We must stop vilifying university vice chancellors: they deserve their salaries

Maggie Pagano’s Good Business newsletter. Exclusive for Reaction subscribers 

Professor Louise Richardson is one of the world’s leading experts on international terrorism. The Irish political scientist, who is also Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, has lectured around the world on terrorism and counter-terrorism as well as British foreign and defence policy.

The Professor has written many books and won many prizes for her work in the prevention of war: the Sumner Prize and Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Centennial Medal to name two. She holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Aberdeen and St Andrews, Trinity College Dublin and Queen’s University Belfast, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and the University of the West Indies.

She’s a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Academy of Social Sciences, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Phew. What a high achiever. So when Richardson lashed out this week at critics over the latest hoohah over high pay for university vice-chancellors by arguing that their pay is low compared to that of footballers and bankers, I was amazed.

Why would such an intelligent, talented woman make such a crass comparison? Of all the contrasts she could have chosen, why pick on these two groups of players who are paid egregious amounts of money which are hard to justify on any grounds?

Surely if Professor Richardson wanted to make her point, she should have compared the work being done by the vice-chancellors of Britain’s universities, to chief executives of the UK’s top companies ? By the standards of FTSE companies, the average pay of vice-chancellors which is around £280,000 a year, is also ridiculously low but a more realistic benchmark than footballers.

But wait. Has the Professor played a blinder ? She knows, better than most, the power of words.  She must have known the impact her footballing and banking analogies would have on the media, the public and the ‘tawdry’ politicians she accuses of  being determined to do “their utmost to damage one of the most successful – and globally admired – sectors of the British economy.”

Perhaps Richardson wanted to cause trouble, to make sure she hit a few headlines in the ‘mendacious’ press and wake people up into having a proper debate. If so, then it’s worked. For Richardson, and her fellow vice-chancellors who run Britain’s finest universities, are not only in the business of teaching students and doing academic research work.

They are also civic bodies, part of the fabric of the cities and communities in which they operate and educate. More than that, they are at the front-line driving and attracting inward investment from overseas companies into the UK. When Novo Nordisk, the giant Danish pharmaceuticals company, agreed earlier this year to invest £115m at Oxford University to work on landmark research collaboration focused on type 2 diabetes, who do you think Nordisk negotiated with ?

It would have been Richardson, either formally or informally as vice- chancellor, and Sir John Bell, Oxford’s regius professor of medicine, and author of the recent report into how Britain can boost its £64bn life sciences industry as part of the government’s industrial strategy.

As Sir John’s report showed so vividly, the UK’s life sciences sector is one of our fastest growing industries and depends utterly on the brilliant, ground-breaking research work being carried out at Oxford, but also institutions in Manchester, Liverpool and Durham.

Over the last few decades these universities have attracted millions and millions in overseas investment going into research areas including genomics, early diagnosis of chronic diseases and cancer to robotics and artificial intelligence as well as materials.

Why would AstraZeneca have decided to build its new global HQ at the Cambridge Bio-Medical Campus if it were not for the great research in the city ? Why did Microsoft, Apple and Huawei choose Cambridge for new research centres? It’s the brains, stupid.

Yet such collaborations do not come out of thin air.  Most vice-chancellors, such as Richardson, spend much of their time travelling around the world as ambassadors for their institutions on the look out for new students but also new collaborations, joint ventures and inward investment.

Give or take a few exceptions, the UK’s top academics are worth every penny of their pay and Richardson is worth every cent of her £350,000 a year. What’s more, some of those working at the lower levels should earn more.

Richardson was also right to take aim at the ‘spurious’ correlations being made between the recent rise in student fees and university salaries.  As she said, it’s “not because it’s embarrassing for me and my colleagues, but because it’s damaging” to the reputation of UK higher education.

Those critics – many of whom should know better – who have made this correlation are working from the wrong premise: although the two are linked, they should be looked at as separate issues.

There are serious questions to be asked over the fairness of tuition fees. First, why do all academic institutions charge the same fee when clearly the quality of education is different? Second, why are the interest charges so high at 6.1% when the Bank of England is lending money to the high street banks at 0.25% ?Third, should degrees be cut to two years to help keep down costs?

These are the sorts of questions policy-makers should be looking at rather than making cheap jibes at vice-chancellors and mocking education which is one of our finest industries for the value it brings to individuals but also the wider wealth and health of the country.

With exquisite timing, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings published its 2018 rankings this week which showed that Oxford and Cambridge took the two top spots for the first time in the 14-year history of the table. Richardson’s own university, Oxford, held on to the number one spot for the second year in a row, while Cambridge took the second position from the California Institute of Technology; that’s why overseas students and investors come to the UK and why countries like China even have Cambridge University shops around the country they so admire the place.  Better still, 23 out of 24 of the UK’s Russell Group are in the top 200 and overall 31 UK institutions were in the top 200 and 93 in the top 1,000.

As Richardson said after hearing about the league table: “Success in our field is never an accident. It is achieved by a relentless pursuit of excellence, creative brilliance and a deep commitment to our enduring values”. Quite. And those that work at upholding those values should be paid well to do so, otherwise they might be poached overseas for huge transfer fees.