The real scandal of rising salaries for university vice-chancellors

Salaries for university managers are rising, and both ministers and the media are outraged. Don't join them. This concocted hysteria gives hypocrisy a good name.

For months, Vince Cable and David Willetts have been targeting "excessive" pay at universities. Practically the first thing Cable did on joining the Cabinet was to accuse VCs of being "out of step with reality" on the issue.

Cable said in May, “I was very taken aback to discover that last year the pay of vice-chancellors rose by over 10 per cent in the middle of a financial crisis. ... We want to signal to them that there has got to be some restraint.” He and Willetts then wrote to all VCs.

This campaign has found willing footsoldiers in the media. On Friday, the Telegraph reported that pay for vice-chancellors rose by as much as 20 per cent last year. Peter Preston, the former editor of the Guardian, weighed in this morning with a column of snide sniping.

It's all bogus. Higher education is in turmoil. Universities face huge new uncertainties that strike at the heart of their financial viability. They are obliged to respond.

At the moment, much of the uncertainty is politicial. For example - and there are many others - the government has yet to say how it will ration students and the loans that pay for their tuition fees. Depending on how that is resolved, universities face huge swings in their income from undergraduates.

The government intends to push through new legislation later this year that will resolve these political questions. But that will not be the end of the uncertainties. For ministers intend to entrench uncertainty in the system. There is to be a market in undergraduates, universities are to be asked to compete and the failures will be allowed to go bankrupt. In any case, the scale of the revolution means the government's plans may easily fail.

Academia in Britain has been a kind of self-managing entity. It really does have an establishment, traditionally composed of academics. But the government's objective is to sweep all that away.

What this all adds up to is a huge increase in the risks faced by universities. These range from merely rapid decline to  catastrophic failure. Success in this new environment will depend on good lobbying and effective handling of the flood of new regulations and dynamics that are coming into play.

In a specially deluded phrase, Preston says "universities are communities of learning not merchant banks" as if they can remain immune to the tide of commercialism that ministers are dunking them in. But any university that thinks it can go on as before is being reckless. The new world that ministers are creating has to be tackled head on.

And all that can only mean one thing - more management and more managers. This is the one discipline in every university that is guaranteed to expand in the coming years.

There will be many ramifications to the switch from a self-managing to a managed system. But one of the most obvious is that the managers will become more highly paid. And the more like companies universities become as they respond to the market ministers are creating, the higher those salaries will go.

In this context, to rail against the average 8 per cent rise in the salaries of senior university managers that the Telegraph uncovered is ludicrous. The true outrage is for the government, egged on by the Telegraph, to create the conditions in which higher salaries for managers are inevitable and then to complain about them. That shows a total unwillingness to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions and, in the words of the Telegraph, an "arrogant disregard" for the intelligence of the public.

Comments

[David Colquhoun]

It will be very hard to take anything you say about universities seriously after this little outburst.

There are far too many people commenting on science from the outside, and mostly they hinder the efforts of those who are actually trying to do science

[William Cullerne Bown]

1. Hey - don't shoot the messenger!
2. Wouldn't it be better to trash my argument rather than me?

[Aberacademicals Anonymous]

The Aber VC (#5 on the telegraph list) is retiring shortly. It's a straightforward bump-it-up-so-it-goes-on-the-pension rise. Increased risk? My arse

[William Cullerne Bown]

@Aber I agree, that kind of thing's rubbish.

[James]

I'm afraid this is one of the few posts of yours I don't agree with...

If such a high wage is validated by the high-profile high-level lobbying work that Vice-Chancellors have been doing, then why do we have articles such as this (http://tinyurl.com/6jxzry9), and UUK being widely accused of rolling over in the face of Government pressure around the CSR and Browne?

"Universities face huge new uncertainties that strike at the heart of their financial viability. They are obliged to respond."
Sure they do - but is the sensible response really to grant a pay rise of up to 20% on an already fairly generous wage??

Not to mention the government's backing of Will Hutton's Public Sector pay ratio...

[William Cullerne Bown]

James, broadly speaking, vice-chancellors got what they wanted from the tuition fees debate. They asked for students to pay higher fees, and they are. As a result, BIS says university undergraduate income will *rise* by 10 per cent over the next four years.

Are pay rises for managers a sensible way to respond? There's a debate to be had on that. But all the things the government are doing make this much more likely.

[James]

I suppose you're right, given the current circumstances - certainly on your second point. I guess mine is more an ideological uncomfortability with our current direction of travel.
Given the cuts to budgets, and indeed to staffing - the cost of these raises could pay for three or four front-line staff in each case, perhaps five or six graduate interns?

It just doesn't feel right to me...

[Kieron Flanagan]

Hmmm. VC salaries have been increasing by multiples of inflation for some years now and I've always thought the comparison with private sector management misleading. Until now universities have basically been self-regulating (and reactive, rather than pro-active) entities. Top level management strategy has seldom mattered very much except to those who are involved. I suppose universities would want to keep hold of effective VCs and there is a kind of transfer market - but university councils are unlikely to be good judges of which VCs are effective.

But I also think that the effect of the coming 'marketisation' in England will be felt well before the switchover to the new model. All of a sudden all that strategic thinking that we could previously dismiss as irrelevant or deluded becomes more relevant... and potentially more dangerous. In positioning themselves for what they hope or fear will happen, VCs could do serious long-term damage to their institutions and thus to the research and teaching base as a whole.

[William Cullerne Bown]

@Kieron Very interesting points, especially the risks of trying to be too activist.

One quibble - is it true that top level strategy hasn't mattered? Isn't Manchester for example vigorously attempting to get itself back into the same bracket as UCL and Imperial? And even if academics can ignore it all in their day-to-day work and we discount today's Nobel prize celebration as a one-off, hasn't that had quite an impact on the university in recent years?

And BTW here's how they set the VC's salary at Sheffield http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/vc/remuneration.html

[Frank Norman]

I think there are parallels with the Health Service. The Griffiths report in the 1980s introduced the idea that specialist managers were needed in the NHS, and they should be drawn from the business world. 25 years later and everyone is complaining there are too many managers and they are paid at business rates.

[William Cullerne Bown]

@Frank Yes, I think this could indeed be the comparable moment. If it all goes horribly wrong.

[Kieron Flanagan]

@william - hmmm - I won't comment on the strengths or weaknesses of Manchester's post-merger strategies except to say Andre Geim was in post at the Victoria University of Manchester well before the merger and the "2015 Agenda" and the actual 2015 agenda strategy of buying-in existing Nobel prize winners (Sulston, Stiglitz, et al) on a part-time basis has arguably not worked out so well.

[Nick Stuart]

The interesting point is surely who are these brought in VCs? How many VCs have actually got a decent industry background, or in fact any other backgrond?
Academia is almost entirely a self referential world whether that is good or not I've leave to the academics to decide...
However the bottom line is that leadership really does matter so a good VC will take an institute further and a more limited one can destroy a Uni. eg Hertfordshire and London Metropolitian respectively. In current circumstances the possibilitiy of bringing in great leaders will cost real money.