Thrift under the Vice

It seems that the cold January weather on Monday did little to deter students from attending an organised demonstration against the vice chancellor’s controversial salary increase. With the recent staff strikes over pay disputes, the announced cut to scholarship funding, and Warwick SU’s latest statement disapproving of Nigel Thrift’s pay rise, the matter of the vice chancellor’s wages is now more than ever a hotly contested issue. Staff and students crowded outside Senate House with the aim of voicing their disappointment and anger at Thrift’s second pay rise in two years.

The attendance numbers at the demonstration clearly exposed that many students are determined not to take this issue lightly. This sentiment was echoed when the first of the two speakers at the demonstration, Luke Gallaway, stepped up to the bench and called for the vice-chancellor to “live up to his name” and reconsider his substantial pay rise. As an indicator of Thrift’s own seeming hypocrisy regarding wage pay, Luke quoted from one of Thrift’s own previous essays “What’s Left? Just the Future”, reading an extract which demanded for a roll back of “corporate ideologies”, and also accused Nigel Thrift of indeed being “thrifty with the truth”. The second speaker, the SU Postgraduate Officer Lucy Gill, has previously vocalised the SU’s disappointment over the pay increase in a recent blogpost.

The wage increase has occurred in the midst of a recently announced cut in scholarship funding, meaning thousands of pounds will no longer be available to the poorest students at Warwick.

At the demo, Lucy called into question the ethics of the vice chancellor’s payrise, highlighting the timing as insensitive, given the recent staff strikes over pay disputes: “[The payrise was] something that we thought, in terms of timing and in terms of scale, was incredibly disappointing… if we can’t pay the people that deliver the teaching and learning that students pay for, both undergraduate and postgraduate, what are we as a university?” She further went on to point out that the wage increase has occurred in the midst of a recently announced cut in scholarship funding, meaning thousands of pounds will no longer be available to the poorest students at Warwick. As this vital scholarship was cut due to the university simply having “not enough money”, it seems that Thrift’s generous pay rise appears to be exempt from this universal call for cuts across the university.

Event organiser Miguel Costa Matos emphasised this point, stating that the university has “been under a spell, under the idea that there is no money left”. Certainly leaving the demonstra-tion the feeling that this was only the beginning of organised events opposing Thrift’s pay increase. If nothing further is done to appease staff and students across campus, then we can certainly expect a lot more dissatisfaction and anger over wage hypocrisy, and a lot more demonstrations such as this one.

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Photo: flickr/vpickering