: Thu Apr 23, 2009 5:35 am
At first sight, as somebody who's worked as a university academic for 15 years, I'd say that it all looks very fishy with senior staff doing a lot of corporate tourism in a time when money in universities is tight and demands of staff increase year on year with no sign of any pay rises that may actually keep up with inflation. I've often had to dip into my own pocket to resource basics to do my job.
But Carnegie has probably set its goal on being an international centre for sports science and to compete with the US places you have to pull high-publicity stunts like sponsorship of major sports events and teams. College sports in the UK simply has no profile unlike the USA.
I'd be surprised if the university is simply foisting the bills for sponsorships onto the general university bill that gets paid out of student fees and and government money. That's just wrong.
Most Universities have a commercial arm which brings in the additional funding through research grants, industrial funding of projects, teaching of commercial courses to companies and organizations, etc. This has now got to be fully funded though what is called FEC - Full Economic Costing. This includes all the infrastructure costs and indirects and when it was introduced a few years ago it put one of my grant applications up by over 50% and that was actually with a reduction in direct costs, i.e., reduction in what I was going to do in the project! This eventually led me to decide that there was no point in pursuing work with small companies because I juct kept being told they could employ three people for the cost of one university RA. The spending money for commercial activities such as sponsorships etc should be going though this route, i.e., coming out of commercial income not student fees. If it isn't they are on real dodgy ground.
However, this is often little financial control in universities of senior staff - they can often get away with outrageous behavior because they know that they can move on elsewhere very easily and they know their employer knows that too. The pool of experienced senior university staff (Dean and above) is not great and with constantly expanding education there is a shortage.
Peter often gets robbed to make Paul even fatter. It is not unknown for a Dean to simply top-slice a load of money off everybody's grants to feed one of his pet projects.
And guess what? I no longer work in a UK university...
