything, except to stare into the headlights of an oncoming American train wreck and wait for it to crash to assess the damage.
But we should be looking to position ourselves as an alternative location for researchers, scientists, doctors, professors and anyone else who can improve our universities and research institutions. Call it the ‘Rosie O’Donnell’ policy. If they can’t make it in the USA, what’s a bit of summer drizzle to the seriously-minded researcher?
Trump is pursuing a policy not only of limiting the work that scientists can do in America, he’s also demeaning the whole process of science.
In a way, this is crazy. Google was started when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were students at Stanford. The behemoth that is now Google is one of the most successful companies ever to exist, and its existence furthers and develops other businesses, ideas and start-ups. It would never have happened without universities and federal funding.
And Ireland – having played the ‘English-speaking, business positive, FDI-supporting’ card for so many years (we have some cards, unlike Zelensky) can now add to that list, ‘scientist-attracting’.
To compete with the other countries out there means a substantial investment from the Irish government in research and development, an investment that might pay off now, but also mightn’t pay off for 20 years.
Unlikely, you might say. But then, the Ireland of 1970 could not envisage the Ireland of today. This is a golden opportunity to attract the best scientists, developers and researchers to this country, and the act of doing so would encourage other to come here too.
We have a financial surplus. Obviously, we need to hang on to that in these difficult and rapidly changing times. But there is also an opportunity to develop our universities and research institutions, and that opportunity should not be missed.
We should invest in science and scientists. They’re the new infrastructure. 