AUTHOR Martin Amis is being paid an incredible £3,000 an hour - the same hourly rate as a Premiership footballer - to work at Manchester University.
Amis - who was signed up last year to teach creative writing - is receiving an £80,000 salary but is only committed to working there about 28 hours a year.
The M.E.N. discovered the figures using Freedom of Information legislation.
The university has recently been forced to shed up to 750 jobs - including lecturers' posts - to get itself out of £30m of debt.
About £10m of that debt was taken on to pay for the appointment of Amis and other top academics as the university pushes to be recognised as one of the world's top institutions by 2015. Today union leaders criticised the size of the salaries. Most visiting lecturers are paid between £20 - £50 an hour.
Amis, 58, was appointed professor of creative writing last February in what was touted as a coup for the city.
He is one of a number of high-profile figures to have been appointed. Others have included Nobel prize winners, economist Joseph Stiglitz and geneticist John Sulston.
As part of his duties, the writer runs a 90-minute seminar for students on the post-graduate writing course. But these tutorials run for only 12 weeks in the year - meaning his total teaching time is just 18 hours.
And, unlike other lessons in the course, his subject is not assessed, meaning he is not required to carry out any marking of students' work.
His contract stipulates he must make four public appearances and teach one session at the summer writing school - each of the five appearances lasting around two hours.
Commitment
The total annual commitment of seminars and appearances is 28 hours, although these hours do not include preparation or research time.
Other staff at the university expressed surprise at the massive hourly wage.
Dave Jones, senior Unite union organiser who represents 600 technical staff at the university, said: "We understand why people like Martin Amis are being sought by the university and recruitment is a competitive business.
"But I think those staff who are left after the various redundancies and early retirements need to know that there will also be investment into their careers as well, along with the new structure of the university."
Amis, whose father was the novelist Kinglsey Amis, is widely regarded as one of the best writers of his generation and his books include Time's Arrow and Money.
The author, who lives in London and commutes to Manchester, declined to comment.
Since his appointment the number of students applying for the £3,000-a-year course this year soared by 50 per cent, from 100 to 150.
But the university denied that the arrangement was unusual for its professors who carried out research and other commitments at the university and said that his appearances did not take into account time spent researching for lectures.
A spokesman said: "The university is a research-intensive university, so writing and research must be factored into the salary of any academic. The amount of contact time with students and the general public represents only a proportion of any academic's salary.
"In addition, the salary paid to all new staff members in the Centre For New Writing will be funded by increased applications to the centre and the additional income those applications will create.
"Their presence in the centre confers direct benefits to students."
What do you think? Have your say.
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Showing comments 1 to 25 and replies | View All
ant (25/01/2008 at 09:24)
Garry Burns (25/01/2008 at 10:03)
Bejjy ex Salford now Malta, Malta (25/01/2008 at 10:48)
ace, manchester (25/01/2008 at 11:18)
Mark, South Manchester (25/01/2008 at 11:20)
Obviously Manchester's evening newspaper doesn't value good education & top universities? Those damn "well paid" intellectuals eh!!
The Right to Reply (25/01/2008 at 11:21)
Bill, Kiriat Motzkin (25/01/2008 at 11:27)
Jimc (25/01/2008 at 11:32)
£80,000 FOR AMIS TO WORK JUST OVER A MONTH.
750 JOBS GONE TO REDUCE DEBT.
WHO EMPLOYS THESE INEPTS TO MAKE THESE DECISIONS IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Mark Johnson (25/01/2008 at 12:02)
It's nothing but a very expensive gimmick more akin to New Labour spin than policy of a credible University .
disgruntled student (25/01/2008 at 12:15)
Leo B (25/01/2008 at 12:31)
Mark Spencer, Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire. (25/01/2008 at 12:56)
jimsleftfoot, Manchester (25/01/2008 at 14:07)
Having the likes of Martin Amis at the University will like attract further funding significantly greater than the £80,000 fee he receives so you could say its a rather prudent investment.
thaitanium (25/01/2008 at 15:10)
At least he is not required to work on Sundays at double time.
As you say he is on the same rate as a premiership footballer and why not they both do the same sort of work
i.e. both do something that is no use to anyone better than anyone else.
RANDYRED (25/01/2008 at 15:55)
Shamefull waste of tax payers money.
Blue Ape With A Drum (25/01/2008 at 16:18)
As for Amis,his salary is ridiculous,he is an overrated writer whose half baked views, are taken far too seriously.My mum talks more sense,but she's not Amis (all bow down to his name),she worked on the tills in Tesco's instead.The fact is that Amis beneffitted immensely from his dad's name,and being associated with the overrated Hitchen's in their right time,right place,vaguely radical,privileged little coterie.
The culture of high wages for a few in this country is ridiculous,and getting worse.Rise up ye Murdoch Muppets, you have nothing to lose but his lies.
Andy., Bury (25/01/2008 at 17:41)
Ellie Jordan (25/01/2008 at 18:17)
Witness the monumental scale and ugliness of new buildings on Oxford Road and all over the campus.
Unfortunately it was always going to end in disaster and of course it was the hard working staff who were forced to bear the brunt of severe cutbacks once the inept pen pushers messed up the budget and spent everything that was left on the likes of Martin Amis.
One can only hope the situation acts as a warning to other Universities.
brian thompson (26/01/2008 at 13:41)
To a similar question, Sir Thomas Beecham replied "Only if it's electric!" Someone is needed to highlight the fiscal and managerial absurdities of university committee proposals, particularly when, as in Manchester, bread and butter academic jobs are at stake.
Mr Squimps, Fallowfield, Manchester (27/01/2008 at 18:46)
Smokey Burrito (28/01/2008 at 23:07)
To take the football analogy, it would be like costing the time on the basis of their time spent in possession of the ball, and ignoring everything else including training.
So while Amis is not a typical academic it is just as ridiculous to cost his full time salary on the basis of his teaching load.
But surely I am just stating the obvious. Are MEN and the other papers just making fun of people gullible enough to believe the tosh they are printing?
Ellie J (05/02/2008 at 09:06)
You have obviously NOT read the article above correctly.
By your very admission you are contracted to work approx 640 hours PER YEAR including marking, research, coursework, exams, admin etc etc
Amis does 28 hourse PER YEAR and has prepare for these 28 hours, that is it!!
He has NO other commitments.
Articles in the media are written for a variety of reasons.
Yes, a lot are for entertainment and to sell papers, but they also serve an important purpose in what remains of our democratic country, which is to reveal cases of injustice and in this case shocking financial misappropriation!
Connor Fitzgerald (05/02/2008 at 13:49)
I can vouch for that, my lecturers, professors and tutors at Durham University did a fraction of teaching!
Academics are waste of space! I did Electronic Engineering for my BEng and Radio Physics for my MSc. The rubbish taught at University is always out of date and useless in the current market place (especially in Engineering and IT).
All Higher Education provided me with was a few initials on my CV to get an interview.
Pay the money for experts from the outside, up to date people with real world experience, not academics, most of them have never had a job in the real world, how can they prepare tomorrows graduates with experience in 'theory' and virtually no experience!
Smokey Burrito (06/02/2008 at 13:08)
I would also say that an undergraduate degree that is not intended to be very specifically vocational is not designed or intended to teach you exactly things you will need next year at work. Imagine if you signed up for a computer science couse and the set book was "Learn Visual Basic version x.y in ten easy examples that you can use right away, for dummies" Like many technologies a particular programming language is very quickly out of date. But if they taugh algorithms and data structures, structured program design and testing they these would be valuable skills for a lifetime, irrespective of the language they chose. Similar considerations no doubt apply in elec eng, eg that you learnt an older type of VLSI design, or to program an older kind of embedded controller. Not the point. At University you primarily learn how to learn and how to think. If Durham failed to do that then it is a serious failure.
As for the case in hand, there is no question but that Amis makes his living in the real world as a writer. So presumably the UoM is doing what you suggest for their writing students?
And Ellie, What I mean is I have about 100 contact hours this year (usually more!) and earn about £50k. My contract does not say much about what I have to do in a very perscriptive ways but leaves it largely up to my Head of School what duties are assigned to me. In practice of course to keep the job and keep getting promoted I have to publish papers, get grants, supervise (half a dozen) PhD students and do various admin and managerial jobs. Similarly Amis will be expected to do whatever creative writing professors do: mainly write books, talk about writing books, write about writing books I suppose. My point is that he is salaried professor not a casual occasional lecturer paid by the hour, so dividing his salary by his teaching hours is not the point. It is what he does the rest of teh time that qualifies him to teach.
Kodi, Manchester (07/02/2008 at 12:31)
Both the students AND the staff are fed up of all the bungling and wastage of vast sums of money on flash buildings and senior staff, while the people who actually DO all the work face pay cuts, demotions and impossible working conditions. Many disgruntled staff took up the option of voluntary redundancy and early retirement last year, which was great for them, but took with them their experience and qualifications, leaving behind a gaping hole in the workforce, which has not been effectively plugged by a rapidly turning over stream of temps, who are unfamiliar with the institution's increasingly over-complex administrative and finance systems. I asked about the possibility of a job with the Centre for Creative Writing, even before it had opened, and was told there was no budgetary provision for research staff. Now I know why!!!!