AIBU to think university executives should not be paid so much that the uni can't afford lecturers

[melisande]

AIBU to expect that the uni my DS might go to should not pay their execs so much that they can't afford to pay lecturers and profs and are making them redundant: News story on cuts at Exeter; same thing happening at Hertfordshire and Sussex. Exeter UCU says that if the 16 highest paid execs at that uni capped their salary at £120k, they'd save more money than all the planned cuts to archaeology and history.

Compared to the private sector, it's an obscene salary. I'm not only referring to PAs before I get accused of internalised misogyny. Support staff have always been overpaid.

An Administrator, not manager, at Exeter with the opportunity to work from home. 31K starting salary. I'm reminded how local councils are also mismanaged with finances.

Perhaps you’re just out of touch as to current salary levels. The national living wage is £26.5k.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a professional level job to command a higher salary.

So just £5k a year above the national living wage?
To work as a Finance Administrator who has to be working towards professional qualifications? Sounds reasonable tbh.

I was an EA for many years (several of them in an HE institution) and it's astonishing how many people genuinely think the role is mainly coffee and typing. In my case it was also events and stakeholder management, office management, line management and HR, facilities, extremely complex international travel and diary management - a lot of drafting e.g. letters, emails, presentations - research and due diligence, FOIs, compliance, and a lot more.

And of course a fair bit of counselling/coaching of principals who didn't always know what they were doing 🙄

I'm not saying I wasn't paid a fair wage in my HE EA job, but it was just that - fair rather than inflated. Also worth considering that a lot of PA/EA roles have no room for progression, particularly in a university, IME.

Friend of mine works in the private sector as a PA two days a week and earns 20k a year for 2 days. So if she was full time she’d be on 50k. It’s a well paid profession for experienced PAs.

Everything has become a business now, it's the same with academy schools and the NHS. Lots of people at the top being paid huge salaries to discuss strategies while they can't afford to hire TA's or nurses.

We are going to lose a lot of PS staff to automation. A lot of the programme support jobs are essentially moving data between platforms and linking messages between different groups. Most of it can be automated leaving one person to make sure it's running smoothly rather than a team of 20.

And the NSS has just been released with a disappointing drop in student satisfaction scores. I ve been sent an email saying I need to attend a meeting so that opportunities for improvement can be identified.

Comments talk about lack of equipment (which I’ve been requesting and have repeatedly been told there’s no money), lack of support from professional services staff (because loads have been made redundant), would like more teaching (can’t happen because we teach what we’re allowed to teach with the restrictions on hours per module due to staffing levels). 🤷‍♀️

Its so disheartening to go through the shit of rounds and rounds of redundancy (another one announced only this week), to be one of the ones left firefighting after 25% of your team take packages and leave. You’re doing your best. Of course satisfaction will drop. And then made to feel like it’s my fault that the students aren’t as happy as previously? I probably need to be thicker skinned.

It isn't your fault at all. Education is a nightmare for depriving funds for basic resources which renders individual staff powerless. It's all about performance and all the other sizzle - sucking up to management teams, seeing internal promotions because of who they are related to/friends with at the top. I was sickened when I read a Principal getting an MBE. I worked under him and he was a self serving arrogant tosser. I used to see some of the ignorant replies he would send back on students' complaints. Education, being a business, has now dumbed down the quality of services.
I don't know why FE and HE still issue student satisfaction surveys because they are completely ignored. I wish you well and really don't envy you still being in the thick of it. 💐

It’s awful isn’t it?
Our university decimated our professional services and we as academics were left to pick up the slack.
My team have been amazing but they’ve had to pick up so much additional admin alongside their teaching that it was inevitable that NSS scores would dip. There are only so many hours in the day.
It’s incredibly frustrating and is having a huge impact on wellbeing and staff morale.

I am going to bite. I am a head of/director of a support service function. I used to work in the private sector. I work far harder in HE than I ever did in financial services and except for the Executive Board, academics generally are not appreciative of suppprt staff going the extra mile for them and there is no cognizance that many support staff work just as hard, if not harder than some academic staff.

My salary is less than it would be in the private sector, pension and holidays are far better. I have been in HE for 15 years and whilst workloads are higher than they were 15 years ago for academics, I was very surprised back then at how little teaching academics did, 6hpw for a Reader, which may have been fair enough if they'd been producing any refable research. Whilst I accept things have got tougher, the gravy train had to stop.

One massive improvement has been around behaviours. Ten to fifteen years ago, some academics thought they could be unbelievably rude to support staff. Shouting, unreasonable demands, reducing people to tears because they were working in accordance with the rules. I remember a professor calling an administrator because the copier had run out of paper and demanding they walk 800 or so yards across campus at 4.45 in the dark and pissing rain to fill a copier with paper from outside the professor's office. That member of staff came back drenched and in tears having arrived at 5.01 to find the Prof putting on her coat because it had gone 5 o'clock. Thank goodness that sort of thing has improved. I escalated it to the Academic Head. Nothing was done - it would be now and thankfully that sort of nonsence has largely been stamped out.

@TheyGrewUp thats so sad to hear. I love our professional services staff and feel they make a massive difference to the program, the students and to the academics. I fully appreciate they’re under a massive strain themselves.