The Sunday Post View: Striking lecturers may deserve more but their students definitely do

So another week, another strike by university lecturers, and another seven days of mounting frustration and worry for students and their parents.

It is not difficult to understand why lecturers feel justified in hitting the pavement as they see the cash pouring down on those nearer the top of their venerable institutions.

It is harder to understand the delusion of these university principals who believe their special kind of magic is worth north of £300,000 a year – in some cases, far north – with their many and various perks and a copper-bottomed, mink-lined pension.

And it is frankly impossible to understand the brass-necked entitlement that allowed many of them to sit on the remuneration committees setting their own pay as it soared by up to 76% over the last decade.

It is not just the principals, of course. Cash is swilling around all the bigger, book-lined offices in our most esteemed seats of learning. Can anyone explain (while keeping a straight face) why, for example, there are more than 70 staff at Edinburgh University taking home more than the Prime Minister’s £160,000 salary?

So, no, it is not difficult to see why lecturers are ready for a fight as they return to the picket lines this week, but that does not mean their strike is right. Like nurses and doctors, firefighters and police officers, their job is too important to down tools unless it is absolutely, unequivocally unavoidable; without every possible avenue for arbitration and conciliation being irrevocably blocked; and without a reason that is utterly compelling.

Is there one? The lecturers certainly believe so. They are being asked to put more into their pensions, which, they claim, is the equivalent of a pay cut while being resolutely unimpressed by a pay offer just below 2%. Fine, but out in the harsher world, away from the dreaming spires, many workers in the private sector would be delighted with any pension, never mind one as generous as the academics will enjoy. Others would be happy with any pay rise, never mind 1.8%.

When their bosses are gorging themselves, it is easy to see why the lecturers believe they deserve more. But so too do their students, particularly those in their final years or completing post-graduate degrees.

They deserve to know their education will not suffer; their exams will go ahead; and their prospects will be undimmed because lecturers are refusing to accept the smallest diminution in what, to the outside world, is a more than decent pension.

The outlandish salaries paid to the leaders of our academic institutions are wrong and unjustified but so too is this damaging, debilitating industrial action that uses the future of our young people as bargaining chips in a game of poker played by academics who are, relatively speaking, well-paid and will enjoy far greater security in retirement than most of the students they are teaching.

Our young people should not be pawns in this dispute. They deserve the education they were promised, that they have worked for, and they have lost too much time already. For their sake, agreement must be reached.