To those that have shall be given

The scandal of senior staff pay in our universities rolls on.

I was saddened to read in today's Guardian of the treatment afforded by my own university, the University of London, to its support staff, in particular its cleaners, seemingly hired through a shifting maze of intermediaries.

Despite plenty of stuff on the web about the subject in general, I failed to get a number for the salary of the vice chancellor, Sir Adrian Smith, an eminent mathematician and statistician, who, as it happens, went to the same grammar school as BH. Let us suppose that he gets something in the region of the average for such people, £333,333.33p.

The only information that I could find about other salaries at the university was an Excel spreadsheet from the HR department which showed a 53 point scale running from around £20,000 to around £70,000. Presumably neither cleaners nor senior management are on this scale. And one wonders what proportion of their teaching staff are on zero hours contracts and obliged to moonlight elsewhere to make ends meet.

I would have more sympathy for the financial plight of the university, which one can only assume is dire to be treating its staff thus, if those at the top took a substantial pay cut, which I am sure they could, at their time of life, well afford. Saddened that such people, whom one might suppose to be the brightest and best in the land, do not see fit to set a better example.

And I wonder what would happen if the senior management team at the university took the bull by the horns and took drastic action to preserve the working conditions of their staff? Would the government sack said team and drop in some private sector accountants to do their dirty work for them? Get the managing director of Uber to lend a hand?