University that’s charging £280k vice-chancellor less rent than its students
A UNIVERSITY vice-chan- cellor has caused outrage after it emerged that she will be charged less than the average student rent for her plush flat.
The University of Chester is spending more than £25,000 on ‘reconfiguring’ two offices so that Professor Eunice Simmons has somewhere to stay on campus.
Prof Simmons, who is paid £280,000 a year, will be charged rent of around £121 a week for the flat in the historic Senate House. Hard-up students pay an average £149 a week for university flats.
It comes as the former teacher training college is in the process of making up to 25 staff redundant, with 86 people at risk during a consultation period.
In an email to academics, Prof Simmons, 60, a mother- of-two, wrote that the institution was ‘reconfiguring two offices to create a small flat which I will rent from the university in due course’.
It comprises a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. The cost of conversion is put at £21,588 plus VAT – around £25,900. It is a two-hour drive from the £500,000 home which the ecologist and her former BBC producer husband Alastair are understood to share near Penrith in Cumbria.
A spokesman for the Chester branch of lecturers’ union the University and College Union said: ‘ Senior management have signed off on over £21,000 of refurbishments while throwing 86 staff into a state of anxiety about their future employment. Our members are disgusted and outraged at this clear injustice. The low rent the VC will be paying adds insult to injury.’
The TaxPayers’ Alliance accused the university of ‘taking taxpayers for a ride’.
The university insisted that the vice-chancellor’s rent was not comparable to that paid by students because many also have meals supplied as part of their package. In addition, her accommodation is unfurnished and will share a kitchen with nearby meeting rooms. She will furnish it at her own expense.
The flat would help fulfil Prof Simmons’s desire to hold evening events aimed at boosting the career prospects of neglected groups ‘ such as white working-class boys and part-time learners’, it added.