5th January: Nigel Thrift
This is our Vice-Chancellor, Warwick Uni's boss; bosses in general are awful, scooping up hugely disproportionate amounts of resources despite being no more vital than those who clean the floor, getting paid a premium for extracting as much work for as little money from their workers. Nigel Thrift has the added hypocrisy of pretending that, far from being the class enemy, he is actually a lefty.
After police exercised extreme violence on students Thrift put out a lying, manipulative statement calling on the idea of 'community' to defend his vision for the university (privatisation, shit wages, and turning a seat of learning into an outsourced, consumerised, marketplace) and casting the opponents as a tiny violent minority (ignoring the 1,000 people who turned out to support this supposedly reviled activist minority) - this seems rich coming from a manager, the ultimate unaccountable and violent minority.
Thrift spend over £100,000 over a 3 year period on travel, awarded himself a £42,000 pay rise in a year of real pay cuts for many staff and this year has increased his pay packet further.
Thrift's marketisation of Warwick, and complicity in the Russell Group's ongoing support for making education twice as expensive, is in stark contrast to his academic work. This work includes critiques of the very policies he is now pursuing.
This blog post provides an excellent outline of Nigel's Marxist academic work, and his decidedly non-Marxist management practice.
