“I Want Money, That’s What I Want”

The 21 Group has extracted some statistics from the University of Cambridge’s End of Year Financial Reports. They make interesting reading.

• From 2019–2025, central administration spending more than doubled (£195m → £395m), while funding for academic departments fell by 8%, as shown here. In 2019, £2.33 went to teaching and research for every £1 on admin. Today, it’s just £1.04.
• The number of six-figure earners in Cambridge University tripled between 2019 and 2025.
• The total amount paid to senior figures earning in excess of £150,000 has increased from £7 million in 2019 to £37 million in 2025.
• Average pay for all staff has been static at ~ £49k for a decade. This figure is corrected for inflation.
• The vast majority of employees of Cambridge University are no better off than they were 10 years ago (though they are 10 years older). Career and salary progression has stalled for many.
• A growing gap in pay is emerging in the university with an elite of high earners and the rest of us.
• Some of those earning more than £100,000 are academics. This stark rise in pay for senior academics alongside flat salaries for early-career staff shows a distortion of priorities. The rewards should be shared out more equally.
• The most inflated and exorbitant salaries are reserved for the senior managers and executives (the Registrary, the HR Director, the Academic Secretary, the Pro Vice Chancellors and the Heads of School)
• All this is exemplified by a Vice Chancellor who is the highest paid in the United Kingdom, yet spends a lot of time telling the rest of us that pay is not important.

Given this background, we highlight again the interesting contribution made on the previous thread by Autophagy here

The corruption has advanced in several phases

1. In the first phase, senior administrators awarded themselves outsized salaries and benefits, as well as outsourcing contracts and favours
2. This generated resentment from other senior stakeholders, notably senior professors. The first solution was to add more senior executive roles in the administration and tell these professors that if they were “good” they too could join the golden club
3. This bought off some people (heads of school etc) but there weren’t enough positions to go around, leaving resentment among research professors
4. This resulted in any number of abusive practices as departments sought to pass down workload to junior academics, admin, postdocs while coercing them to give cuts of grants, publications and credit to senior profs
5. So then they raised salaries for senior professors, we ended up with a massive inflation of high (150k+) pay deals but nothing for basic admin staff or postdocs or lecturers
6. But the people at the bottom (programme admins, lecturers, postdoc team members) were the ones doing all the work and they’ve had enough, and no amount of short-term hires will fill the gap
7. So now the whole system is falling apart- the best scholars have left, the grants aren’t coming in, students are upset, and yet the nomenklatura still continues to expand
8. The legal cases pile up, the costs augment, and the university is failing as research output declines and the rankings finally catch up with reality
9. VC wants austerity but the cuts fall on the people doing all the work while the nomenklatura continues to drain resources
10. All the skeletons are coming out of the closet and no-one has a clue what to do. We need a total rebuild from scratch but it cannot be done because the people who birthed this mess are still running the show and running circles to keep the skeletons hidden

This is a summary with which the 21 Group is in complete agreement.

As teaching and research are squeezed ever tighter, bureaucracy expands with remarkable ease and consumes more and more of the resources. The institution increasingly views its academic purpose not as something to advance, but as something to contain. Until this contradiction is confronted, no narrative of excellence can succeed. The present management look unsuited to the task of fixing things because they are “the people who birthed this mess”.