In a recent interview with The University Times, Provost Patrick Prendergast chose to quote Edmund Burke: “A state without the capacity for change is without the means for its own preservation.”
College is, without doubt, in a transition phase. “We’ve not been caught napping” is another phrase of Prendergast’s. In a few years, Oisín House will be transformed into one of the largest buildings in Dublin, while down in Grand Canal Docks the Engineering, Energy and Environment (E3) Institute will mark the start of a second Trinity campus. As early as next summer, Regent House will begin operating as a visitor centre, as Trinity attempts to attract more tourists.
Trinity’s culture is slowly changing too. Increasing attempts to commercialise the College space might see gigs and concerts held in Trinity next year. Who knows who might be bidding for naming rights for Oisín House and other buildings on campus?
As ever taller buildings are built and grand ambitions are realised, some are calling for a conservation plan – a constitution of sorts to protect and preserve Trinity’s campus in the face of this development.
Students are not always good at this kind of self-preservation – there is little collective memory of a time before cuts and underfunding. In five years time, commercialisation will be the norm. A Bank of Ireland dominating a previous student space will be unsurprising. The Denis O’Brien Student Centre will raise few eyebrows. Few students entering Trinity next September will know a time when having to pay €20 for a student card would be absurd.
This is especially important as Trinity and higher education changes. It is not right that universities must rent beds from private accommodation because they can’t afford to build their own. Yet in five years time, students might be unable to remember a world before fees, levies and loans became the norm.
If students are to continue to keep fighting for a better education system, they must not see the current underfunded, under-resourced system as the new normal. No student today can recall higher education before the funding crisis. But to create a better system, we must be able to remember and conserve what we had.
