Belfast is back on the map

The wind of change that is whistling through higher education in the UK has been making itself felt in Northern Ireland. There Sir George Bain, vice-chancellor of Queen's University Belfast and the man appointed by Tony Blair to sort out firefighters' pay, has been transforming a traditional, not to say old-fashioned, university into a modern academy fit for this millennium.

To this end he has been restructuring, axing underperforming departments, redeploying academics, and setting up new offices – one to raise money from alumni, another to recruit international students – as well as introducing new initiatives to tackle tasks such asimproving the position of women in the hierarchy.

He now proclaims that Queen's is in the top 20 for research in the UK, on a par with other members of the "Ivy League" Russell Group. "When I came, I found an institution that virtually everyone agreed was not achieving its full potential," he explains. "Thirty years of civil war was one reason. It had been difficult to recruit staff from outside Northern Ireland. It was also an institution that had lost touch with some of the major currents in higher education, in particular the national and international standards of excellence in some areas."

Now, he says, Queen's is marching up the league tables. Sir George thought the makeover would take 15 years – and he only had seven. (He retires in two years time at the age of 65.) His objective, as he puts it, was to begin to restore Queen's self-respect, to get it back to where it was before, as one of the highly respected civic universities of the UK. He clearly feels he has done that.

Once a backwater consumed by the sectarian problems of Northern Ireland, Queen's is now trying to look outwards. The peace process has helped. It wants to attract more students from the UK mainland – to give more variety to the student body, 95 per cent of which comes from the Province – and it wants to burnish its international reputation by recruiting more students from overseas. It might be more successful with the latter than the former. The peace process is a relatively new phenomenon, and the Troubles are seared on the memories of the British parents of today's teenagers.

Until the late Sixties there were sizeable numbers of Brits at the university, according to Robert Miller, a senior lecturer in sociology, who has studied the issue. But that contingent dried up with the Troubles. The challenge now is to persuade British students to stop thinking of Belfast as a dangerous place full of bomb-throwing paramilitaries, and to start thinking of it as an interesting safe place in which to study.

"I was born here and I have lived through two sets of Troubles and I have never been in danger except once when it was my own fault," says Professor Kenneth Bell, pro vice chancellor in charge of students and learning.

Other university staff agree. "As with any big city, there are some areas you wouldn't go into at night," says Robin Halley, the director of the new international office, who came from Manchester University in June. "I think it's safer here for students than Oxford Road in Manchester [where the university has its headquarters]."

Sir George endorses the sentiment. He had a daughter who attended Manchester University. One of the first things she was given was a rape alarm – and that was back in the Eighties. "We have never given our students rape alarms," he says.

Some of the change pushed through in the last five years has been extremely painful, notably the restructuring of departments and academics. Soon after he arrived from the London Business School, Sir George identified 110 academics who were not "research active", to use the unlovely jargon of higher education. They were offered early retirement and redeployment packages within the university. The news caused a furore. The Association of University Teachers objected loudly, but the restructuring went ahead. Four departments – Italian, geology, Semitic studies and statistics – were closed. A total of £25m was invested in hiring new staff from all over the world – from Italy, Russia, Romania and Argentina – and the impact has been huge, according to Professor Bell. It explains the university's improvement in the research assessment exercise.

The second restructuring is now taking place and emotions are running high in the departments that are for the chop. Courses in Latin and ancient Greek are being cut out on the grounds that few, if any, students want to study them. Three staff are being offered early retirement or redeployment. According to the university, not a single student was admitted to study single honours Latin or Greek in the last four years. Classics staff dispute the figures but acknowledge that student numbers are very small. There is no doubt Mrs Margaret Hodge, the Higher Education minister, would approve of this reallocation of resources.

Sir George doesn't deny the difficulties involved. And as a good industrial-relations peace maker he has a lot of sympathy for the staff being squeezed out. "You have to expect that people will oppose this," he says. "If I was in their position I would fight it as well. But my job is a different one."

His job has been made easier by the fact that he has the support of most other heads of school in arts and humanities. "It is draining resources away from other subjects that could use them," he says. "Here you had a situation where no students were being attracted, yet £150,000 a year was going on the infrastructure."

Not surprisingly, Sir George is behind Mrs Hodge's push to see universities respond more to the marketplace. He sees no reason why people should support higher education without universities being accountable. The Queen's vice-chancellor is New Labour man incarnate, a Canadian who has spent his working life in British academe, but at the sharp end – first in Warwick, than at London business school. "I do believe we should fund curiosity and that governments should not interfere in great detail," he says. "But I think that there is no reason why students should be forced to attend one institution, and particularly a failing institution, any more than consumers of soap or anything else should be forced to buy that brand. I do believe that people should have some freedom of choice."

Like other observers of the higher-education scene, Sir George deplores what is known as "mission drift", whereby funding mechanisms have forced increasing numbers of institutions to try to build up their research to maximise their funding. The idea that Britain can support 106 first-class research institutions is straining it, he says.

He is in favour of top-up fees to bring in more money to universities and to ensure that graduates contribute more to an education that gives them higher earnings. "Otherwise you have bus drivers subsidising the children of vice-chancellors," he says. But like many other vice-chancellors, he would like to see students paying their contribution after graduation, as they do in Scotland. "Higher education here will go downhill unless the Government finds a mechanism for funding it," he says.

l.hodges@independent.co.uk