Vice-chancellors’ pay under fire

Andrew Adonis, a former Labour education minister, has criticised the pay rates of university leaders.

Lord Adonis, who on 8 July wrote an article questioning the validity of the English tuition-fee system that raised the possibility of further fundamental reforms to the financing of higher education, has now laid into the pay of vice-chancellors. I have said it before, but I feel partially responsible for the stratospheric pay rates. When devising the rankings of vice-chancellors’ pay two decades ago, I thought that transparency would drive down emoluments. It drove them up.

As an aside, there are some interesting parallels between Lord Adonis and Jo Johnson, the current universities and science minister. Although Lord Adonis was born into a very different family to that of Mr Johnson, both went on to study at the University of Oxford, to work at the Financial Times and to enter government in the role of a policy adviser to Number 10, before assuming a ministerial role.