Abstract
This contribution addresses the author’s experiences in the Irish University System and his reversed “rite of passage” from the University to a Eurac Research – a private research institution. After an overview of the Irish tertiary sector on a statal, organizational and financial level, the author illuminates how the situation unfolds for researchers and why as a result he decided to move on to Eurac Research. Even though student fees were canceled in Ireland in 1993, students are still obliged to pay costly enrollment fees due to the neoliberal organizational structures of the institutions. Therefore, in order to generate profit, universities are constrained to constantly up their student enrollment numbers, which in turn poses a conundrum for the teaching personnel. Academics need to take on additional teaching in order to keep the students engaged, consequently they can hardly devote any time to their own research, which creates a negative effect on their career progress, trapping them in professional mid-levels. Eurac Research as a private institution, however, is described as a space for scientific cooperation in symbiosis with architectural openness and historical revaluation.