Irish university chiefs need to begin reform and accept pay cuts like everyone else

Higher-level institutions have become a snapshot of the problems with the broader economy. In 2008, Irish university chiefs between them pocketed over €1.7m in pay.

In recent months, as the extent of our economic woes became apparent for all, the magnificent seven have refused to share the pain – point blankly refusing a pay cut requested by Batt O’Keeffe, Minister for Education.

But what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. In the same year, 2008, according to the Higher Education Authority (HEA), the wage bill for all universities was over €1billion. Some lecturers, who head up departments, or professors, who control programmes, are on obscene six figure sums – while rarely showing their faces inside the lecture room.

This is not mentioning the recent 5.5% pay increase given to over 400 professors across the sector, nor the 5.1% hike for bursars and secretaries. Neither is it mentioning the almost 20% pay rise given to two of the magnificent seven in recent months nor the extravagant residences occupied by them or the expenses claimed, and dutifully paid.

But wages and pay are not the only area of waste. Universities have spent over €5m in the last three years fighting legal disputes with their own staff. Most of them will claim that it was the wronged party who instigated lawsuits, but it is the universities who have continued to appeal decisions ensuring mounting costs. The HEA say that the average cost of a student attending college is €9,500, not including the €1,500 registration fee. So, for that €5m, spent another 454 students could attend Ireland’s colleges.

While the seven campuses demonstrate all the very worst characteristics of public sector largesse, as outlined above, they also manage to mimic the most dangerous aspects of the private sector.

Contracts for staff are no longer worth the paper they are written on – demonstrated by DCU in particular, with its selective view of the Universities Act 1997, designed in part to give a certain job security to staff. There are hundreds, if not thousands of young, energetic and resourceful lecturers on non-permanent, poorly paid contracts, unsure of their future and living day-to-day. All the while permanent staff, with bloated salaries, ease-off and disappear from classrooms leaving the dirty work to others.

Management embody all the short-termism that got the country into this economic fix. They run their universities like businesses and play the CEO, Michael O’Leary, bottom-line, PR man part. These the big seven corporations focus on attracting the largest amount of students, while meeting their financial goals and maintaining that squeaky clean image of their university for the public and the Department of Education.

Universities are now bureaucratic monsters lead by profile-chasing presidents with the head thinking public sector and the heart saying private sector. They are as broken as our banking system and in need of a far more drastic root and branch clear-out. While they continue to churn out graduates with the wrong skills to an economy with no room for them, the time for a rethink is now. It is time our universities discovered not what they really are, but what they ought to be.