The author of this article is an academic at an ‘ancient’ university in Scotland. It is a sad reflection on the state of free speech in UK universities that he/she has asked us to remain anonymous because of fears of reprisals
The unprecedented 14-day strike by university lecturers, important and worrying as it is, has exposed a much deeper and systemic fault at the very heart of the UK higher education sector – the total lack of accountability of the new class of ‘managers’, vice-chancellors and their senior teams.
The issue of rapacious vice-chancellors awarding themselves astronomical salaries and surreal benefits (live-in butler, anyone?) has attracted much attention, but it is a mere symptom of a far graver failing of accountability.
I ask my unbiased reader to consider the following comparison: one NHS trust has a budget of £470m and cares for 23,795 intensive-care patients a year, employing 2,430 highly-trained medics, supported by 1,049 administrators. The NHS trust CEO, who is in charge of the whole trust and appoints directly all his deputies, earns an annual salary of £280,000. Another NHS trust has a budget of £224m and cares for 10,745 intensive-care patients, employing 1,074 highly-trained medics. I have two questions for you: can you guess (i) the annual salary of the CEO of the latter trust; and (ii) how many administrators does it employ?
To help with the simple arithmetic, considering that the latter trust’s budget, patients treated, and medics numbers, are respectively 47%, 45%, and 46% of the larger NHS trust, one would expect the CEO of the latter trust to earn approximately £140,000 pa. As far as the employment of administrators is concerned, if the smaller trust applies the same medics/administrators ratio as its bigger counterpart, it would employ 463 administrators. A large discrepancy between these two NHS trusts would be a matter of concern and would prompt internal and external scrutiny.
If it transpired that the CEO of the smaller trust was paid nearly as much as the CEO in charge of the larger trust (£270,000 pa), not just eyebrows would be raised – questions in parliament, too. Further, if a scrupulous journalist discovered that the smaller trust, far from employing 463 admin staff, in fact had 1,498 administrators on its payroll, a prima facie case of gross mis-management could reasonably be expected to be made.
The two NHS trusts described above are the figment of my imagination, unlike all the figures, that describe accurately the basic statistics of the universities of Newcastle (the ‘larger’ trust) and St Andrews (the smaller one). For patients read students, for medics read academic staff, and for CEO read vice-chancellor.
Are academic staff in Newcastle extremely poorly supported in terms of administrative staff or is St Andrews grotesquely over-staffed in its administration? The real scandal is that under the current governance structure of most UK universities there exists no mechanism for answering these legitimate questions. Whereas research and teaching are subjected to in-depth cross-institution assessments (the research excellence framework and the teaching excellence framework being the latest examples), no such assessment is undertaken on the management/ administration side.
I am not calling for direct intervention from Westminster/Holyrood. The very thought of a Jo Johnson (he who thought that Toby Young would be the perfect candidate for a top job in the office for students) meddling in higher education governance policy makes me shiver. But a zero-cost, bottom-up solution is readily available: in each university a one-academic, one-vote, election should be held to appoint members of a newly created Administration Supervisory Committee (ASC).
Membership of ASC should be incompatible with previous or future administrative senior appointments; its remit would include approving all mid- and top-ranking administrative appointments (and their job description), scrutinising expenses (presumably outlawing live-in butlers and chauffeur-driven cars), and setting criteria for remuneration (the committee of university chairs is expected to announce a ‘fair remuneration code’ for vice-chancellors with a ceiling of 6.4 times the average academic salary). All reports and analyses produced by ASC should be made public.
The establishment of ASCs would go a long way towards reversing the disastrous trend in UK universities that has seen a steady and substantial transfer of power and control from academics to the new class of senior administrators. My educated guess is that if ASCs had been in place, the current dispute about pensions would not have arisen in the first place, as vice-chancellors would have put the welfare of their staff and students above irrational accounting changes that would allow them an even freer hand in allocating resources to their own pay and grandiose real-estate projects.
The last few days have seen a number of hitherto hawkish vice-chancellors abruptly switching from a categorical refusal to even negotiate with the union to discovering that their staff do not support the reckless dismantling of their pension scheme and thus finally agreeing to resume talks. The thought that they might have asked for their staff’s opinion before the strike was even balloted for apparently had not crossed their minds.
Many had hoped that the surprisingly wide support for the lecturers’ strike, the tabloid press interest in extravagant expenses by VCs, the sight of exorbitantly-paid VCs resigning in disgrace, the timorous defence of free speech within the walls of academia by over-paid administrators, could have provided the impetus for some structural reform, restoring some semblance of internal democracy within British universities. Instead, the silence from both Westminster and Holyrood has been deafening, and the platitudes of support from the Labour party predictable and vacuous.
In the final analysis, it is us ‘pure’ academics who must bear the responsibility of having created the uncontrolled monster of this new class of ‘managerial academics’ with neither the skill and expertise to manage, nor the will to uphold the true values of academia.
By Anonymous | 14 March 2018