By a retired UCU member, Coventry
Over the past weeks and months there has been a veritable crescendo of anger among staff and students in universities and higher education colleges over the pay of university bosses, called Vice Chancellors (VCs). The anger has been expressed verbally over the internet – and through many demonstrations up and down the country.
Why is there so much anger? The pay of VCs has risen by more than 50% over the past ten years to an average of £258,000 per year while at the same time those who deliver the teaching, the lecturers, have seen their pay cut in real terms by 15% and students have seen their study fees rise to an average of more than £9,000 per annum.
The average pay of VCs, however, does not take into account the gross and obscene salaries that some of them get. On December 7th the BBC website revealed that the VC of Bath Spa University, Prof Christina Slade, had received a pay packet worth £808,000 after she had decided to leave the job. She got £429,000 for “loss of office” on top of her £250,000 salary. Other benefits were a housing allowance of £20,000, other benefits worth £20,000 and a pension contribution of £89,000.
At the same time, students at Bath Spa University pay £9,250 per year to study or £27,750 for a three-year course. On top of that there are living costs so that a student can leave university after three years saddled with debts of £50,000. The BBC calculated that the VC’s pay is equal to the course costs of 87 students for one year or 29 students over three years. And it says that the median annual salary in the UK is £23,474 and in Bath it is £23,082. These figures alone might explain the anger.
But Prof Slade is not alone. Prof Dame Glynis Breakwell of the University of Bath resigned after a row over her £468,000 salary. She will receive £230,000 for a six-month sabbatical as part of her resignation deal. The University of Southampton, too, was forced to admit that their VC, whose pay package is £433,000 per year, sat on the remuneration committee that sets pay. The i-newspaper reported on December 9th that as recently as 2015 “some 70 per cent of universities and higher education colleges placed their VC on the committee that decides pay for senior staff”. But there is no conflict of interest if the VC is not present when the committee sets the pay of the VC!
Oxbridge too is part of the gravy train. Again, the same i-newspaper revealed that the VC of Oxford University, Prof Louise Richardson, got a salary of £410,000 and was “required” to live in a £2m Victorian mansion that was recently refurbished for £100,000. The Lodge home of the VC at Cambridge, Prof Stephen Toope, is undergoing a £700,000 programme of works and therefore his salary, at £408,000 per year, pales into insignificance. And we must feel sorry for these VCs and the other 44 who get rent-free accommodation for they live in “tied cottages” and when they are no longer VCs, they become “homeless”.
When viewing these figures, it is of little wonder that Sally Hunt, General Secretary of the main lecturer’s trade union, the University and Colleges Union (UCU), has stated that many VCs and senior staff look like they are “living on a different planet”. It is therefore no accident that at UCU branches and annual conferences the anger has been palpable. Unfortunately, however, a lot of the discussion and anger has been divorced from the economic and political context of the expansion of Higher Education and the massive increases in the pay of VCs.
As you might expect from teaching staff in UCU, a new vocabulary has been developed to try and explain what has been happening. Words like massification, commodification and marketisation predominate.
Massification refers to the massive expansion of HE over the past 50 years, an expansion that has been basically driven by two factors: the increasing need for highly skilled workers to service a capitalist economy that is more and more technically challenging and diverse, as well as a recognition among many young people that a university degree can be a stepping stone to better pay, a more secure job and therefore better prospects of buying a house and starting a family.
The developments here in Coventry illustrate what has been happening. A student arriving in Coventry in 1967 to study would have been part of the 8% of youth, some 197,000, at that time who had the chance to do a degree. That student would have come to the Lanchester College of Technology which had about 1,200 students. The student would have had a Local Education Authority grant to study and the course would have been free.
Today, just over 40% of young people, some 2.3 million, go to university. Lanchester College is now Coventry University with 25,000 students, a growth of almost 2,000%, with plans to expand to 60,000 students by 2025. If those plans are realised, and that is doubtful as Coventry University UCU branch has produced a pamphlet which illustrates why the expansion plans are unsustainable, the student population in Coventry will be about 20% of the city’s population. To put the issue in context the population of the UK in 1967 was 55m. Today it is 66m, a rise of only 20%.
A university education, once the almost sole preserve of the middle and upper classes in the UK, has now been opened up to larger sections of youth from working class families and that has to be welcomed. However, that massive expansion in student numbers has to be paid for. At a time of a declining capitalist system which is experiencing constant economic crises, the state no longer has the finance to fund education on this scale. It could do so if it wished to, but that would mean increasing state income from taxation to fund an expanding HE system. The bosses, who ultimately will benefit from having an intelligent and skilled workforce, not only refuse to pay more taxes but do everything possible to evade and avoid paying taxes.
So increasingly, HE is being paid for by students through higher course fees and by some companies making “gifts” to universities in exchange for research and development programmes that will benefit the same companies.
So, what is happening in HE directly reflects what is happening in the capitalist economy. Universities are becoming more and more like giant private corporations, but which still retain a “charitable status” which means that they only have to pay 10% of the going business rate in any town or city. Here in Coventry, as elsewhere, the central government block grant that used to pay for local council-provided services is being replaced by locally collected business rates. What will be the impact in 2025 on local council finances when one fifth of the city’s population comprises students who do not pay council tax and where the university only pays 10% of the business rate, yet the same students have the same access to local authority services that others pay for?
The economic model is clearly unsustainable yet that does not prevent the universities from acting as if they were giant profit-driven corporations who cannot make a “profit” as they are “charities” yet can make “operating surpluses”. These universities have all the hall marks of private companies. They strive to cut costs by refusing to pay nationally agreed wage rises so that real wages of staff fall. They constantly make inroads into the terms and conditions (T&Cs) of the staff, terms which were won through previous struggles. They seek to change pension provisions so that in retirement workers have less to live on. And they are always seeking to prevent UCU and other unions from organising the workforce.
A workforce that is not organised is easier to attack and undermine. To do this the university bosses dream up some wonderful schemes. They simply divide the university into a number of theoretically separate companies, so that previously agreed T&Cs can be simply abolished as staff members now work for separate companies that have their own T&Cs and previous ones no longer apply. And where the union may have negotiated bargaining rights, those rights no longer apply as the staff members now work for other companies.
And all of this has one aim in mind – to reduce labour costs, as other costs cannot be reduced. It is in this context that the proposals that have surfaced in the past few days to cut three-year degree courses to two years have to be seen. The cynicism is hard to believe. A two-year course will still cost as much as a three-year one, but students will now only have to pay for two years of living expenses and will therefore save money! And, don’t forget students are no longer students but customers whose sole purpose is to buy what the university offers.
And the VCs, the Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), ensure that they are increasingly paid higher salaries for the “work” that they do, salaries that more and more resemble what is paid in the private sector of the economy. The model is simple. If the university is going to act like a giant private company while maintaining the pretence that it is a charity, then all the rules of big business apply including rewarding handsomely those at the top, the VCs.
So now we have these new terms, new in areas outside of HE, of marketisation and commodification. Education is now a commodity like any other product or service that is sold at a profit in the market place and the cheaper the means of producing that service, that commodity, the greater the surplus to pay those at the top higher salaries and the greater the reserves that can be built up to fund even greater expansion in the future.
And who pays the price for all of this? Those who access the service, the students, pay ever increasing amounts in course fees. Those who work in the service see their pay, working conditions, holiday entitlements and pensions constantly under attack. And local communities also pay as expansion comes at a local price. Despite a shortage of decent homes for the homeless there is no shortage of money to build more student accommodation.
Universities too are taking up ever larger public spaces in inner-city areas that local populations are then banned from. And as universities act and look like large corporations, they increasingly become in reality large corporations that are open to takeovers by hedge funds which will then acquire large sections of valuable inner-city areas for a knock-down price as they had been sold to the universities for a song by cash-strapped local authorities. Universities and HE institutions therefore act like uncontrolled big business that opens up the gates to profit-driven hedge funds.
We know this. We have seen it happening and we have experienced the process personally. So what do we do? In the time-honoured tradition of the labour movement we EDUCATE, AGITATE AND ORGANISE and we strive to create a political response to the whole process.
The fat cats at the top must be exposed but it is not good enough simply to shout out “Shame on You” for that explains nothing. We must educate and explain why all of this is happening and that means explaining that a capitalist system that can no longer take humanity forward, a system that has outlived its usefulness, will in its death agony leech off the public sector and that includes making a profit from the universities.
We therefore need a publicly-funded, publicly-owned and publicly-controlled education service from the cradle to the grave that will enable all human beings to have access to learning at all levels so that humanity as a whole flourishes and reaches its true potential.
So, when we agitate against the obscene pay levels of the fat cat VCs, we must also explain that they are a product of the capitalist system in which we live and that while we may make some gains here and there from our actions and organisation, and those actions in themselves are valuable as we learn from them, the gains will be temporary and will be taken away when we are seen to be no longer prepared to defend them. What is happening in the NHS is a stark warning of the future of education as a whole, in particular higher education.
So we fight for a socialist society. We fight for the public ownership of the means of production. We fight so that the wealth that we create through our labour is owned and controlled by us all as members of society, as social beings, so that we as a whole determine how that wealth is spent, how much on education, health, housing, pay, pensions and so on.
If we do not use each and every opportunity to fight to change society, then we will face an even greater concentration of wealth at the top and the system of paying for education now prevalent amongst students at universities will be extended to primary and secondary schools and then to the NHS, social care and every other social provision that we need in order to survive. In the words of Rosa Luxemburg our future is either socialism where we own and control what we produce or barbarism where we devour each other from fighting over ever decreasing scraps that are thrown from the top table.
December 12, 2017
