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.

Clearly didn’t read. I said academic resources, and in fact their privatization is a part of the increase in costs. Crazy country. Research used to be paid for largely by government grants, so public money, then the universities were forced to buy back the results of that research and all forms of communicating them again. It’s all about making money for the rich. Thats all university is for nowadays. The degrees themselves are deliberately outsourced training, much of which used to be done in house much more cheaply. All to create more and more opportunities for private pockets to generate more and more profit for the few at the general public’s expense.

Well we can’t afford it any more, the country is nearly bankrupt and very few have the hundreds of thousands needed to pay for increased university fees. I realise that the central government and authoritarian private companies think they’ve destroyed all possibility of organisation among people but what they’ve really destroyed is the organisation of the nation. A future age of civilization will have to bring back guilds and other mechanisms to pass on knowledge because privatised universities have failed.

I wouldn’t knock VC pay as they’re running multi million £ businesses with 1000s of staff… some of the Uni executives are certainly overpaid.

I’ve worked in HE for over 20 years and it is a shitshow.

They are guilty of complacency by certainly. They do live in ivory towers certainly. But they have also contributed an awful lot towards economic investment in the regions.

The fact is the UG courses do not cover their costs. They banked on international PG students (and lost).

the obsession with STEM is mad. The obsession with RG is stupid.

They grew too fast and now they have to cut. I just hope they survive overall.

Poor kids.

What are you on about? The majority of provision isn’t private all - unis are charities. Research funding still largely comes from the Gov. via the Research Councils (obvs unis can bid for grants from other sources, charities, philanthropy etc), research has never paid full costs though.

Are you making some clever nuanced point or just ignorant about how HE (teaching and research) is funded. If the former can you explain.

@shortsaint The need for research led universities of high calibre is not mad. They have attracted external students and investment and most countries have a premier league of unis. USA and France certainly do. We should not be different.

The huge mistake was over expansion and offering too many low level courses at low level universities. There was no objective need for this. At the same time, we destroyed the HE sector below degree level by chronic under investment. The unis are there to educate students, not bring money into university towns. That’s a by product. Some areas like Lincolnshire employ few Lincoln grads so the area is boasted by high salaries at the universities. Great for some but the overall population doesn’t benefit much.

Unfortunately universities make a loss on both teaching home undergraduate students and on most of their research. Tuition fees don’t cover the cost of delivering the course, and government-funded research grants only cover 80% of the full economic costs. Until recently, the shortfall was made up by charging top dollar to international students; but as other posters have said, government policy and the strengthening of universities in students’ home countries have put paid to that. The system is broken, and all universities apart from a handful with very deep pockets are having to cut costs to get back on a sustainable footing.

You have my sympathies working at Dundee - a prime example of the utter failure of highly paid senior management, resulting in a government bailout. For those unfamiliar with this, google the Gillies report. Shocking.

Thank you @TurbulentPriest It's been a wild ride for sure. I've been a charity trustee myself. I'm sure had I mismanaged charity / public funds like that, I would have been in court by now over it.

The thing is, these are hugely popular departments and it isn’t a case of unpopularity. These fees paid for these humanities subject fund the science degrees which cost far more to run and yet cannot be elevated in cost in terms of student fees. The Humanities at Exeter are profitable, not only in terms of the popularity of the degrees but also the fact that the ranking and research money coming into the university also stem - significantly - from here. The redundancies are already recognised as being awfully ill judged and yet, it appears it’s still full steam ahead.

nor is the University of Exeter in any financial trouble

I've heard very much to the contrary since years ago.
People who manage large complicated budgets should be well paid, imho.

Governments capped tuition fees too low for years. That was a big mistake.

I didn’t express myself well. Of course STEM is important but so are humanities and social sciences, and, as other people have said, these are cheaper to teach. It needs to be balanced. A University is there to provide an education not just give a qualification.

And my personal beef is why does nursing and so on need a degree. These people go on to an underpaid public sector job and are penalised for it. Same with PGCEs, or even Medicine (though I am interested in the previous post about doctors salaries skewing the salary rates of science grads)

@shortsaint stem subjects are an education. They are not all vocational. Some subjects like law lead to jobs in law for some and are a pre qualification. The whole point of a degree is knowledge and skills. Many employers won’t care too much about the knowledge the student has on the novels of Emily Brontë, but will care about transferable skills and ability to be a good employee.

I agree re Nursing (and other AHPs). I’d have a scheme of loan forgiveness in return for x years working in the NHS.

PGCE is already free, and comes with a bursary in the shortage subjects which is reasonable.

If teaching and nursing weren’t degrees though, it would be mainly boys that went to uni. I don’t think many of us would like that! Plus it puts those professions on a more respected footing.

Patient outcomes have improved since nursing became a degree entry route.

Name changed for this. I work at Northumbria Uni in professional services and it’s an absolute shit show.

People who want to become old fashioned style nurses can still follow a career path being "nursing assistants" and HCAs, etc. But if someone could get into a prescribing and treatment-decision role with lots of record keeping, digital record keeping, constant training & supervising others, they need Uni degrees. Modern health care is complicated and needs academic skills, this isn't the 1950s.

Annoys me that people devalue modern nursing jobs by implying they don't take a lot of brains, excellent numeracy, holistic thinking & literacy training.

That's the starting salary. Lecturers have a further 9/10 grades to increment through up to about £59k. Then another five if they are promoted to Reader/Associate Professor, which they ought to be if they are high performing.

There is still significant freedom as an academic and a high performing researcher should have 1 to 1.5 days to focus on research.

All organisations need to be run efficiently.

In the public sector (and the HE sector) very few are.

It is a recurrent theme through all publically funded organisations that they are thickly resourced in well paid management roles (NHS I am looking at you too!) but under resourced on the front line.

This inherent problem is exacerbated when cuts are required as the most common response is to cut the front line because managers will never cut themselves.

I estimate that the public sector is 50pc over resourced in management compared to the private sector. There are huge efficiency gains to be made here.

In contrast public services are unnecessarily stretched on the front line. I guess in HE then lecturers are the equivalent of the front line.

Nope. Top of lecturer scale is 47k. Top of senior lecturer scale is 56.5k but it’s not always possible anymore to get moved up to SL. Like I said earlier I know module leads and even a programme lead who are lecturer and keep getting the SL carrot dangled but it doesn’t happen. They take on more and more school wide responsibilities in a desperate attempt.

Where I work there is no promotion to Associate Prof. there are a few positions in the school but you have to wait for a vacancy and apply. They’ve gone from about 9 associate profs to 4 in the last round of cuts. Their work obviously still needs doing, they’ve just asked for expressions of interest for one workload as a two person job share but made it clear it would be at your normal wage of lecturer/senior lecturer…..oh and there would be no back fill for the other half of your job. So basically you’d have to do your normal job in three days a week not 5 and half of someone else’s job in two days and get no more money for that 😆😆😆

and I have no time to focus on research. I doubt I do 1.5 days a year never mind a week. Sadly the course admin and teaching takes up 5 days a week due to slashing the number of lecturers on the programme.

It is true we have a lot of freedom and flexibility, which is great.

However it would be rare for me to get a whole day to focus on research during term time. There’s simply too much else going on. Same during assessment periods, there’s such a time crunch and tight turnarounds. That seems to be a common trend among my colleagues, including those I’d consider very high performing, and it’s across universities, so it indicates something about workloads and the increased demands on academics’ time from things that are not research. Sure, we have more time in the summer for example, but in my experience there’s significant parts of the year where most academics are not getting much substantial research done due to other demands. And even the summer research period is gradually shrinking due to things like admissions work, resits, supervising Master’s dissertations, summer schools, and ongoing pastoral care issues.

Are you happy to share which institution this is? I need to move there!

At mine it is very difficult to get promoted up to Senior Lecturer, never mind higher than that.

We get 42 days holiday in total. But a lot of people cannot take that amount because there is too much work to do.

@UEAStaff None of those nursing attributes shout degree to me! They are training matters for the right recruits. How on earth did nurses manage in the 80? The nurses are not better - they are the same people who didn’t do degrees when 20% went to uni. Now it’s 37% and nurses are part of the 17%. They aren’t better or brighter! They are the same group of people.

Patient outcomes improve due to new drugs and new methods and research. Nursing has just moved away from patient care, as the list of duties clearly demonstrates! Most of us don’t think care is great! It’s a conveyor belt of mediocrity. Mainly because patients are data and the NHS is poorly run.

This is a really great article. It's long, because it recognises the many complexities of the system and how it's changed over time.
The idea that you can just pay VCs less and it'll all be fixed is bizarre.

Having worked in a university finance department I wholeheartedly disagree with you OP. The VC are the heads of incredibly complex organisations with lots of different demands on funding and tenuous funding. It’s an unbelievablely hard job. They earn every penny. Lecturers an are poorly paid for their qualifications and thevSTEM lecturers could walk into highly paid roles elsewhere. But if you’re a lecturer in medieval poetry be glad of the job. Theres no other way for you to be paid to indulge in a hobby.

I found the UCU whiners really tiresome. Always bitching about the grace and favour house the VC lived in ‘we’re paying for his heating etc’ totally overlooking the fact that the property is used for hosting functions and meeting held by the VC to promote the Uni. It’s like expecting the PM to pay the council tax on Downing Street. And then there’s all of the misogynistic trans shite they spout.

I feel for good lecturers losing their job, but members of the UCU brought it on themselves, asking for endless pay rises when income of the uni wasn’t rising, kicking back when the uni was looking to trim the totally unaffordable pension liability. Money doesn’t grow on trees. If you won’t let them cut pay or pensions is has to be jobs you ignorant fools.

I left the uni because the pay was so bad for a professional services role - about half the market rate - I couldn’t afford to act as a charity any longer.

I work in a university library, we are officially on a hiring freeze and "informal restructure" which basically means changing terms so that people are forced out. There was a push for ages to have libraries open 24/7 so we have staff employed out of 9-5 core hours, now they want to unstaff at these times so those colleagues have to take core hours reshuffling or leave. We are completely at the whims of senior leadership who'll have a different plan in 2 years time, I guarantee.

Student facing staff are also massively undervalued here, they're basically pretty openly planning to replace library desks with faq kiosks in the near future. If you'd like your 18 year old studying in a 1000 seat building with 1 security guard on the front desk to cover 3 floors, no practical support for academic issues or emotional support when they're panicking about a deadline, then send them to a red brick UK uni because that's what libraries look like now.