By Professor
Doom
It’s so saddening to watch higher
education in the UK go the same route as it is here in the US. One of first big
changes was restructuring of higher education into a royal (and royally paid)
caste of “leaders” getting everything, while reducing scholars to peasants,
barely scraping by.
This process is finished in the US, but in
the UK it’s still ongoing:
It’s just so bizarre looking at the
salaries the folks at the top get. The low pay of academics is somewhat
justified because technically we only work 9 months of the year (yes, we do our
research over the summer, I’m only talking technically here). But admin don’t
have to do much when classes are not in
session, or at least don’t have to do anything important. They blow their
summers traveling to Leadership Retreats and working on irrelevant Vision for Excellence plans.
While
the high financial compensation of the upper echelons in academia might shock the general public, the
low pay received by its junior members is the real scandal.
Yes, the UK is starving out the academics,
but asking for more money “for the starving academics” will fail. We have huge
streams of money flowing into higher ed, the solution won’t be more money,
because the issue isn’t lack of money. The issue is the predatory caste at the
top, sucking it all up.
While Lord Adonis was quick to quip that increased
tuition fees have neatly mirrored increases in vice chancellor’s salaries, I
can assure his lordship that junior academics are certainly not beneficiaries
of such tuition fee increases, and instead are the recipients of some £50,000
of student debt.
The academic making these observations is
doing so anonymously, because he’s afraid. Is he afraid of lack of money? No,
he’s afraid that the leaders will punish him for complaining about the reality
of higher ed. Yet again: it’s the leadership, not the low pay, that’s harming
academia.
On
announcing her departure from academia, she was met with derision from senior
figures. She now loves her job, earns easily thrice my salary (before her
bonus), never works at weekends and is truly done with work at the end of the
day. I find myself asking: which of us is the real clever one?
The end result of such an exploitative
system is what I’ve seen before: the smart people are getting away from
academia. It starts are the top, of course, the Ph.D. recipients, but I assure
the gentle reader, as the plundering continues, it’ll affect all students,
until, much like in the US, having a college degree will mean you
have below average intelligence. Will it be one decade, or two? Hard to say, information
travels so quickly now, perhaps their kids will learn about this scam more
readily than in the US.
The vice chancellors are scoring 6
figures salaries, and the first number isn’t even a “1.” Not content at
astronomical pay, it keeps going up:
Dozens of
university vice-chancellors getting pay rises over 20%, figures show
It must be so nice to get consistent and
generous raises like this. There are complaints of course, so soon the UK will
learn to hide the transfer of wealth like we do here in the US, with huge,
massive perks like “loans” of a million dollars or more
which are then forgiven.
Of the 57 universities that had the same vice-chancellor in
place throughout the five-year period, eight saw their pay go up by more than a third in cash
terms, while three of those saw overall remuneration rise more than half in
cash terms.
…the
three universities where overall remuneration packages rose by more than half
in cash terms were Huddersfield, where vice-chancellor Bob Cryan saw a 67%
increase over five years to £364,564 in 2015/16; Bournemouth, where John Vinney
saw a 53% rise to £305,000, and Roehampton where Paul O’Prey saw a 52% rise to
£342,000…
--emphasis added, because the article
glosses over the relevance of this detail.
Granted, 50% pay raises are
pretty common in the US as well (with, again, more like 100%
once sweet perks are factored in). The article doesn’t notice it, but one of
the many problems with our “leaders” in higher ed is how all they do is loot,
and then move up in the system to another school. The study the article uses
looked at 114 schools over a 5 year period…but only half of them could actually
hang on to the same vice chancellor for that amount of time.
Keep in mind,
these guys have spent 20 years or more in higher ed. Their resumes consistently
show them spending 2 years at one place, 3 years at another, 2 more years at
another, perhaps 6 months at one place, and so on. In the “real world” a resume
like that would be a huge flag that
the employee was unreliable and a questionable candidate for even a minimum
wage job. How do guys with such tainted resumes still manage quarter of a million
(or more) dollar jobs so easily? I don’t know, and the article can’t answer it
either. Let’s get back to the money for these useless jobs.
…on
average vice-chancellor pay has gone up by 15% (7% in real terms) in five
years; rank-and-file academic staff in contrast have lost out over the same
period and have seen their salaries drop in real terms by 2.8%, and in the case
of professors by 3.1%...
Like every other
county on the planet with a fiat money system, the UK is struggling hard with
massive debts. But the guys at the top just keep raking it in. How do they
justify this level of plundering?
Let’s look at the
guy with a 67% pay raise:
The
university said there had been a “sustained high-level performance” and Cryan’s
salary had increased to a level “commensurate with the significant
transformation of the university and the associated peer recognition in terms
of the many accolades received”.
“Sustained high
level performance”? Neat. Can the gentle reader tell me his school? Tell me of
his academic accomplishments? Tell me anything at all about this guy? You can
win national awards for scholarly work and get almost nothing for it. You can
do almost nothing as an administrator and get salary enough to live like a king.
“Peer
recognition”? This stuff always makes me grit my teeth, because I’ve had a long
close look at how it works: a bunch of Poo Bahs get together, and they form a
bunch of organizations and committees. These committees then create awards,
which they then award to each other. Then they use those awards to justify
astronomical pay raises. It’s little different than when they send themselves
on leadership retreats to luxury villas across the world, and then use that
“leadership training” to justify even more pay.
Then comes another
way they justify their pay:
The
vice-chancellor of Oxford University, Louise Richardson, last week defended her £350,000 salary
saying universities now operated in a “global marketplace” and were competing
with high remuneration packages offered at institutions overseas. According to
THE, the average pay for an equivalent university leader in the US was £398,00,
and in Australia £546,000.
---incidentally,
this shows how the UK is catching up to the corrupted US system: they’re only
about 10% behind us. I’ve mentioned the Australian system before.
No less foul than
using self-generated awards and self-awarded vacations to justify pay raises,
they also use the fact that “other guys are getting paid more” to give
themselves more pay. How demented to you have to be to point at another
system’s corruption to justify the corruption of your own system? They
literally bootstrap each other up and up and up, crowing all the while about
how important they are to education…even as no student, no faculty, can
identify a single positive thing they’ve done for education.
And this
ultimately is my problem: these guys are only in it for the money, and every
decision they make causes only more harm to our kids trapped in the system. If
we could just move them off campus and increase their pay to infinity, maybe
then we go back to focusing on education and research?
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