University vice-chancellors: too much gravy?
When I left Oxford 17 years ago, the university’s vicechancellor was paid £100,000 a year in today’s money, said Ben Chu in The Independent. Today, its vice-chancellor – Louise Richardson – earns £350,000. That’s a 250% real terms increase. And she’s not even the UK’S highest paid university boss: the head of the University of Bath earns £451,000 a year. Over the same period, salaries paid to junior academics have gone up in line with average pay – in the region of 10%. “Why the discrepancy?” Richardson uses an argument that has become all too familiar in relation to soaring executive pay: there is, she says, a “global marketplace” for people capable of running large institutions. If Oxford didn’t pay her so well, she’d sell her talents elsewhere. Really? It’s far more likely this salary inflation at the top reflects a change in attitudes among the people who sit on remuneration committees. Once, they had a sense of restraint; now, it seems, anything goes.
Richardson is right that top US colleges pay far more, said Iain Martin in The Times. But that doesn’t mean Harvard would come over here to poach, say, the man who runs the University of Bolton (£220,000pa). Most VCS (who tend to be from academic, not business, backgrounds) would struggle to find better-paid jobs abroad, much less in the private sector. As for Richardson’s observation that footballers earn far more, that’s a classic example of Lynton Crosby’s “dead cat” strategy, said Sonia Sodha in The Guardian – a distraction to divert attention from the real issue: is she value for money? Universities like to be opaque about their finances, but since it’s taxpayers who fund research and underpin student loans, we’ve a right to know where the money’s going. Universities Minister Jo Johnson is now rightly demanding that universities reveal how many of their staff are paid over £100,000 – and that they justify, in writing, any salaries above £150,000.
Even if vice-chancellors are paid a bit less, said Joanna Williams in The Daily Telegraph, it won’t lead to lower tuition fees or higher pay for academics. But then this row has little to do with struggling students, and a lot to do with both Tories and Labour’s Blairites feeling they must “do something” to lure the youth vote away from Jeremy Corbyn. And they’re right, said Martin. Under the current system of high fees and high interest rates, graduates may end up paying £100,000 for a course that cost a fraction of that. Voters under 40 feel they are the victim of a rigged system. Their anger is perfectly legitimate. It needs to be addressed.