First of all, I would like to congratulate all those involved in the Oxford Living Wage and Accreditation campaigns. It simply cannot be right that the hardworking, University staff are not sufficiently compensated. However, work remains to be done and questions need to be asked about whether our lecturers and tutors are sufficiently rewarded.
And yet, while I appreciate the achievements of this democratic activism, I do not approve of the campaign, largely orchestrated on social media, to pressure Andrew Hamilton, our Vice-Chancellor, into a pay cut. This campaign has been lazily and erroneously merged with the admirable Living Wage campaign, to allege a causal relationship between the Vice-Chancellor’s pay and the low pay of many other staff. In my opinion, this ‘pay-day’ campaign has been run on shaky evidential and moral grounds.
The evidence supplied by Oxford Defend Education (ODE) in this campaign needs to be examined. The group urges the Vice-Chancellor to forgo £305,000 of his £380,000 salary (according to the Oxford University financial statement 2012-13) to bring University pay down to a ratio of 5:1 between the highest and lowest paid workers. They suggest that this would reduce social inequality and allow the money to be distributed to the other staff.
While the motivation is sound, there is no basis for such a claim. Even this radical, and surely unrealistic, pay cut would only free up enough money to give £29 to each of the 10,442 university staff. Andrew Hamilton’s salary, despite perhaps being too large, does not cause the University to pay below the Living Wage. The issue of low pay is far more complex than ODE allows when it scapegoats Hamilton in their social media witch-hunt.
Furthermore, those attacking Andrew Hamilton for taking home such a large salary are on shaky moral grounds. I do not condone such a discrepancy in pay; the University’s justification of Hamilton’s salary does lack of transparency. He is spoken of like a CEO, who is responsible for the day-to-day running of his business, yet information is
scarce about his actual responsibilities. Thus, it is difficult to assess whether he deserves his salary.
However, since I myself have been attracted to graduate jobs with lucrative salaries, my conscience does not permit me to criticise the Vice-Chancellor. The numbers may be different, but the motivation is the same. 
I do not believe
that earning that money is inherently wrong, and, if I felt I was rightly earning it, I too would have no qualms about receiving it.
I am not alone in being partly motivated by money: Oxford students will earn an average of £54,000 a year according to a survey by Emolument. From 2009-2012, 19.6 per cent of Oxford graduates worked in either investment and banking, accounting and financial services, or law and consultancy six months after graduating, according to University data. Many of us will become ‘the rich’ that ODE resents. I would feel better placed to admonish Hamilton for his salary if I myself forgoed money to which I was entitled me. I applaud the decision of Raymond Burse (the President of Kentucky State University who took a pay-cut), but I will not pressure someone into doing so without having the moral high ground that Mr Burse does.
In short, we must commemorate the successes of the Living Wage campaign, but it is not right to sentence our Vice-Chancellor in the hysterical, precipitous, and unjust court of social media. He should be innocent until proven guilty. Let’s continue these positive campaigns, but let’s go no further with this medieval witch-hunt.
