Academic… surely?

Following the discussion, actually it’s more like an argument, about high levels of pay for chancellors and vice-chancellors of UK universities it’s kind of breathtaking the excuses being put out about why some are ‘worth it’. As Sonia Sodha notes in the Guardian:

According to Louise Richardson, vice-chancellor of Oxford University, one of the reasons we shouldn’t be worried about high levels of top university pay is that footballers and bankers earn more. It sounds like she’s been brushing up on Lynton Crosby’s “dead cat” election campaign strategy: distract voters from the real problem by chucking in something more sensational. Let’s just say comparing yourself to the investment bankers who crashed our economy suggests her argument needs a little more work.

And…

The global marketplace was her other defence for pay packages that have broken the £400,000 barrier in a sector where annual increases of over 10% are far from unheard of. It’s the same tired old argument we hear in relation to corporate pay: we have to pay the millions we do, otherwise Britain will lose its top talent. But executive pay is about as far from a competitive marketplace as you can get. Instead, company boards reward their chief executives so they can boast they pay above the FTSE 100 average. The result: a fat-cat arms race, in which salary growth bears little resemblance to long-term company growth.

What is so dispiriting is the sense that just as with private enterprise there is now a clear dynamic embedded in the society whereby there is an expectation that such salaries are natural, indeed unquestionable. Certainly the whiff of any such questions being lese-majeste comes across from some very clearly.

And as Sodha notes, this isn’t an incidental issue…

Those who claim vice-chancellor pay is irrelevant because it’s a fraction of university spending are missing the point: these salaries have become a symbol of justified concerns about value for money. What is the extra cash being spent on?
The truth is, universities are so opaque about their finances – even arguing that they should be exempt from freedom of information legislation – that it’s hard to know. Probably not on attracting and training top teachers: more than half the lecturers at the leading Russell Group institutions are on insecure contracts. More probably, it goes on risky capital investment projects, with £2bn of construction spending planned in the next three years.

And there’s worse than that…

Universities should be much more transparent about how they spend student and taxpayer money. This will raise tricky questions: are working-class students on cheaper-to-provide courses such as English cross-subsidising more affluent students taking more expensive subjects, such as engineering? Should students be cross-subsidising research? These are important issues, and we should be exploring them.

Where students are in all this is difficult to discern. Or education. Or…