Higher education staff have a “tough” job and universities should do more to help them ensure that their roles remain “tenable”, the University of Oxford’s new vice-chancellor has said, as she pledged to make staffing issues a priority of her tenure.
Giving her first speech as vice-chancellor at her admission ceremony on 10 January, Irene Tracey promised to commission an independent analysis of pay and conditions for staff at Oxford as one of her first actions in the post. This will look more broadly than the current national pay and pensions dispute, and will also consider how to ensure that staff have a good work-life balance.
“We must find ways to shift the needle in your quality of life so that you can continue to deliver your best performance,” she said, adding that she would do all she could to “support staff during these difficult financial times and [for the university] to be an attractive place to work in the future”.
Professor Tracey – a renowned neuroscientist who has spent much of her career at Oxford – said she recognised that “the job of being an internationally competitive teaching-research academic is really, really tough” and that there was a need for creative thinking “about ways to make the job tenable”.
