CAAEEEE: Center for Academic Accountability, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Excellence and Entrepreneurialism

CAAEEE first arose from a concern with management practices in our own university, which had been less than optimally configured before the advent of President O'Toole. We soon realized that we ourselves have the expertise to rectify and optimize those practices. All it takes is visionary leadership and a strict vision compliance program at every level. The Center for Academic Accountability, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Excellence and Entrepreneurialism now brings together the finest minds in Irish academic leadership, together with visiting fellows from like-minded institutes around the English-speaking world. The center is headed by Professor Brad Grinder, a world-renowned consultant who has worked on the privatization and downsizing of universities in many lands. Author of Handling Dissent (1993) and of Undermining America: Intellectual Intruders in the Academy (2002), Brad has many years' experience of dealing with organized labor.

Says Grinder, "accountability, efficiency, effectiveness, excellence and entrepreneurialism are all bound up together in the day-by-day operations of a modern university. You can't have one without the others. Too many professors still spend their available time on private study, indulging their personal foibles rather than creating quantifiable and measurable outcomes for the authorities. community leaders, social partners, parents, stakeholders and students who have invested their hopes, their substance and their energies in the university situation. For too long the leaders of educational institutions have taken refuge in woolly generalities and shirked tackling the essential problem, which is this: how can we break down academic work into its component parts and insure that each of these parts is delivered under optimum conditions of efficiency? We need to create a fully controlled model of quantifiable and useful learning, at the right price."

CAAEEE administers research contracts placed by public authorities in Ireland and abroad, and teaches the MAKE online postgraduate diploma course (Managing Academics for the Knowledge Economy).  It publishes the Journal of Organization, Accountability and Quality, a refereed quarterly journal supported by a grant from the Freedom Philanthropy Institute .