Amid job cuts and financial strain across Scotland’s universities, hundreds of senior staff continue to earn six-figure salaries. What role does high pay play — and who decides what’s justified?
The exclusive story is in The Ferret today and has been met here with this swift reaction: Esmé Maxwell said: ” From the headline, one could be forgiven for thinking that management were being paid just over £100k but, on reading the article, there’s people being paid £380k and >£400k! The circa £100k range is perhaps justified in terms of attracting the best candidates but the latter is really not justifiable.
“Particularly when, as noted, those on >£100k comprise 3% of the workforce but a quarter of the main teaching grant. For a comparison, the rector of NTNU (Trondheim), which has an enrolement of ~43k students (more than Edinburgh afaik), is on 1.85m NOK which is roughly £133k, and that has been subject of some vague debate [1].
“It would be interesting to see mean and median salaries in Scottish universities for different types of position, e.g. what is a postdoctoral researcher, lecturer, or a professor paid? In terms of attracting researchers, Scottish universities will have to compete against other universities at least in Europe. The UK is not overly attractive to researchers at the moment, for a number of reasons.”
Matthew Scott said: “This isn’t an exclusively Scots problem. British universities are awash with overpaid parasites, the result of misguided intelligences focussed on finding the weaknesses in the system and exploiting them. The losers? The students. Always.”
Top of page picture is of Dundee University.