Super-sized salaries due to lure of private sector
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IT’S hard to take pleas for more funding for higher education seriously when 50 senior university staff are earning around €10m a year between them.
Take the UCC and UCD presidents Drs Michael Murphy and Hugh Brady, for instance, both earning more than a quarter of a million each in pay and expenses. And what about the UCD vice president for research Des Fitzgerald, the country’s top academic earner pulls in over €400,000 in pay, expenses and pension contributions.
UCD wisely decided not to pay performance-related bonuses last year. If it had, Prof Fitzgerald would have earned an extra €86,000 – his bonus alone would have been more than most Irish people earn in a year. Had it been paid, it would have caused uproar once the figure was disclosed.
Senior Irish academics, in general, earn more than their counterparts in many European universities. Yet the reality is that Drs Brady, Fitzgerald and Murphy would earn much more in the private sector in Ireland. That’s because the three are medics where some specialists are paid enough to keep a top banker happy.
And even if they had stuck to their original calling in academia – medicine – they would still be doing very nicely, thank you. What’s not generally realised is that the top medical professors are usually paid much more than your ordinary professor of Latin or Irish. The extra money is to ‘compensate’ for the loss of earnings they would have got in the private sector.
So there’s at least an explanation, if not a justification for the supersized salaries of some senior academic administrators.
That’s apart from the fatuous argument the presidents used in their submission to the review body on higher remuneration in the public service some years ago, which referred to their “mental horsepower”, a phrase that caused great mirth in common-rooms. Belt-tightening Nevertheless, it’s inevitable in a time of belt-tightening that their salaries will come under the microscope.
But the debate about what we pay our academics and the direction of our higher education system was put into perspective this week by Dr John Hennessy, president of Stanford University in California, one of the most prestigious higher education institutions in the world. He was in Ireland as a guest of the Higher Education Authority and was not afraid to give his opinions on the development of our thirdlevel system.
He does not believe we can have seven world class universities in Ireland and suggests we might be better off having research-led universities and predominantly teaching universities.
He also preached patience when it was put to him that the Government here wanted a quicker return for its investment in research in higher education. Patience and people will drive our hoped-for ‘smart economy’, suggested Dr Hennessy.
Reacting to the Irish Independent report on Monday about rationalisation of courses, he said cuts were happening in universities everywhere. In his own case, he faces a 10pc wage cut on a salary of around $680,000.
At a HEA organised lunch attended by Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe among others, he said that Stanford has 18,000 students, half undergraduate and half postgraduate, and 10,000 staff. Its annual budget is around $4bn – almost twice what the taxpayer pays for whole higher education sector in this country with its 140,000 students. The comparisons show just how difficult it is for Ireland to compete on the world stage
- John Walshe
