In this austere era of tuition fee increases, huge funding cuts and student unrest, university bosses should not accept big pay rises
Different salaries interest different newspapers. The Guardian monitors boardroom pay with an acid eye. The Mail runs a pocket calculator over the BBC. Everybody twitches when bankers or MPs wander into frame. And the Telegraph? Ah! Are you sitting uncomfortably, vice-chancellor?
The first higher education message Vince Cable delivered when he became business secretary last May was aimed at top university people. The research on his desk showed that university bosses' packages had just risen by 11% (to hit a �219,000 average). Every intelligent person knew that these were harsh economic times, with harsher cuts coming, Vince said. Everyone knew that pain needed sharing. Could we please see a little "realism and self-sacrifice" from the leaders of academe?
Apparently not. A painstaking Telegraph analysis this weekend showed 950 university staff paid more than the prime minister, an 8% jump year on year. Examining the accounts of 87 different universities, three-quarters of their vice-chancellors were found to have carried on as though oblivious to the squeeze. Eleven of them had taken rises of over 10%. Watch Brunel and Plymouth, up 18% and 20%, close in on Oxford, up a mere 17%.
And all this, of course, at a moment of tuition fee increases, huge funding cutbacks and rippling student protest. Now, how do you fit rising enrichment and rising impoverishment together? Cue in all the usual stuff about world class universities needing world class administrators. Then ask where Professor Purcell at Plymouth, on �283,504 after her 20% boost, sits in the world class league (or why the early-retired head of Gloucestershire University, on �229,000 as she departed, was worth more than the head of Radio Four, let alone the saintly Vince, last sighted by me hunched in a very crowded standard class rail carriage bound for Manchester)?
There are three answers here. One is that years of headlong university expansion have loaded on ambitions (and proliferating) professorships to a ridiculous degree. The average vice-chancellor pay is now �254,000; the average academic staff pay across the sector is �47,000 ? in itself, hardly garret-bound penury. Another is that ? quite unlike the BBC, let alone private companies ? university chiefs expect to get extra cash for shedding other peoples' jobs (the Plymouth equation). And a third, still more dismaying answer is that supposed competition within a prestige-conscious sector means that introverted comparabilities rule.
You may just about argue that the vice-chancellor of Oxford's aspirations to world-class status make his �382,000 package acceptable, but you're straining to understand why the vice-chancellor of Birmingham University needs �392,000 to cement his world ranking. Maybe our supreme civil servant and chief administrator, cabinet secretary Gus O'Donnell (�284,000) can be called into explain?
What to do, if you're Cable or Clegg still suffering collateral fee damage? There's little benefit in more finger-pointing. Who wants to run the risk of campuses trashed in student demos? No one wants higher education bitterness to turn toxic. Nevertheless, it's selling another kind of pass if you just sit there in government and say nothing while universities cry woe over every aspect of funding ? except, in too many cases, their own still swelling remuneration deals.
Maybe Cable can't do much more than jawbone the deaf or oblivious. Maybe he has to take Lib Dem pain for an election pledge too far. Yet there is another dimension to this funding crunch that can't, in all fairness, be excluded. Universities are communities of learning, not merchant banks. When the music stops, and the financial world swings off its hinges, do our brightest and best-paid public employees have a duty to set an example that resounds? If they do, could they please start setting it ? and get the Telegraph off their backs?
Tobin tax Shola Ameobi Allied Irish Banks John Barnes Extradition David Beckham
No comments:
Post a Comment