V-c pay: Are vice-chancellors worth their salaries?

Last week, the UK’s universities minister threatened to fine institutions that pay their v-cs more than the prime minister without a strong justification. We present three perspectives on the debate 

Published on
September 14, 2017
Last updated
September 14, 2017
Andrew Oswald, Fred Inglis Jeremy Harris
Man blasts off with jetpack
Source: John Holcroft/Getty
Read more about
Read more about: 
Vice-chancellor pay
Higher education policy

POSTSCRIPT:

Print headline: Because they’re worth it?

Register to continue

Why register?

  • Registration is free and only takes a moment
  • Once registered, you can read 3 articles a month
  • Sign up for our newsletter
Please
or
to read this article.

Reader's comments (9)

#1 Submitted by sniffia on September 14, 2017 - 11:20am
I'm an administrator in a academic department and suffer far greater resource envy than pay envy, appalled though I am by the different percentage increase between classes of staff. Our workloads have become completely unmanageable in the context of greatly increased student numbers and we simply cannot deliver the quality of support necessary to provide high quality Higher Education. Whatever the 'brilliance' of leadership in senior management may be, our VCs would be pointless without able and highly committed staff at the service delivery end.
#2 Submitted by Lwizzle27 on September 14, 2017 - 11:40am
I completely agree. I work in student services and have been through a 'transformation' which should be streamlining the service to the students and academics when in actual fat there are not enough hours in the day to deliver the service we should (which is why many of us have to work at home too). NSS results are down because we can't deliver what we promise as we don't have the staff anymore, yet the VC is earning a top wage, with a house on campus and a driver...
#3 Submitted by JohnnyTallywhacker on September 14, 2017 - 11:51pm
A house on campus, how unfortunate, our VC has a multi-million pound mansion out of town in a verdant green wooded area! One thing that seems clear is the adoption of business methods, and senior management staff parachuted in from the commercial world, often failed commercial staff someone on 'council' knows and owes, is having a deleterious effect on the whole sector. Of course our President, the title adopted by our VC, doesn't mind having a CEO/COO to actually run the business along with a whole cadre of 'directors' and for them to take the blame when things go wrong, the pay bill for those people is huge, along with the VC's pay, so cutting other staff to make savings enough to secure a multi-million development pound bond, a condition of the lenders we hear, results in too many over paid chiefs and not enough indians to cope anymore. Whilst VC's pay is rightly in the spot-light, a few flood-lights on all the senior management teams pay and benefits might be a good idea as well. I'm sure the kudos of having so many directors sitting on or chairing national committee's, advisory boards etc is a good thing, but are there any real benefits, other than comparing notes and deciding how to avoid consulting the unions on matters that really are important to those staff that actually make the University tick?
#4 Submitted by phyllis... on September 14, 2017 - 3:22pm
Surely the problem is not just about wages (VC vs academic vs support staff) but more about the artificial creation of "market" competition between highly collaborative, intertwined institutions, which are NOT enterprises but are all charities. This charity status seems to be overlooked in the rush to commodity the student experience?
#5 Submitted by sniffia on September 15, 2017 - 11:36am
Couldn't agree more, Steve H. And quite right, Jim.
#6 Submitted by Charles Hedges on September 15, 2017 - 5:31pm
No Vice Chancellor who cuts teaching staff or closes departments is fit to serve. It is a disgrace that Universities UK lacks the integrity to say this. UK Vice Chancellors have played a large part in what Professor Antony Grafton of Princeton rightly called the disgrace of Britain's universities, and for that they receive knighthoods. I challenge those who defend them to name any Vice Chancellor who has challenged the mendacious farce of the RAE or the REF, or any Vice Chancellor who has attacked government destruction of UK Higher education. Around the world the situation in England is regarded as utterly shameful.
#7 Submitted by michaelw on September 16, 2017 - 9:06am
Professor Oswald observes that vice-chancellor pay is closely linked to market wages. However, he takes country-wide income inequality levels as given. While his points are valid on this basis, they hint at the bigger picture; market wages are not sacred, and inequality can and should be contained. It's not surprising that public commentators are singling out vice-chancellor pay. For them, public grievance about income inequality is a much spicier meatball. The focus on vice-chancellors may be politically expedient in the short term, but distracts from the real issue.
#8 Submitted by Rutherford_FHEA on September 16, 2017 - 9:55am
If the implicit rationale for the extraordinary salaries paid to university vice-Chancellors is that (in essence) ‘one must pay top dollar to get top people’, we are now being assured that, just because we pay exceptional salaries, we must therefore be getting exceptional people’. If these leaders are so exceptional, I would expect a better quality argument than the one put forward by Oxford’s vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson, who (according to a report in the Telegraph 'University vice-Chancellor handed 67 per cent salary increase as pay row intensifies', 14 September 2017) advanced the argument that, ‘compared with footballers and bankers, vice-Chancellors are not overpaid’.
#9 Submitted by AntonyB on September 26, 2017 - 2:54am
Professor Oswald's arguments ovelook the fact that, at least in terms of educational achievements, almost all academic staff at universities are already in the top 1%. We aren't picking VCs at random from the general population. He also uses the fact that more junior academic salaries can be a significant factor in whether people choose to do PhDs to justify his belief that universities are competing with banks to select their leaders. I find this unconvincing - perhaps in an economics department, such as his, there is exchange of staff between the sectors. In the rest of the university sector it is rare to recruit senior management from outside of academia.

You might also like

Sponsored

Featured jobs

See all jobs
ADVERTISEMENT