AIBU to think university executives should not be paid so much that the uni can't afford lecturers

[melisande]

AIBU to expect that the uni my DS might go to should not pay their execs so much that they can't afford to pay lecturers and profs and are making them redundant: News story on cuts at Exeter; same thing happening at Hertfordshire and Sussex. Exeter UCU says that if the 16 highest paid execs at that uni capped their salary at £120k, they'd save more money than all the planned cuts to archaeology and history.

It's so true I have it written in a contract.

SL is virtually automatic at our institution. I think the only contingency is you get your PG cert, which is generously workloaded for. You maybe have to get a 3 (out of 5) in your appraisal, which everyone gets by default. It's a running joke that the only way to get a 2 is punching a student.

Agree OP. Just another sector with the highly paid people in charge protecting themselves at all costs.
Id be interested to know the historical change in ratios of pay for different university roles. Is it similar to other industries where top pay has soared away from the bulk of the employees?
Universities have done well from the ridiculous push to get half of the young people through their doors and selling UK residency to overseas students. None of that has been good for the country. Hard times ahead.

This has to be a joke remark.

Without Humanities a society wouldn't understand itself so it would be massively weaker and make worse decisions.

Philosophy underpins law, medical ethics, ethics in warfare, political policy etc etc.

History underpins political policy making.

Literature, creative arts - the value of these to human beings is enormous.

I'd like to come and work wherever you are - at my place promotions have been frozen for 5 years and national pay rises of circa 2% withheld. It’s so dire that people in our department are returning to the NHS for a better work life balance and pay.

I'm sorry that is your experience, and that must be very demotivating. There is a huge amount of variability between how well universities have coped with shrinkage, and I believe our has coped better than average.

What subject area are you in @HelmholtzWatson?

Yes, this is disgusting in my book. Since when did universities need highly paid execs? The academics should be the highly paid ones.

Automatic progression is rare these days. I had a fight to get it and that was 10 years ago. New colleagues are doing everything I do with no chance of progression. I get 38 days leave. Many universities are trying to switch pension schemes to halve their contributions. There are many disputes rumbling on. Even the TPS and USS aren't what they were and benefits have reduced for new entrants.

@Minasama Academics don’t run universities and haven’t for decades. The VCs were academics but crossed over to management. Maybe think about what their role actually is because academic staff aren’t going to do it!

Yes we have no automatic progression. Not even coming off probation is automatic, we have full panels and many get pushed back onto probation for 3+ more years.

Our SL posts are also being filled by candidates with cvs that rival professors. Most coming from China. All our PhD students are Chinese too. I do think the UK has given up somewhat with HE.

The are running multi million pound institutions. You aren’t going to get people with the skills and experience to do that if you can salaries at £120k.

very naive to suggest it

They're not being paid £120k. As noted above In 2024-2025 the base salary for VCs rose by 5% to £350,500. And even if they accepted salaries of £120k they'd being paid a LOT more than the average academic salary of £56-81k. Maybe the £120k statement is more of a rhetorical point to get attention than a planned policy, but it does effectively highlight the absurdity of paying VCs so much more than all the people their job literally depends on that they can no longer afford to pay those people.

Also for the person earlier questioning the value of the Humanities, enjoy this quote from the Financial Times from a person hiring graduates in 2025 from among students with a lot of AI in their background: 'initially seemed wildly impressive, [but] when senior financiers later probed their ideas, they found them alarmingly shallow. Consequently this person's company....is now focusing less on graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics - and more [on] humanities studies instead'

That’s astonishing! I’ve worked in several universities and talk to people from many others - you get far far far more holidays than most, and most do not have virtually automatic promotion to SL.

I think we get 40 days holiday. But in 20 years of working in HE I have never taken more than Xmas day off and even then I've had students contacting me.

I think you are being very reasonable. As the username indicates I'm at Dundee and currently on the possible might be made redundant list along with probably half the rest of the employees. We need to save £20million a year. If everyone on £100k plus took a 10% pay cut and those of us on £50k plus took at least a 5% cut it would go a long way to helping balance the books. Perhaps we should cap the highest salaries at £200k.
If UCU and other key unions got behind this and proposed it as a national solution, it might help a lot of unis who are cutting shop floor staff while the high hegions earn their £300k plus salaries.

It's not a long term solution though. What talent can you attract with significantly lower salaries? US salaries are already hugely higher than UK academics' pay. We struggle to secure top US academics when they apply for our posts (and they'll be looking at £120k as profs in my discipline). Maintaining UK standing as a world leading nation providing excellent research institutions is tough if we can't get people who do world leading research to work in them.

The issue with the Exeter is definitely not lack of demand

there are similar issues with other universities, but I've talked about them on other threads, so I won't bore on again

Some universities may have lack of demand problems. Exeter is definitely not one of them.

Out of interest, I just checked for accuracy - it's actually 52 this year.

This, absolutely.

This has been brewing since they privatised universities, and also privatised the academic resources required, and forced the use of computers to wipe people’s noses when they sneeze, not to mention using computers for no other reason than to look posh.

Everything in Britain is now fucked thanks to greed, the greed of those at the top.

The only thing you are unreasonable about is the old trope of ‘uni tuition fees don’t cover costs’. Something has gone so so wrong with basic economics in this country, everywhere. All you really need in many forms of education, and even in STEM education for some of the time, is a bunch of people in a room prepared to listen to one person prepared to talk about what they are doing. If a whole bunch of people in a lecture theatre paying 9k a time can’t cover the costs of that 1 person talking then everything is fucked. What else are they paying for? Funny how education used to be so much more affordable isn’t it.

Fees pay so much more than the lecturers! Buliding maintenance, heating, lighting, the admin, subsidising research, finance department, HR department, library, all student services, student union, sport centre, food outlets, the labs, the specialist other teaching resources, student placements and the admin to support that and so it goes on.

Clearly have 0 idea of what that £9k pays for. It's not the lecturer's time. It's the subscriptions to all the academic journals, the building costs, the 'student experience', the careers service, the counselling and well-being services, the disability support, the estate management, the subscriptions to online systems to host and submit work.

Our department estamites a loss of £3.5k for every home student so our target is 80% international students. In a recent meeting our home student allocation was being described as essentially charitable towards the UK because we are located here. In ten years time we will probably be 95% international and people will wonder why UK a level students can't get places anywhere.

You think the 9k pays for one lecturer per course? And that’s all that’s needed? Apart from the fact the course will have multiple academic staff teaching across a range of modules you also need to pay for :

Course Admin ( making sure courses are running effectively, student records are correct, exa my s boards take place, degrees awarded etc)
Timetable team
Library ( staff, books, subscriptions)
IT (staff, equipment and licenses)
Estates and catering staff
Student finance team
careers and employability
Disability and well being
Academic support/study skills
international office
Marketing
Admissions
Registry
Research support

energy costs

It isn’t and never has been , just one person in a room talking. This things always needed to be paid for but the difference was the funding model.

This is a useful infographic.