25.11.2015
The National University of Ireland is delighted to have recently conferred Masters Degrees on the first students of Uversity – a recently approved recognised college of NUI. The conferring ceremony took place in Farmleigh House where Chancellor of NUI, Dr Maurice Manning, congratulated all those connected with this new and novel project including, Mr Dermot Desmond (the founding partner) and Dr Danny O’Hare (Chair, Uversity).
The concept of Uversity was first floated at the Global Economic Forum, held in Farmleigh in 2009. Uversity is a unique
collaborative partnership between the universities in Ireland – north and south, the Institutes of Technology and a number of independent colleges. The vision behind its establishment is that it will use Ireland’s reputation as a centre of excellence in the creative and performing arts and its collective higher education strength in these fields, to attract international students to study in Ireland on programmes offering wide personal choice and the opportunity to study in multiple centres.
Speaking at the ceremony, Dr Manning said, “the conferring of these first MA graduates marks the successful completion of the first cycle of the imaginative and ambitious project that is Uversity. The programme has broken new ground in Irish higher education in terms of student choice and inter-institutional collaboration. The National University of Ireland is pleased to have been able to support the project through the approval of the programme and the awarding of the degrees.”
He added, “it is a major strategic objective of the National University of Ireland to act as a focus for collaboration between the NUI member institutions and also more generally in Irish higher education. For this reason, NUI is particularly pleased to have been able to support the project through the approval of the MA programme and the awarding of the degrees”.
Dr Manning also commented that those familiar with higher education processes and cycles would understand the very substantial progress made by Uversity in six short years, given the complexity of the model, and the extent of collaboration required to make the concept a reality. He added that the Review Panel, which included members from outside Ireland, and which had first advised the University on the approval of the programme, were particularly impressed at the degree of collaboration that had been successfully organised by Uversity. They expressed the view that ‘such inter-institutional collaboration in higher education is a considerable achievement and provides a valuable model to be further developed in the future and which might also be imitated in other higher education contexts’.
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