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Saturday, April 19, 2008 :
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Union: Top university staff overpaid but under-led
UNIVERSITY lecturers are being overmanaged
and under-led by overpaid bean counters in the middle of a funding
crisis, the head of their union has claimed.
The Irish Federation of University Teachers
discovered through the Freedom of Information Act recently that 10 top
staff at University College Dublin were paid €2.4 million a year,
including one whose salary, bonuses and pension benefits topped
€400,000.
A recent review of university presidents' pay gave
most of them increases of 17%, bringing their salaries to €236,000 at
Dublin City University, University of Limerick and Maynooth, and
€270,000 elsewhere.
IFUT general secretary Mike Jennings said
packages like these further deepen the wedge between management and
academic staff, who received no pay increases from the public service
benchmarking body and feel the traditional values of universities are
being replaced by a move towards business management.
He said
despite their differences lecturers and professors and university
management must take a united stand in their campaign for increased
government funding. 'We can't tackle this together while university
heads preside over a demoralising system of managerialism and control
freakery administration and bean counting. Instead of counting what's
valuable, they only value what's countable like research and other
income sources,' he said.
The heads of the country's universities recently renewed their
appeal to Education Minister Mary Hanafin to significantly increase
their funding, which they claim has not risen in line with costs or
student numbers over the past few years.
'Mary Hanafin seems
to think she can rely on the selfless commitment and dedication of
lecturers to continue delivering a first-class education with
third-class funding,' said Mr Jennings.
He said the
universities have combined deficits of €25 million, government funding
for each student has fallen by one-third in the decade to 2005 and
student-staff ratios here are more than double those in comparable EU
universities.
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