Are Scotland’s university leaders worth their substantial increases?

When the Scottish Government, facing a fierce squeeze on public spending, chooses to sustain the funds going to the country’s universities, no wonder the remuneration of university principals comes under harsh scrutiny.

Over the past 10 years, there has been a sharp increase in the scale and complexity of higher education. The University of the Highlands and Islands wasn’t even a university a decade ago and in 10 years Edinburgh University has started 315 new companies as a result of its research.

Scotland’s universities have become far more entrepreneurial. They get almost a third more of their funding from sources other than the public purse than they did even five years ago. That’s a necessity in a climate of tight public spending.

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So the job and the responsibilities of a university principal have become much more complex. Principals have to be respected academics, but they also have to be exceptionally capable managers.

At Heriot-Watt, a typical middle-sized university, the principal is responsible for a business with an annual turnover of £220 million a year. That’s not much less than the revenues declared in January 2017 by AG Barr, makers of Irn Bru, but the total remuneration of the company’s chief executive is more than £900,000.

Scotland has five universities in the top 200 in international league tables, which takes excellent management. Moreover, universities are not just big employers. They have become key innovators and catalysts of new industrial sectors including informatics, digital technologies and renewables.

In the last 10 years, universities have made important breakthroughs in some of society’s biggest challenges of dementia and public health. Stimulating and nurturing that creativity takes exceptional talent. Even so, big pay increases are hard to defend, and at Heriot-Watt, our entire senior management team opted last year to take a pay freeze.

Meanwhile, Scotland’s university Courts – to which principals are answerable – have revised their code of governance to ensure absolute transparency in the process of deciding how much a principal should be paid.

The Scottish Code requires the remuneration committee to look at equivalent public appointments as comparators and to seek a wide range of advice, including consulting trade unions and students.

Staff and students are eligible to join the committee.

At Heriot-Watt, the president of the student union has just become a full member.

Scotland’s universities draw less than half their funding from the public purse, but still feel a strong sense of public responsibility. Ultimately what matters most to Scotland is that its universities should continue to be powerful drivers for economic and social progress, and should continue to provide higher education of globally competitive quality.

Frances Cairncross is an economist and chair of the Court of Heriot Watt University

NO

Terry Brotherstone

IT is abundantly clear from these figures there has been little progress over the past decade in tackling inflation-busting pay rises and generous pension packages awarded to principals while teaching and research staff face real-terms pay cuts, widespread casualisation and the abolition of their defined-benefit pension scheme.

The problem is not primarily the unseemly greed of senior managers, many of whom were once hard-working teaching and research colleagues, but rather that there has been a deliberate policy of disproportionately increasing senior management pay at the expense of the rest of the workforce.

There should be no looking back to a mythical “golden age” when all was good in Scottish higher education. When I began lecturing in the late 1960s only a small proportion of, largely middle-class, young people could aspire to become undergraduates.

However, there was a shared sense of what a university was and of the liberal values it stood for. Principals were colleagues rather than chief executive officers and there was a measure of collegial decision-making.

Today, access is vastly expanded, but there is an unprecedented crisis of leadership.

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Instead of higher education being primarily about the development of knowledge, its dissemination and academic excellence, university leaders since the 1980s have increasingly come to regard ‘their’ institutions as businesses.

We are told there is no alternative, but some things are beginning to change.

The Scottish Government, through the von Prondzynski Report and the Higher Education Governance Act, has encouraged some small but significant reforms in how universities here are run. At Aberdeen University a manifesto to “Reclaim Our University” was recently debated at senate and, most significant of all, the recent unprecedented UCU ballot for industrial action over pensions and the planned 14 days of strikes indicate that we are at a historic juncture.

A profession that – dedicated to its students – has been reluctant to strike has been forced to make a stand. The immediate issue is the assault, spearheaded by some of the same principals who now themselves do so well out of the system, on a pension scheme that guarantees a reasonable retirement income and helps compensate for the relative deterioration of higher-education salaries. But there is much more to it than that.

The pensions action is part a growing movement against a policy agenda based on riches for the few and austerity for the many.

May it inspire the demand to reclaim our universities not only for their staff, but for society more broadly.

There is no golden age to return to, but there is the prospect of the revival in new forms of collegial institutions dedicated to critical research and engagement with the public good.

Terry Brotherstone is an academic from Aberdeen University and a former president of the UCU Scotland union