Bringing richness to the campus

Bringing richness to the campus Professor Eugene Wall, MIC, College President
Personal Profile
Colm Fitzpatrick speaks with MIC’s new president

 

From once a young, budding psychology student to now the new president of Ireland’s largest Catholic university, one man is planning to keep care, social justice, and academic excellence on the map.

This year Professor Eugene Wall was appointed as president to Limerick’s Mary Immaculate College (MIC) after almost 40 years experience working with the university. With an impressive career including qualifications in developmental psycholinguistics and a PhD in Education, he certainly seems prepared for the pressures and challenges of this new role, alongside the voluntary teaching that accompanies it.

“What I’ve always enjoyed about working here is the particularly convivial type of environment, I’ve got excellent colleagues and I have very good working relationships with them. And I interact with staff generally, I enjoy working with them. We’re very fortunate with the calibre of students that we have across all our programmes,” Eugene explains.

“And I continue to teach – last year I taught a module on the psychology of motivation to 40 students and that’s important to me. It’s important because it keeps me in contact with them and it also gives me insight into students and what their issues are in the psychology of motivation.”

Psychology has been one of Eugene’s passions since he was young, after he “innocently” assumed that it gave great power and insight into how people acted and behaved. He studied it in UCD and consequently developed an interest in child psychology. He has also been involved in educational, social and linguistic psychology, eventually becoming a lecturer in this field at MIC.

Challenging

“I don’t find working with students to be challenging to be honest…I had several chances to stop lecturing because it’s not part of my job spec. But I chose to continue lecturing because it’s fulfilling and rewarding and most importantly it generates insight, if you are going to be working with children and understanding them and it keeps you young as well when you’re working with 19 and 20-year olds.

“I know it’s cliché, but I do consider myself very privileged to have that opportunity to work with many excellent students over the years,” he says.

MIC was founded in 1898 and is a multi-campus institute holding 4,500 students in the heart of Limerick and Thurles town, promoting excellence in learning and research in a Catholic ethos context.

Eugene says one advantage the university has is its high calibre of students, meaning that they tend to be more motivated in general.

“A lot of people going into our programmes have made up their mind so on our education programme for example the attrition rate would be 2 or 3%, that’s very low by national standards,” he notes.

Alongside the ongoing successes of the university, Eugene explains that there are still many challenges that it faces, most of which are down to economic factors.

“I’ve never found the problems to be related to the lecturing part of my job, the challenges have tended to be in the managing role and like all higher education institutions, this year we’ve had 10 years of cutbacks, staff reductions, dealing with the effects of austerity and trying to manage with less and less while maintaining quality and maintaining moral – they have been the challenges.”

He adds that although there have been some improvements in the last year, he thinks that reduced number of staff has posed “difficulties” in how the university delivers the same quality of programmes with an increasing number of students.

In spite of these problems, Eugene says he is still trying to diversify the campus and promote more student exchanges so as to become internationally attractive. For example, last year the university welcomed around 200 students from St John’s University, New York. They studied modules there for five weeks.

“All the third level universities are aware of the need to bring in international students. So many institutions would see it as a new source of revenue, but I try to see it more as a sort of richness; the way that the campus and students are enriched and their experiences are enriched by going out, that’s the way I tend to look at it,” he says.

Distinctive

“I suppose one of the distinctive elements here would be an emphasis on caring for the person. A lot of third level institutions in the United States, they would see this as a responsibility as caring for the whole student. The emphasis that is placed on that is something we would see as something core and essential as to what the institution is trying to do.”

Eugene points out that central to the university is a respect for the dignity of the person, and secondarily a commitment to social justice, adding that MIC has been working in communities and reaching out to socially and economically deprived individuals, as well as promoting academic excellence which attracts students from around the world.

With the academic year coming to an end, and a new one soon beginning in September, Eugene has a lot on his plate in the months to come and is ready to take it on.

“I’ve been in the role of acting president for over a year now and I’m happy to relish the challenges. There are lots of opportunities ahead that I’m ready for. To embrace and to sort out some issues.”