University bosses are the robber barons of our age

They draw fat cat salaries but leave students short-changed. That’s why this academic says...

AWHILE back I wrote about the wretched state of Britain’s universities and received a flood of letters. Many were from Mail readers whose children or grandchildren are at university and having a miserable time. They are crammed into overcrowded lecture halls, rarely encounter their lecturers or tutors — and feel they are being fleeced by institutions that see them merely as income streams. In short, they feel betrayed. Yet the academics’ side of the story is no happier, as I also heard. Salaries have been frozen, the workload is greater than ever and pressure from their managers unrelenting. So they, too, feel betrayed and abused.

The truth is that our higher education system, supposedly one of our cultural crown jewels, is in crisis.

And if you doubt it, just look at this week’s headlines.

On Monday, the Universities Minister Chris Skidmore told MPs he expects some institutions to go bust, with heavily indebted universities such as Cardiff, Bangor and Kent already teetering towards financial disaster. Around 8,000 jobs have been cut nationwide in the past year.

Yet the next day, the Government’s Office for Students revealed that six universities paid their vice chancellors more than £500,000 last year, while nearly half of vice chancellors took home more than £300,000. How can this be?

If universities across the board are struggling to stay afloat, how can their leaders possibly justify pay rises worth as much as 22 per cent?

The answer lies in a system that has become utterly dysfunctional, rewarding neither the youngsters desperate to learn nor the academics dedicated to teaching and scholarship.

But it also lies in a wider culture of unaccountability, empire-building and pure greed.

Here’s a case in point. A couple of years ago, I was invited to give a talk at De Montfort University, formerly Leicester Polytechnic.

When my taxi dropped me at the city-centre campus, I was greeted by a temple to steel and glass modernity, the result of a £136 million spending spree to attract new students.

The man behind it was De Montfort’s vice chancellor, Dominic Shellard. I already knew of him as a historian of post-war British theatre. But not even the most vain thespian could match his thirst for publicity. Google his name and you’ll find his face plastered over university press releases.

Catastrophe

Three years ago, Shellard’s officials were caught lobbying for him to get a gong in the Queen’s birthday honours. No such honour materialised, but there was some consolation.

In 2016/17 he took home a whopping £286,000 (more than five times what senior lecturers earn). On top of that, he reportedly claimed £37,790 in expenses. Not bad for a historian of post-war theatre.

Last year there was even better news for the professor. Even though higher education was coming under immense financial pressure, with job cuts and wage freezes, his pay went up by a staggering 22 per cent to more than £350,000, the biggest rise of any vice chancellor in Britain. That meant he was earning ten times the average salary of his own staff.

And then the wheels fell off. On Monday, after days of speculation, Shellard abruptly resigned with no explanation.

By an amazing coincidence, the chairman of De Montfort’s governors resigned last week. Three more governors quit yesterday, and the fallout will drag on for months to come.

It is, sadly, a familiar story. Of 133 higher education institutions, only four pay their bosses £150,000 or less. Yet at the same time, the vice chancellors’ addiction to showy empire-building has left some of their institutions on the brink of catastrophe.

Cardiff, which posted a £21 million deficit in the last financial year, plans to cut 350 jobs over the next five years.

Reading University has an operating deficit of £40 million over the past two years, and has just reported itself to the regulator over concerns that it ‘improperly benefited’ — to the tune of £121 million — from the sale of land belonging to the National Institute for Research in Dairying trust.

On top of that, Reading already owes £180 million to creditors, including Barclays and HSBC, and recently wrote off almost £28 million after a disastrous partnership in Malaysia. Incidentally, the man who ran Reading until recently, Sir David Bell, earned a whopping £329,000.

His reward for their financial calamities was a transfer to Sunderland, where he takes home a mere £260,000.

And wait until you hear about the Harvard of the North-West, the University of Bolton, formerly Bolton Institute of Higher Education. Bolton’s motto reads: ‘Teaching Intensive, Research Informed.’

I don’t know what that means. I do know, however, that it is ranked 126th out of 131 British institutions.

So if it were a football club, it wouldn’t even be at the bottom of the old Fourth Division. It would be in the Vanarama National League North, two tiers further down. I chose the football analogy for a reason. To give you some idea of Bolton’s commitment to scholarship, it recently spent an undisclosed amount on the naming rights for Bolton Wanderers’ ground, now the University of Bolton Stadium.

The man behind this wheeze is the vice chancellor, George Holmes. He earned £290,000 last year, drives a Bentley and owns a yacht on Windermere.

Challenged about his salary, he told the Financial Times that he hopes to inspire students to ‘get a good job and then they can have a Bentley’. How many Bolton alumni, I wonder, will be driving a Bentley in 20 years’ time?

The Government has been pathetically weak in allowing these fat cats to wallow in their bloated salaries — but urgent action is now needed. Our universities are stumbling towards disaster.

Failure

The tuition fee model is simply not working. Not because it discourages poor students, a Left-wing canard that turned out to be completely untrue. But because it has starved our universities of cash which means they have to pull in more students, leading to crowded classes, overworked lecturers and poor standards.

The logic of the system, with universities free to compete for students as never before, means some will lose out. That makes some sort of sense, since there are far too many as it is. But the Government has given absolutely no thought to the economic or human consequences of failure.

What would happen to the staff and students if, say, Cardiff went bust? What about the local businesses? What about the city? Or is the Government going to bail universities out whenever they get into trouble, as Labour demands?

Are we really saying that none of them can ever fail?

What is more, our universities are so dependent on foreign students that they are constantly clamouring for looser immigration rules to let them in. And they are handing out Firsts like sweets.

Waste

At Surrey University 41 per cent of students got Firsts last year. No wonder academics complain of unrelenting pressure to lower standards — which means a breakneck race to the bottom.

The sector needs reform. Some universities should merge; some should go private; some will simply have to go. Students should apply after A-levels when they have results — like every sensible higher education system worldwide.

And they should pay more towards their own education, either through fees or graduate taxes. This would be a massive undertaking, and seems very unlikely given the paralysed state of Government. But it has to happen.

For as it is, everybody loses. The students are wasting three years and a lot of money. The academics are unable to produce world-class research.

The only winners are the vice chancellors, with their expense accounts, their Bentleys and their six-figure salaries.

They are the robber barons of our age, and it is time they were stopped.