The academics and the powers: Colonialism, national development and the Irish university.
Item
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Title
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The academics and the powers: Colonialism, national development and the Irish university.
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Identifier
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AAI9029977
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identifier
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9029977
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Creator
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Sheehan, Elizabeth Anne.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Jane Schneider
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Date
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1990
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Anthropology, Cultural | Education, Sociology of | History, European
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the role of universities and academic intellectuals in the construction of Irish national identity over time. The study is based on a comparison of Ireland's two largest and most influential colleges: Trinity College Dublin, founded in 1592 as a Protestant institution, and University College Dublin, part of the National University of Ireland founded in 1908 to educate the Catholic majority. Historical and ethnographic sources are used to explore the changing relationship of these two institutions and their faculty members to Irish intellectual and political life between the colonial period and the present. The long-term conflict between scholarly knowledge and native cultural tradition, a legacy of Ireland's colonial history, is examined as well.;Focusing on the more recent period, the dissertation discusses the increasing influence of state planning initiatives on Irish higher education since the 1960s, as the country has undergone modernization and greater incorporation into the European Community. As both Trinity College and University College commit themselves equally to this new development agenda, historical distinctions between the two institutions have diminished. However, new divisions have emerged in Irish academic and intellectual life as the state technocrat has gained public authority over the creative and the socially critical intellectual. In this context, the recent participation of academics in the public sphere of political and cultural debate may be viewed as an attempt to restore the traditional authority of the humanist intellectual and to generate critical reanalysis of Irish history and culture in a climate of disorienting social change.;Finally, the dissertation considers the impact of external intellectual and economic forces upon Irish academia, examining Ireland's position within the contemporary "academic world system" of scholarly networks, research funding, conferences and publishing. It suggests that Ireland's historical experience of political economic dependency and cultural marginality is recreated to some extent within this system, and that efforts by the country's intellectuals to redefine Ireland in this international context may be constrained by a prevailing scholarly and popular interest in the "traditional" Ireland of peasants, poets and patriots.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
