Post Comment: Universities out of touch with reality
Jul 2 2010 Post Comment
When satirists of the calibre of Evelyn Waugh and Tom Sharpe felt the need to include university vice chancellors in their novels, they invented globetrotting freeloaders bloated by huge expense accounts and luxury lifestyles all paid for by the poor old taxpayer.
But even Britain’s greatest humorists might have been accused of over-egging the pudding had they captured the cossetted world enjoyed by the West Midlands university elite during the worst economic downturn in decades. Think Porterhouse Blue, but add a few noughts on the end.
Never mind the public spending squeeze, don’t worry about cuts in further education funding, picture the scene as our vice chancellors go about their business in a style that would leave even the fattest of city fat cats or the most thick-skinned of expense-claiming MPs a trifle envious asking themselves where they had gone wrong.
The University of Birmingham tops the high-rollers league, paying its vice chancellor £310,000 which quite possibly makes him the best rewarded public servant in the country, certainly outstripping mere mortals like the Prime Minister, the Cabinet Secretary and Chief of the Defence Staff.
The free house with gardener, cleaner and chauffeur, well-used university credit card and £40,000 of pension contributions is described by a university official, one imagines without irony, as “a condition of his contract and for the better performance of his duties”. Ah, yes, wouldn’t we all work that little bit harder knowing that we had someone to cut the grass and weed the flower border?
At Aston University, Professor Julia King looks almost underpaid on £260,000, although she did manage to spend £12,000 of public money on expensive artwork, not to mention entertaining at the Ritz.
Over at the University of Warwick the inappropriately named Vice Chancellor Nigel Thrift benefits from farmhouse accommodation owned by the university and has a penchant for foreign travel, claiming £23,000 in two years for business trips to America, Hong Kong, India and China.
No doubt the vice chancellors will have convinced themselves that the value of the work they carry out, the expertise they bring, their wonderful business acumen, etc, etc, justifies gargantuan salaries and free perks. But as intelligent people they must surely know in their hearts that such largesse is most unwelcome in austerity Britain and is particularly inappropriate at a time when university funding is being severely cut back, thousands of academic jobs are disappearing and students are facing the likelihood of even higher fees in the near future.
Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, has been quick to accuse vice chancellors of being “out of touch with reality on pay levels” and accompanied his statement with a thinly-disguised threat to take action if universities fail to put their own houses in order.
Does Dr Cable really believe that his words by themselves will have any impact? If he does, he may be suffering from some kind of delusion for the past history of universities has shown that government advice rarely works. Only direct intervention is likely to get results on this occasion, Dr Cable.
