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In Defence of Blackboards

Posted in Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags , on August 21, 2022 by telescoper
Lecturing from Home

I wasn’t very surprised to find that the large lecture theatres in the swanky new building at Maynooth University are not equipped with chalkboards, as I had been told that the powers-that-be were finding it difficult to “source” boards of the appropriate size. I was more surprised and disappointed to find that none of the smaller teaching rooms have blackboards either; the best they have is very small whiteboards which are useless for teaching mathematical subjects.

I know people think I am very old fashioned in persistently using a chalkboard (a better word than “blackboard” as many chalkboards are actually dark green). They also find it quite amusing that I bought one especially so I could do lectures during the pandemic from home using it. One reason for that is that it’s far easier to get a decent contrast on camera than using a whiteboard. I also find that standing up and walking around allows me to communicate more effectively, at a decent pace and with a reasonable amount of energy which made the lectures from home a little less unbearable to give and, hopefully, to watch. Here’s the green blackboard in my office that I used to give some lectures during lockdown:

The very chalky chalkboard in my office on campus

It was never the intention of course that the board in my office would be used for lecturing. We have such things to facilitate the communication of ideas during a discussion by scribbling mathematical expressions or diagrams.

I found some time ago an article about why Mathematics professors at Stanford University still use chalkboards. I agree with everything in it. The renowned Perimeter Institute in Canada and the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge also have blackboards, not only in teaching rooms but also in corridors and offices to encourage scientific discussions.

For teaching I think the most important thing for the students in a lecture on a subject like theoretical physics to see a calculation as a process unfolding step-by-step as you explain the reasoning, rather than being presented in complete form which suggests that it should be memorized rather than understood. Far too many students come to university with the impression that their brain is just a memory device. I fill it’s our job as lecturers to encourage students develop genuine problem-solving skills. The example in the first picture above – Gaussian Elimination – is a good illustration of this. Most of my colleagues in Theoretical Physics and in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics seem to prefer chalkboards too, no doubt for similar reasons.

I know that many in Senior Management think of us as dinosaurs for clinging to “old technology” but the fact is that new technology isn’t always better technology. Whiteboards are just awful. As well as being impossible to read in a large room or to record from, the marker pens are expensive, filled with nasty solvent, and impossible to recycle when empty. Unfortunately the purveyors of these items seem to have cornered the market I hate whiteboards so much I call them shiteboards.

Anyway, with the new academic year due to start in a month, and there being no likely resolution of the accommodation crisis, it looks like many students will be unable to attend lectures in person. It doesn’t matter whether rooms have blackboards or whiteboards or enhanced multimedia digital display screens if the students can’t get to the campus…

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The Accommodation Crisis Again

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , on August 20, 2022 by telescoper

There’s an article on the RTÉ website drawing attention to the national crisis in student accommodation. Included in the article is an example of a student at Maynooth:

Clara Battell is heading into her second year of studying Law and Criminology at Maynooth University. The Sligo student and her four friends thought they’d beat the crowd when they started looking for accommodation shortly after Christmas. However, eight months on, they’re still looking.

I checked this morning on daft.ie and there are just two properties currently available to rent in Maynooth; the rest are miles away and would require the tenant(s) to have a car. One is property is a studio apartment for €1,250 per month (which is way beyond the budget of a typical undergraduate student) and the other a four-bedroom shared house suitable at €3,800 per month. And remember that new students haven’t even started looking yet as this year’s CAO offers are not out until September. Clara Battell might end up having to commute from Sligo:

I’m from Sligo, it’s a three hour train journey and the only option at this stage appears to be commuting. It’s surely not feasible, six hours every day – and you’re not getting the best out of your education if you are travelling so much. We are all a bit stuck really.

Not to mention of course the inability to participate in clubs, societies and other extra-curricular activities. Clara’s situation is by no means atypical. Some brave students may try long-distance commuting this for a week or two, but few will keep it up for the entire academic year when they know how tough it is going to be.

The reality is that a great many students will have to choose between lengthy commutes and skipping lectures. This is particularly bad at Maynooth where the University Management has failed to invest in lecture recording equipment that would at least do something to mitigate the negatives of not being able to attend campus teaching sessions. I can see attendance on campus being very low this forthcoming term, as it was last term. The reality for many students is that they will be stuck at home just like during the lockdown, but without online classes. This was entirely predictable, but little has been done. It’s extremely frustrating for staff as well as students.

I heard this week of a much-needed proposal for a new housing complex including 260 student beds in Maynooth. It’s not on campus, but within walking distance on the other side of the Moyglare Road. This is good news, but the application for planning consent has only just been lodged; a decision is not expected until November 30th. Even if permission is granted it will take years to build and remember that there are 15,000 students in Maynooth so 260 beds is a drop in the ocean.

It is important to stress what is driving this. With costs increasing but income per student falling over many years, third-level institutions have had no choice but to recruit more and more students. The same Government that has driven this requirement is also responsible for inadequate investment in housing across the country. Some people are trying to blame the current crisis on the 48,000 Ukrainian refugees now in Ireland, but all their presence has done is to expose the long-term negligence of the Government at whose door the blame must rest.

It will take at least two years, and probably much longer, to fix this crisis. The big question is whether Ireland’s University system will survive that time without disintegrating.

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A-level Again

Posted in Education with tags , , on August 18, 2022 by telescoper

So once again it’s the day that students in United Kingdom are receiving their A-level results. It seems the number of top grades is down this year but as always my advice to students who got disappointing results is

There’s always the clearing system and there’s every chance you can find a place somewhere good. If you’re reading this blog you might be interested in Physics and/or Astronomy so I’ll just mention that both Cardiff and Sussex have places in clearing and both are excellent choices.

At least you’ve got your results; students here in Ireland will have to wait until September 2nd to get theirs!

My experience of over 30 years teaching in UK universities has convinced me that A-levels are not a very good preparation for higher education anyway and the obsession with them is unhealthy. Some of the best students I’ve ever had the pleasure of teaching came to University with poor A-level grades (for a variety of reasons).

In fact I’d go as far as to say that the entire system of University admissions in the United Kingdom needs to be overhauled. As I said in a post over a decade ago:

…if we had the opportunity to design a process for university admissions from scratch, there is no way on Earth we would end up with a system like the current one.

Of course I longer work in the UK so there’s no longer a “we”, but the system in Ireland is not that much different, with the Leaving Certificate playing the role of A-levels for the vast majority of students.

As things stand in the UK, students apply for university places through UCAS before they have their final A-level results (which don’t come out until August). Most applications are in by January of the year of intended admission, in fact. The business of selecting candidates and making offers therefore usually makes use of interim results or “predicted grades” as supplied by teachers of the applicant.

In my (limited) experience most teachers systematically overestimate the grades of their pupils, which is presumably why so many of this year’s A-level results are being downgraded, but there are lots of unconscious biases at play here and I accept that some teachers may be unduly pessimistic about their students likely performance.

But the inaccuracy of predicted A-level grades is not the only absurdity in the current system. Universities have to engage in enormous amounts of guesswork during the admissions process. Suppose a department has a quota of 100, defining the target number students to take in. They might reasonably get a minimum of 500 applications for these 100 places, depending on the popularity of university and course.

Each student is allowed to apply to 5 different institutions. If a decision is made to make an offer of a place, it would normally be conditional on particular A-level grades (e.g. AAB). At the end of the process the student is expected to pick a first choice (CF) and an insurance choice (CI) out of the offers they receive. They will be expected to go to their first choice if they get the required grades, to the insurance choice if they don’t make it into the first choice but get grades sufficient for the reserve. If they don’t make either grade they have to go into the clearing system and take pot luck among those universities that have places free after all the CFs and CIs have been settled.

Each university department has to decide how many offers to make. This will always be larger than the number of places, because not all applicants will make an offer their CF. They have to honour all offers made, but there may be penalties if they under or over recruit. How many offers to make then? What fraction of students with an offer will put you first? What fraction of them will actually get the required grade?

The answers to these questions are not at all obvious, so the whole system runs on huge levels of uncertainty. I’m amazed that each year any institution manages to get anywhere close to the correct number, but they do tend to get very close indeed by the end. Usually.

It’s a very skilled job being an admissions tutor, but there’s no question it would all be fairer on both applicants and departments to remove most of the guesswork by which I mean allowing students to apply to University after they have got their results. But there is the rub. There are two ways I can see of changing the timetable to allow this:

  1. Have the final A-level examinations earlier
  2. Start the university academic year later

The unavoidable consequence of the first option would be the removal of large quantities of material from the A-level syllabus so the exams could be held several months earlier, which would be a disaster in terms of preparing students for university.

The second option would mean starting the academic year in, say, January instead of September. This would in my opinion be preferable to 1, but would still be difficult because it would interfere with all the other things a university does as well as teaching, especially research. The summer recess (July-September), wherein much research is currently done, could be changed to an autumn one (September-December) but there would be a great deal of resistance, especially from the older establishments; I can’t see Oxbridge being willing to abandon its definitions of teaching term! And what would the students do between July and January?

Either of these options would cause enormous disruption in the short-term, which is presumably why they have never been implemented. However, this year everything is disrupted anyway so there’s an opportunity to redesign the whole process.

I don’t really imagine the Government is will do any of this but here are some suggestions of elements of a new admissions system:

  • Students to apply after receiving A-level* grades (i.e. implement 1 or, preferably, 2 above)
  • All university applications to be anonymous to prevent discrimination.
  • The identity of the applicant’s school to be withheld to prevent undue influence.
  • Teachers to play no part in the process.

*I don’t think A-levels are fit for purpose so here I mean grades of whatever examination replaces them.

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Quiet Quitting

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , on August 16, 2022 by telescoper

Not long ago I had lunch with a friend and former colleague from Sussex now working elsewhere. During the conversation I found myself saying words to the effect of “It’s only easy being a manager of something if you don’t care”. Speaking in the context of University management I meant “care” about the things that matter, i.e. staff and students and teaching and research, not metrics, rankings and key performance indicators.

Over the years that I’ve worked in universities, I’ve seen them systematically taken over by people who really don’t care at all about the important things. The result among ordinary staff is exhaustion caused by the overwork required to meet arbitrary criteria of productivity imposed by a remote and uncaring managerial class. Universities are thus a microcosm of neoliberal society at large, with the management being the propertied class, the academics being the workers, and the students being mere commodities.

The drive to alienate and demoralize staff through overwork accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Teaching staff were required to transform their working methods, undertake countless hours of unpaid overtime and suffer long periods of isolation and stress. Being a Head of Department with lots of responsibilities but no actual power and no reduction in teaching load to compensate for the administrative burden, compounded this They did it because they knew there was an emergency and because they actually care. In return for this sacrifice they have generally received no appreciation except for platitudes and nothing by way of financial compensation, with the notable exception of Queen’s University Belfast which paid a bonus to staff in recognition of their exceptional efforts. Well done to them, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Elsewhere the only reward for efforts during the pandemic looks likely to be real-terms cuts in pay.

My worry, which is rapidly becoming reality, is that in the post-pandemic era The Management, aware of how far their employees were prepared to go during the pandemic, will continue to take them completely for granted, increase their workload by recruiting more and more students to be taught with fewer and fewer resources, all of it driven by financial targets. Why do we continue to put up with this gross exploitation? Are we doomed forever to labour under the dead weight of managerialism?

Over the past few weeks I’ve seen a number of articles about quiet quitting, most recently this one in the Guardian. Roughly speaking “quiet quitting” means fulfilling one’s contract but not going any further – no work at evening or weekends, taking one’s full holiday entitlement, and so on. Staff have generally done these things because they care but that care has been and is still being systematically exploited. Indeed, it says something about the way higher education institutions operate nowadays that “working to contract” is generally regarded as a form of industrial action! Universities would grind to a halt without the good will of staff, and there’s very little of that still left. In my own case, my employer still hasn’t fulfilled the terms of my employment contract almost five years after I joined.

So am I now going to join the ranks of those quitting quietly? You might very well think that. I couldn’t possibly comment. What I will say is that my union, IFUT, is going to ballot its members next month on industrial action over pay. I think you can probably guess which way I’ll be voting…

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The Student Accommodation Crisis

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , on August 13, 2022 by telescoper

These days many of Ireland’s newspapers are carrying stories about the drastic shortage of accommodation for students ahead of the start of the new academic year.; see, for example, here and here. Sinn Féin spokesperson on Further and Higher Education, Rose Conway-Walsh, has called on the Government to prepare emergency measures to tackle the crisis “before it’s too late”.

Unfortunately I think it’s already too late. I think this year we’re going to see a complete breakdown of the University system and that’s even without the industrial action that looks likely to take place. Although third-level institutions could have done more, the root cause is the funding model. There’s also a lack of housing nationally which is caused by systematic underinvestment over many years.

To illustrate the problems let’s look at Maynooth University, where I work. Some of the issues here are common across the University sector but some are specific. Maynooth is Ireland’s only real “University Town” in the sense that the University constitutes a very large part of the population; the local football team is even called Maynooth University Town. This is often used as a selling point for the University and indeed Maynooth is a pleasant place to work and study, but this year the special status of Maynooth is exacerbating the national crisis.

The number of permanent residents in Maynooth is about 15,000 and there is a similar number of students (13,700, including about 11000 undergraduates), so the population almost doubles during teaching term. Both populations are steadily rising. The University is recruiting more and more students without comparable increase in student housing – this year looks like being another record intake – but there is also pressure on housing due to other factors, particularly the dramatic expansion of the Intel plant in nearby Leixlip, with many of the new workers trying to find places to live in Maynooth. New properties are being built but at a rate much slower than the demand is increasing.

It is now mid-August, about a month before term starts for returning students. This is the time when foreign students start arriving and looking for accommodation. As a matter of fact I have two PhD students due to start in September, both of whom are new to Ireland. Usually getting in ahead of the home students helps them find somewhere ahead of the rush, but this year there is absolutely no accommodation to be found in Maynooth. I don’t mean there’s a shortage. I mean there isn’t anything. And the incoming first-year students haven’t even started looking yet.

This year’s Leaving Certificate results will not be out until September 5th. After that more than 3000 students will begin looking for accommodation. But the supply is already exhausted in August. Some will find accommodation on campus, but at the moment there are over 800 Ukrainian refugees living in the halls who will have to leave at the end of August to make way for students, but where will they go? And in any case there spaces vacated will only accommodate a fraction of the new arrivals.

There’s also the question of cost. The law of supply and demand is merciless in this situation so as private accommodation is so scarce, the rents payable have soared. That’s fine if you’re a landlord, of course…

The only solution I can see in the short term is temporary accommodation in caravans or tents or perhaps in large buildings such as sports halls. That’s highly unsatisfactory of course, but the alternative is lengthy commuting which is exhausting and which we saw last year leads to widespread disengagement.

Maynooth has just opened a new building on campus, the TSI Building, with large teaching rooms anticipating ever-increasing class sizes driven by the bums-on-seats mandate. But how many students will be able to attend?

New Teaching Room in the TSI Building

I’ve been arguing for over a year that we need to accept the reality that many students will not be able to attend on-campus sessions as we would like them to so we should invest in remote teaching methods to allow them to study at home. We did this during the pandemic emergency and we should do it during the accommodation emergency too. I am appalled that Maynooth has not bothered to install proper lecture capture facilities in its teaching rooms. These facilities were commonplace in the UK long before the pandemic and it’s shocking that they are not deployed routinely in Maynooth. I have better lecture capture facilities in my study at home than the University provides in its lecture theatres.

Although this crisis has been brewing for many months, the Irish Government has done little to help. Individual universities have also been staring into the headlights and doing nothing. Government funding per student has been falling steadily so Universities wishing to maintain their income have been forced to recruit more students, despite the lack of investment in accommodation and other infrastructure.

It’s stressful enough for academic staff having to contend with this looming disaster, but I can hardly imagine how awful it must be for students. All I can do is apologize, which is something the people really responsible will not do.

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Examining Again

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , on August 5, 2022 by telescoper

ChorizoGate distracted me from mentioning on here that the Repeat Examination period started on Wednesday. I usually write a post at the start of an Exam period to wish all the students good luck, but this time the first examination for which I am responsible took place yesterday morning, and I’ve already marked the scripts so in that case the die is already cast. I send my best wishes to all other students taking repeat examinations, though, including the first-years taking my paper later on this afternoon.

Today’s examination doesn’t finish until 5.30pm so I’ll have to collect the scripts on my way home to mark them over the weekend. I have another three examinations on my own modules next Wednesday but because of ongoing staffing issues I am also responsible for marking several examinations for modules I didn’t teach. I’ve got a busy week ahead so I want to finish marking today’s paper before it starts,

I also thought it was worth mentioning for any university teachers out there reading this that although they are held at roughly the same time of year in the two countries there’s a difference in the way resits are handled in the institutions I’ve worked at in the United Kingdom and the way repeats work here in Maynooth which is implied by the slightly different name.

In UK institutions with which I am familiar students generally take resits when, because they have failed one or more examinations during the year,  they have not accumulated sufficient credits to proceed to the next year of their course. Passing the resit allows them to retrieve lost credit, but their mark is generally capped at a bare pass (usually 40%). That means the student gets the credit they need for their degree but their average (which determines whether they get 1st, 2nd or 3rd class Honours) is negatively affected.

This is the case unless a student has extenuating circumstances affecting the earlier examination, such as bad health or family emergency, in which case they take the resit as a `sit’, i.e. for the first time with an uncapped mark.

Here in Maynooth, repeat examinations are generally taken for the same reasons as in the UK but the mark obtained is not capped. When I’ve told former UK colleagues that our repeat examinations are not capped they generally  don’t  like the idea because they feel that it might lead to many students playing games, i.e. deliberately not taking exams in May with the intention of spreading some of their examination load into August. There’s not much sign of students actually doing that in my Department, to be honest, for the reason that the results from the repeat examination period are not confirmed until early September so that students that deploy this strategy do not know whether they are going to be able to start their course again until a couple of weeks before term. That could cause lots of problems securing accommodation, etc, so it doesn’t seem to me to be a good strategy.

I’d welcome comments for or against whether resits/repeats should be capped/uncapped and on what practice is adopted in your institution(s).

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PhD Stipends in Ireland

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , on July 29, 2022 by telescoper

Some time ago I posted an item about the planned introduction of a higher PhD stipend (€28K) for a small number of research students in Ireland. It being obvious that he current level of PhD stipends (e.g. €18.5K per annum for IRC-funded studentships) being far too low, my main comment on that was that if that level is a fair level for a PhD then all PhD students should get it.

Now there’s an open letter going around signed by over 400 PhD students arguing for an uplift in their stipends. I support this wholeheartedly. I’m surprised there aren’t even more signatories than that, actually, but I think they have now opened it up again and let others sign it who didn’t know about it. I encourage all PhD students reading this to sign it

With inflation rampant at over 9%, even the IRC level of stipend is difficult for a student to live on (especially in the Greater Dublin area) yet many receive even less than that. Maynooth University, for example, funds many of its PhD students at the paltry level of €10K per annum. This is completely impossible to live on and it forces recipients to undertake large amounts of tutoring or other work (including bar work and retail) in order to get by financially. In my opinion stipends paid at this level are simply exploitative. I have argued repeatedly, but without success, for these to be scrapped.

The deliberate impoverishment of PhD students exists in order to force them to undertake extensive and poorly paid teaching duties because there aren’t enough teaching faculty to cover what is required. That situation is a direct result of the chronic underfunding of higher education in Ireland. Universities will argue that they don’t have any choice, but that doesn’t make the situation is acceptable.

Third level institutions don’t care. If they did they’d do something about it. Maynooth University ran up a surplus of €13.2M during the first year of the pandemic largely by exploiting unpaid overtime by lecturers and tutors, the latter predominantly PhD students. It could be used to provide emergency relief for PhD students but I bet it won’t be. In fact has anyone working at Maynooth received anything at all in return for generating this surplus?

It is of course good for a research student to get some teaching experience during their PhD but this should be on a voluntary basis. A PhD student who chooses to teach will probably do a better job than one who is forced to do it in order to pay the rent. My basic point, though, is that a full-time research student should be funded to do research full time, and it is grossly unfair to pay them too little for this to be possible.

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How to be a better PhD supervisor

Posted in Education with tags , , , on July 24, 2022 by telescoper

The text for this Sunday’s sermon is provided by a piece by a Danish PhD student called Rikke Plougmann in the latest Physics World entitled How to become a better supervisor. The article is quite interesting, though I was a bit alarmed by the first of the two paragraphs here:

While it certainly is “scary” I don’t think the “misconception” described in the first paragraph is “widespread”, or at least I sincerely hope it isn’t. I think any supervisor who behaves in such a way towards their research students shouldn’t be allowed to have any! Does your supervisor use “negative, condescending language”? If so I think you should get a new one!

Whether or not the first paragraph is accurate, the second definitely is. It is important for a supervisor (and the rest of a research group and the rest of a department and indeed the whole institution) to try their best to create a welcoming environment for all.

I have written several times on here about my own experiences as a PhD student, most recently here. I have written much less about my experiences as a supervisor. That’s partly because I don’t feel comfortable writing about what I think should really be confidential matters relating to PhD students and partly because each student-supervisor relationship is different.

I certainly don’t think I’m any sort of role model as a PhD supervisor. Among many other failings, I have let my students down at various times when I’ve been mentally unwell and/or when struggling with workload. But I’ve always tried to be friendly and supportive, and encouraged students to look after their work-life balance.

Other than that, it has always seemed to me that it is important for a supervisor to create a healthy working relationship. It’s not simply about training an early-career researcher. The fact of the matter is that when you take on a research student it’s because there is a project you think should be done but you’re not able to do it on your own. The student should realize that their work is not some sort of prolonged test but is highly valued as an essential contribution to a project. In other words, you need the student. I have known some supervisors to act as if they are doing students a favour by taking them on, when the reality is the other way round.

Another thing that I think a supervisor should do is make it clear that they do not have a monopoly on wisdom. Students should be encouraged to question what the supervisor suggests. I always feel I’m succeeding as a supervisor when a PhD student has the confidence to say something like “I thought about what you suggested and decided it wouldn’t work so I did this instead….”

Certainly, by the end of a PhD, the student should know more about the topic than their supervisor. At the beginning, though, the supervisor will know more and it is more of a teacher/pupil relationship then. Managing the transition from that to the equal partnership it should become is tricky as it depends on individual personalities, and it doesn’t always work out. That’s not always the fault of the supervisor. On the other hand, recognizing that’s where you should be headed is at least a start.

Above all, a supervisor should try the best they can to enable the student to enjoy their PhD. I certainly enjoyed mine and I am immensely grateful to my supervisor, who is alas no longer with us, for being so kind and supportive to me during the difficult times as well as giving me such interesting projects to do.

I’m aware this is all rather vague so I’d welcome any comments either from students about how they feel their supervisor might be better or from supervisors with advice to others. The box below is at your disposal.

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Last Open Day

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , on June 25, 2022 by telescoper
Ready to go

So here I am, then, back at home. I’m not at Dublin Pride because I had to attend an Open Day at Maynooth University. It was a lot quieter than the last one I did, in April, but a reasonable number attended. The weather forecast was rather dire but it turned out to be not bad at all, if a bit breezy. Hopefully that means there was good weather for Pride too.

I’m told there were 1000 registrations as opposed to the 5000 a couple of months ago. This one is usually a bit quieter because students have basically finished making their choices by now. A show of hands in the audience in my talk suggested the vast majority were actually 5th year students, so not planning to go to University this September.

Anyway, that completes the cycle of open days for this academic year. Since I’m stepping down as Head of Department when my term ends at the end of August, this will be the last of these I shall be responsible for. I hope.

Big thanks to Dale who helped out a lot today, setting up and dismantling the stand, and to him and the others who have helped over the year.

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Another Late Start to the Academic Year

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , on June 24, 2022 by telescoper

Following on from Monday’s post about uncertainty relating to the start of next academic year, it has now been announced that this summer’s Leaving Certificate results will not be released to students until Friday 2nd September and CAO offers will be made on 8th September.

The timeline for admissions at Ireland’s third level institutions will therefore be roughly the same as last year. Although nothing has been officially announced from Maynooth yet, it seems likely that lectures for first-year students will have to commence a week later than returners just as happened last year.

This is not ideal but at least we have some basis on which to start planning. The start of the current academic year was a bit chaotic to say the least but if this year is a repeat of last at least we have some experience on what worked and what didn’t to guide us. And at least I have something reasonably concrete to say at tomorrow’s Open Day.

From the point of teaching, therefore, things are probably going to be a bit less bad than last year, at least in Maynooth. Some universities were due to start teaching on 5th September so they face a delay of 2-3 weeks.

That doesn’t mean however that things will be better for the students. They will have to wait until September until they know which course they will be on, which will cause considerable stress. On a more practical level it means that that new students will have very little time to find accommodation which is in any case in very short supply.

Now that we know the dates we will make the best plans we can for teaching, but for accommodation there doesn’t seem to be any plan at all. A crisis is looming.

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