Universities Abroad: Ireland's Shotgun Wedding

Their campuses are less than a mile apart, but Dublin's two major universities have long been separated by a bitter heritage of hate and suspicion. Trinity College (enrollment: 3,500) is Protestant, England-oriented, aristocratic. University College (7,325) is Roman Catholic, nationalist, middle class. Relations between the two are so frosty that, when the Irish government recently offered them joint use of a veterinary school, the colleges balked at sharing the same faculty and instead created overlapping, independent staffs. Now, however, Ireland's Ministry of Education has taken a major step toward ending the rivalry. Under a plan of union revealed last month,...

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