Accountability and UK university governance

Your return to the VC salaries issue (Revealed: how vice-chancellor pay eclipses public sector, 12 March) is timely. The University of Bath’s remuneration committee meets on Wednesday, 14 March, at a time when its staff are on strike over the downgrading of their pensions, with the students demanding compensation for lost teaching time.

So far the university has been upbraided by HEFCE, the university’s court, a large number of professors, its academic assembly and the students, but nothing has yet changed. The university’s chair of council, Tom Sheppard, and other senior lay office-holders cling to their positions despite calls for them to resign. Still the VC remains in office until August, and will then receive her salary for a further six months』 sabbatical leave.

The background to this loss of credibility entails privileging a small group of senior management over several years with exaggerated pay and perks (ie rent-seeking on student debt), while the salaries and conditions of all other staff are restricted to below-inflation awards; public money spent on a personal loan write-off; permitting the VC to take on significant additional paid employment outside the university (including, ironically, membership of the university pensions board); a lack of transparency in these decisions despite repeated requests for published criteria; and undermining the collegiate culture so essential to a well-functioning university. This same leadership team is currently asserting its right to control the appointment of a new vice-chancellor. This is indefensible.

Failure to resign now will cast a shadow over any incoming VC. We call upon them, again, to do the honourable thing, having lost all legitimacy.
Geof Wood, George Lunt, Ian Gough, Stuart Reynolds, Mike Owen and David Collard
Prof emeriti and life members of the court of the University of Bath

• The scandal of excess pay for vice-chancellors stems in part from universities』 anomalous status and weak governance. The ONS classes universities as private, not public sector, even though most of their income is from public bodies (especially since much student loan debt will be written off by the government), and most were built with public money. Yet there is none of the external accountability to shareholders that is a check on excess pay in private companies. Though having charitable status, they are exempt from supervision by the Charity Commission. The only check is internally appointed non-executives, whose complacence on VC pay has been shameful.

Universities are the least accountable entities in our economy – public or private. It is moot who actually owns them. Given the scandal of VC pay (and the coming scandals – universities』 financial instability, dilution of student’s learning experience, financial exploitation of students and staff), it is surely time that the issue of university governance was looked at afresh.
Julian Le Vay
Oxford

• It seems appropriate that the vice-chancellor pay league table should be headed by the London Business School, since business schools are there specifically to teach their customers how to maximise their earnings. Business used to be about producing some necessary or desirable thing and selling it at a workable profit. It involved deep knowledge of the field and the workforce. Business schools, by contrast, teach all-purpose management skills designed to be parachuted in anywhere. As the financial pages demonstrate, what these businesses make or sell is subsidiary to the profits that can be made by merging or 「rationalising」 them. As for the workforce, that’s the least of their considerations.

Business schools do not increase knowledge, are not a public good, and have nothing to with universities』 real purpose. By contrast, they have everything to do with the mindset that has led to the current universities strike.
Ruth Brandon
London

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• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters

Topics

Higher education

Lecturers

Lecturers' pay

Students

Pay

Work & careers

letters

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本文來源：https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/mar/12/accountability-and-uk-university-governance