Stuart Croft to be paid £280,000 a year

Warwick’s new vice-chancellor Professor Stuart Croft’s starting salary is £280, 000. This represents a £68,000 pay cut for the position compared to Nigel’s Thrift’s last salary.

Stuart Croft’s starting salary of £280,000 has been agreed by the Remuneration Committee at the University. According to the committee, this salary was agreed ahead of Croft’s appointment.

Warwick’s former vice-chancellor, Professor Nigel Thrift, previously was paid a salary of £348,000. This followed his 5% pay rise in 2015.

This starkly contrasts what the new vice-chancellor Stuart Croft is being paid, which sees a £68,000 cut in the salary for this position.

Thrift was subject to much controversy and complaint over his salary in the duration of his time as Vice Chancellor which saw three significant pay rises in the span of nine years.

However, Stuart Croft’s starting salary has been revealed to be more than Nigel Thrift’s initial salary when he took up his position in 2006. The University’s statutory accounts for the year of 2006 states that Thrift was paid a total of £204,342. This excludes pension contributions.

In the release notes of the a recent University Council meeting, Sir George Cox, the chair of the Council, revealed that Croft’s salary was considered on market data on UK universities. He stated that the figure of £280,000 was a “median of that paid to existing Russell Group comparators, albeit at the low end of many of our international competitors.”

Sir George Cox also announced that Stuart Croft had requested his salary to be published immediately once they had been reported to council. This marks a change from the previous system where the salary of the vice-chancellor was not announced until the publication of the University’s statutory accounts.

Stuart Croft started his position has vice-chancellor in February and was previously the University’s pro-vice-chancellor for research (Arts and Social Sciences) in 2011.