Letters – 11 October 2018

Promotions and pay system needs overhaul

In their opinion article “The judicial now usurps the pastoral in managing performance” (4 October), Gill Evans and Dorothy Bishop describe the problems arising from universities’ increasing use of appraisal and performance targets, including measures of academics’ grant income.

It is clear that the system needs reforming.

We should ditch all the ranks in universities (retaining them only as honorary titles for exemplary achievements) and move to a base salary that reflects contractually agreed delivery of core tasks (teaching, scholarship, service) with increments based on years of service and then annual bonuses based on research income as well as other valued activities such as outputs, social responsibility, knowledge transfer and so on (the rules can be set by institutions rather than sector-wide, encouraging competition for labour).

Currently, promotions are based on performance during a review window with the expectation that a given trajectory will continue or even accelerate, but past performance might not predict future performance, which should be appraised continuously for remuneration purposes. Moreover, you may well have two academics ostensibly contributing/achieving the same in a year (same teaching load, grant income, outputs and so on) but with vastly different pay. This seems anomalous with the tenets of equal pay.

With the suggested reform, you could continue to manage individuals’ performances to aspire to the highest level but academics would be more secure in their jobs as long as they continue to deliver their core duties. It will also inject healthy competition into the system.

Naysayer
Via timeshighereducation.com

Entry points

Your news story “Should LSE let US ‘white nationalist’ study MSc?” (4 October) reports that the London School of Economics has enrolled a US student who once described himself as a “white nationalist”.

Someone who holds obnoxious views within the law is entitled to hold them, but also has a duty to accept that others have the right to hold their own views about him on the basis of his views.

A university has no right to police the private views of its students, only their behaviour.

Brido
Via timeshighereducation.com

A university, which is a private body, has a right to decide who it educates and allows access to its facilities and who it does not.

Given that there is so much said about who should and should not be allowed into the UK, one could argue that allowing a person who was part of the “Unite the Right” protest to study at the LSE, and thus presumably giving that individual grounds for a student visa, raises public safety concerns.

UpsilonMale
Via timeshighereducation.com

A healthy cluster

I was very pleased to read William Keenan’s appeal for keeping alive the ideal of the Higher Education Academy subject centres, which provided highly valued training, conferences and workshops for academic staff in individual disciplines (“Higher Education 
Academy’s ideals must not die”, Opinion, 17 September). However, his characterisation that these “subject clusters” were “subsequently phased out” is not quite accurate.

The Economics Network is a former HEA subject centre that never ceased its activities and continues to train more than 300 new economist teachers each year, runs a regular international conference and frequent workshops and continues to support the subject’s teachers across the UK in an active way. The University of Bristol generously provides it a home, and the network receives continued funding from learned societies and individual departments of economics. The Economics Network provides a viable model for other subjects that may wish to resurrect their own subject centres.

Alvin Birdi
Director of the Economics Network
Associate pro vice-chancellor (undergraduate)
Director of Bristol Institute for Learning and Teaching

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