Our Vice Chancellor is an absolute baller

Would YOU like to to decide how much money you deserve for your job? How about an annual pay rise of around 10 per cent, whilst the minions you lord over have to go on strike just to secure a one per cent rise?

Sound appealing? Maybe you should become a University Vice Chancellor.

Who is the Vice Chancellor of Northumbria University? What does he do? We’re sure if someone asked you that, you probably wouldn’t know the answer. We didn’t. We knew he would probably wear a fancy robe and shake our hand at graduation if we got lucky, but that was it.

Our ‘cost-effective’ Vice Chancellor, Andrew Wathey

Northumbria’s Vice Chancellor is Professor Andrew Wathey, and has been since 2008. He has an “overarching responsibility for maintaining and promoting efficiency, academic excellence and financial robustness within the institution.”

Financial robustness? What an interesting idea.

Surprised they can keep the electric on

You would think that to enforce such financial robustness, our VC would be financially responsible and tighten up his purse strings to save money for our Uni. Especially when you consider the fact that his 2013/14 salary was £300,000. You thought wrong.

As well as spending £10156.94 on airfares (which over 71 per cent were business class), our VC is in the top 20 spenders on hotel accommodation, spending well above the average. Sounds cushy.

A real life picture of our VC, imagine Fergie’s GLAMOROUS playing in the background

How much did dear Andrew receive in personal expenses? Actually, Northumbria issued an exemption so that they didn’t have to answer. We wonder why.

In 2012, our VC’s salary was £230,000, having received a 12 per cent pay rise at a time when our own lecturers had to strike to secure a pathetic one per cent increase. It makes you think, what has he achieved to warrant a £70,000 pay increase? Has our university really excelled THAT much? Does Andrew Wathey deserve a pat on the back as well as a wage 7.5 times larger than the average staff member, whilst he won’t even fork out more than a tenner on printing credits for us lot?!

How can I get in on this?!

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the committee that decides his pay has only five seats, and he holds one, whilst one other paid employee holds another.

We are willing to bet that if everyone was in charge of their own salary, the Uni would be bankrupt in a week. The lecturers would want £300,000 a year too. So would the library staff. So would IT support. So would the cleaners. In fact, seeing as though we are all capable of setting our own salaries, why don’t we just open the banks and take what we feel we deserve?

We know what it is to be poor

The findings of the UCU report are absolutely eye opening and can be accessed here.

We urge everyone to check them out. If you are as appalled as we are, we would suggest sending an email to Professor Wathey himself, but unfortunately, there is no direct contact available for him on the Northumbria Website. He must be too busy flying business class around the world on our money for such trivial matters.

The VC’s office can be contacted at [email protected].

Kick up a fuss. Maybe he does deserve all this money. What we deserve is transparency.