Laurie - you are on to a real story about the elites in the public sector. Salaries and their unfunded pensions have ballooned in recent years - and when cuts come, they are their deputies are the last to feel the pain...as they administer the cuts.

RE: Vice-chancellors

Anyone else got a mental image of Ridcully and the other wizards in Unseen University when reading this?

@Joseph: You and your friends make get 2:1s or if they are really good, like me, firsts. However, there are many students who get passes and thirds and only get these by cobbling together assignments from 'others'.

My point is that because there are so many of these latter degrees all degrees have to be suspect. This is particularly true on the lower end of the university status scale especially when a university relies heavily on the income of foreign students.

And why are doing a English Lit course Joseph? You can just read stories in your spare time. You don't need someone to teach you that.

"What does the author mean by this? " "What does he mean by this." Yadda, yadda yadda. English Lit is all bull. Do something else.

"Anyone who believes that knowledge has no price should look away now"..

Yes and go and have a look at the picture of the sewing machine shop over on the business article by Alice Gribbens. That in my view is why the education world is becoming so self important and generally overblown and arrogant -jumped up executive effects such as ridiculously high wages are probably bound to happen when those wielding such powers know they have an almost captured market here in the UK. People have nothing else to do in life because there's hardly any decent manufacturing jobs going these days.

Industrial scenes like that sewing shop depicted in Alice's article remind one most sharply of how generations of families here in the UK worked in just the same type of places, running the same type of machines. We hated that type of low status sweat shop work at the time as I remember - and longed to get out, go to night school so we could get a fancy public sector cushy job - but now there's not even any basic sweat shop jobs around and everyone's an executive .. or so it seems. Even worse, education is too expensive. Who in their right mind still believes debt is a great way to acheive one's goals after the latest financial fiasco?

It's galling to see but common knowledge that our manufacturing industries have long since been packaged up and sold to places where even poorer workers can be paid peanuts to do the same job.

Is it any wonder those in education are lording it over the rest of us, charging us whatever they want when they have no real competition in the broader context of a full economy ie one with more than enough decently paying manufacturing jobs or other gainful employment opportunities.

Ehtch tee might I suggest that you start your own blog or join Facebook. At least limit your domineering contributions to this forum and let said contributions be vaguely relevant! Cheers. This is the second time I've seen you dominate a forum with utter twaddle

Laurie, based on the show you either have no idea of what a non-executive director does or you you willfully misrepresented it.
The fact that laws about non-executive directors are so lax that most do nothing but show up at the board meeting once or twice a year is a disgrace to which a whole episode of Dispatches could be devoted, but to claim that it's a distraction from being a Vice-Chancellor is total nonsense.

What only the second time!

I must say Laurie, I can't help feel that by trying to find a new angle, you've lost any sort of journalistic credibility (when it comes to this issue).

It's not the VCs that we should be blaming - when it comes down to it, it wasn't their decision to hike up tuition fees, it was the coalition's. By spreading the blame our argument is being watered down.

I'm sure Gove and co. breathed a sigh of relief when they saw Dispatches.

Students really have become the punchline to someone else's joke.

You're right Gita, I had forgotten about the point made that the VCs had lobbied for the changes. Perhaps I was slightly too explicit in my choice of words but I still feel that from a journalistic viewpoint it put too much negative press on the universities for something the previous governments and current government have allowed them to do (commercialisation etc).

Note to Laurie and NS sub-editors:

York University is in Canda.

The University of York is in Yorkshire.

Long live the White Rose etc.

And you're right about universities being run as a cash cow, lowering standards to gain more students especially foreign students.

Most arts degrees aren't worth anything now because there are so many people with them. And they're dead easy to get using copy and paste tactics.

@Mr.Dvine

How dare you besmirch the arts with your hackneyed right wing rhetoric regarding art courses.

Cut and Paste? My friends who do Humanities (which is an amalgamation of politics, history and philosophy) work day and night in the library reading book after book on their subject. For you to say the course it worthless is offensive and wholly untrue. I am currently doing an English course and I am not sure whether I will find a job at the end of it but what I will do is understand, through examining different theories, contexts and points of view in literature, what is intrinsically right and what is intrinsically wrong and I know have a greater understanding of the world I live in now.

@Joseph. "The world in which I now live."?

I notice you claim to have a 'first' in some degree or another and quickly disparage Literature and Arts as subjects - yet you neglect to mention what exactly you studied.

I'd guess from your demeanour that it was Business Studies, and I'd argue that is a vocational subject with no academic merit whatsoever.