Every penny well-deserved

The 2009-10 University Vice-Chancellors' pay figures are out, and - as we suspected - our Dear Leaderene has received a whopping 3.07%: rather more than our own 0.4%, and a proper recognition of her leadership skills, including, of course, the redundancies which saw 150 (and counting) of her staff forced out of their jobs because she and her executive 'didn't understand' the rules about what counts as a student, and had to repay the government £millions.

For the record, she got £201,824 and £33,176 in pension contributions. She won't be darkening the door of Lidl anytime soon. I wonder what the 2010-11 pay scales will reveal…

At least we're near the top of one league table, eh readers?

Educationalists: we're all in this together

While Oxbridge shockingly decide to charge the full £9000 fees, vice-chancellors of other institutions play their part in the new Age of Austerity. While staff got a 0.4% pay rise for another year (effectively a large pay cut taking inflation into account) and casualisation erodes the chances of even the very brightest getting a permanent job, senior management carry on with the life of Reilly.

My own VC told us in a public meeting that she'd refuse a pay rise this year, but still took home an extra £7000, handily negating the inflation rate. But she's a model of propriety compared with the rather immodest antics of another VC according to the Guardian:

"Who is the university vice-chancellor whose contribution to the new austerity is to buy a third Range Rover," asked my colleague Mike White last week, setting the hounds a chasin'. "Their number plates are PhD 1, PhD 2 and, yes, PhD 3." This is the sort of challenge readers can't resist, so in came the emails. Dr David Grant, vice-chancellor of Cardiff University, they said: have a word with him. We tried, but his spokeswoman said: "The university has no comment regarding the vice-chancellor's private vehicle." She didn't say which vehicle. Does he own all three?

Grant takes home around £250,000 per year.

The Queen Is Dead, Long Live The King

White smoke has appeared from the stately chimneys of The Hegemon. Habemus Vice-Cancellariam cheer the loyal drones as we throng the central quadrangle.

Yes, we've appointed a new Vice-Chancellor. Here he is.

A half-holiday is hereby announced for all.

Not quite all of us are in this together

Just been to my union meeting. The institution is targeting individuals for redundancy with blatant disregard for the law.

A few months ago, I had an exchange with the Vice-Chancellor about her pay (in the region of £230,000-240,000, or £100,000 more than the Prime Minister. She told us, in public, that she wouldn't take a pay rise this year.

My pay rise this year is 0.4%, about £5 per month. With inflation at 3.7%, I'm effectively receiving a pay cut of 3.3%.

The Vice-Chancellor's income has gone up by £7000: so even if she's 'only' on £230,000, she's had enough of a raise - 3.5% to keep pace with inflation.

Jolly good. Wouldn't want to price her out of Waitrose and collapse the local economy. At least I know that nothing she says can be believed.

Touché

Hello. It's 1.30 on Sunday morning and I'm up at 5.45 for the last day of the fencing. I took several hundred pictures yesterday, so carried away was I by the quality. It's taken hours to upload them to Flickr, so I won't post any more here until I get back to The Hegemon, but you can see them all here. Parents, friends, fencers and fencing clubs can use any of them for non-commercial purposes, as long as I'm credited.

Meanwhile, I think Paul Uppal MP should watch out. My campaign to oust the Vice-Chancellor has succeeded. Merely a matter of months since I told her she should do the decent think and resign, she has.

If I'd realised bullying was such fun, I'd have enjoyed my schooldays much more!

Someone else on the internet doesn't like her. Relive her glory days here.

Irreconcilable differences?

You may have noticed that I've had my disagreements with the Vice-Chancellor (popularly known as Kim Jong-****) over the past few years. I object to her 'earning' £90,000 more than the prime minister, to her sacking 160 people to cover an £8m government clawback for fiddling student numbers, to her giving honorary doctorates to torturers, to the attack on humanities and a number of other issues.

Turns out today that we can't even talk about the weather without falling out. Meeting in a doorway and forced to acknowledge each others' existence, we naturally fall back on the weather. She - deeply tanned - rues the end of the heat; I glance at the sky and celebrate the breaking of the searing, cancer-causing oppressiveness. We part, no doubt convinced that industrial relations are irreparably sundered by our failure to agree on the most inconsequential facets of life.

Meanwhile, a little example of how this place works:

modules on the list of modules not submitted for validation need to be deleted. I'm afraid to say that the way the system works is that modules need to be submitted for validation before they can be deleted from the system.

Revolution in the afternoon

It's all go round here, I tell you.

Management are absent - apparently they think better in posher surroundings, so they're having an 'away day' - kind of like the Wannsee Conference for education (too tasteless?). Shame teachers and students aren't afforded the same consideration.

In their absence, I sloped off for a very frustrating swim, then for a quick demonstration, supporting our City of Dark Place College colleagues as they fight huge cuts in Further Education, which is under severe attack.

Then in a few minutes, I'm off for another meeting with the Vice-Chancellor and the Executive. I plan to ask how many of them are earning more than the Prime Minister and how it makes them feel. The V-C was on £228,000 in 2008-09 - it will have increased since then - while the PM struggles along on £142,500. 4 more of my management 'colleagues' (obviously they don't mix with the likes of me) earned took home more than the PM too. Well, 'we're all in this together'.

Meanwhile, the Chancellor has announced plans to force local authorities to cap council tax at this year's level, and plans to provide mechanisms to force them to cancel raises in future if a small number protest.

This is a naked attack on working people. The focus on prohibiting rises makes this clear: some (Tory) councils stay in power by charging very low tax, and therefore providing very few services. What if a local population want to pay more, for better services? Sorry, that won't count. What if a council needs to charge more because of exceptional costs - a hard winter perhaps, or entire housing estates need renovating? Tough - Cameron hates government and detests public services, so he wants you to hate taxes and hate collective action. Lower taxes produces selfish individualism. He sees this as a good thing. I see it as socially damaging.

This bit's really pissed me off. The welfare system isn't 'out of control'. It might need tidying up a little, perhaps even tightening. What's out of control is that Britain's given the banks hundreds of billions because they screwed the global economy, and they're back to the bad old ways, without paying any of it back yet. Quite frankly, I'm far happier for someone on unemployment benefit (£51.85 for 18-24s, £65.45 per week if you're over 25) to fiddle things a bit than I am for free-marketeer bankers to demand state bailouts. That's real fraud.

All the political parties hysterically condemn benefit fraud for impoverishing the country. Let's see what the figures say:

Benefit fraud and error overpayments, 2008-09: estimated £3.1bn, or 2.1% of the benefits budget.
Benefit underpayment: £1.7bn, or 0.9%.
Total loss: £1.4bn.

So where's the campaign to get people to claim their full entitlement? How much is fraud, and how much is error?

Now, let's see. Benefits fraud and error loses us £1.4bn. Now, how much have we given or guaranteed the banks?

£1.5 trillion. £1, 500,000,000,000,000
Take away £1.4 billion for those benefit fraudsters and I reckon that George Osborne's being rather generous to the bankers and rather mean to the rest of us.

Also, I want to know this: which minister in the International Development department replaced African art with a massive Union flag and a portrait of Margaret Thatcher, as reported in yesterday's Observer?. Given that the department exists largely to repair the damage done by the kind of imperialism Thatcher was nostalgic for, neither decoration seems appropriate.

We're talking telephone numbers

I did get a reply from the university governors, directing me to the Annual Report, which is available here. The V-C's salary went from £141,000 in 2006, to £189,000 in 2007, and £206,000 in 2008 - which means a £65,000 pay rise in 3 years - and they have the cheek to say that our 5%, which took us to just above a secondary school teacher's wage - was greedy.

Mouth stuffed with gold

According to a colleague's analysis of the institutional financial reports, my Vice-Chancellor was paid £206,000 in 2007-2008. That's £12,000 more than Gordon Brown and twice that of a top-ranking surgeon.

I make that an 8.5% pay rise (or £16,000) - despite her statement to us that our 5% rise has caused financial problems. I'm assuming that she declined to take a rise this year then… but I can't say because she hasn't even acknowledged my polite enquiry.