Roger Hayter wrote:

pamela wrote:

On 12:54 22 Feb 2018, Tim Streater wrote:

In article , Andrew
wrote:

On 19/02/2018 18:09, Roger Hayter wrote:
Perhaps they're just worth more in pension than you are? Or,
more likely, you are just cowed by the bosses into accepting
considerably less than you deserve in pension. Why should
others copy you because you don't insist on what you are worth?


-- Roger Hayter

Nobody 'deserves' anything that they have not made any effort
towards.

Public service pensions and closed-shop jobs-for-the-boys are
classic examples.

For years the unions bullied BSC into pay rises that just
exponentially increased the pension black hole. No-one
considered this back in the black years of the 1970's when
12 million person-days were lost to strikes. The actuaries still
thought that men would retire at 65 and be mostly dead by 73
when now the figure is far higher. Someone has to pay for all
those extra years. Free lunches don't exist.

And everything I hear about pensions (such as this bull**** strike
by academics over pensions) further confirms my view that *all*
pensions should be *personal* and that only pension companies
should legally be able to manage them.

If the academics want index-linked pensions (worth £10,000 a year) and
there's no more money then let's end security of tenure and sack as
many as needed to provide pensions for those who remain.

Of course, harder work and longer hours will be required from the
rmeaining staff to provide the same level of service.

Those were the days: https://imgur.com/a/NgHeA

The idea of security of tenure for academics was to ensure that people
capable of thinking were in a position to develop new ideas, about
society, literature, science and politics. This is essential to prevent
totalitarianism, but also to prevent the ossification of society and to
allow science to develop without stultification (or more likely the
rapid overtaking of our science by universities in the far east). You
may be jealous that academics are clever than you, but we do need them.
And we need them to be able to express new ideas without being sacked by
jealous middle managers, or hounded out by Mary Whitehouse type ladies
with hats on management committees.

P.S. a beautiful case in point occurred recently. Some years ago the
University of Exeter appointed (using a grant from Prince Charles'
foundation) a professor of alternative medicine. There was really only
one credible candidate, a European (possibly Austrian) who had done
considerable postgraduate research assessing and tabulating the
scientific evidence for alternative medicine. He started his career
with a strong desire to refine and promote effective alternative
medicine. He moved to the West Country and has since devoted his life
to his career and become a valued member of the local population.
However, once he used the opportunity to develop valid research into
alternative medicine he found that every single study he did, and every
single meta-analysis using other scientifically valid studies (of the
few that have been done in the world) demonstrated that alternative
medicines generally, or at least the various ones he has studied, simply
did not work. Not more than placebo, anyway. The result recently was
that Prince Charles got him sacked, by threatening the University with
loss of patronage if it failed to do this. Not for being a poor
academic (he is probably still the acknowledged world expert on the
*science* of alternative medicine), but for reaching the "wrong"
conclusions as far as the Prince is concerned.

This sort of thing, on a more minor scale, will happen everywhere there
is no security of tenure for people with original ideas, or who support
unpopular causes.




--

Roger Hayter