One in ten Irish academic staff on six-figure salaries

Class room teaching is going to become a thing of the past. Cyber Schools, or teaching by computer are the future. This is going to change the world of education in many way. Actually it is going to help male student. The male mind is not suited for sitting in a class being lectured. The male mind needs hands on education, which the computer provides. The rapid questions and responce, that a computer gives enhances male education.

These high salaries make education too expensive for the average Irish. The Universities bring in rich students form other countries. These rich students stay in Ireland, and become part of the upper class. This will hold the Irish in the lower class in there own countries.

@Eiriamach - they are entitled to be classified as 'academics' because they are employed within the academic faculties. ALL the heads of faculties are academically qualified, and ALL hold the position of 'Professor' since that is not an academic qualification. The highest academic qualification is a PhD. which confers the title of 'Doctor'. Most of the full-time lecturers hold at the very least a Masters, while quite a few hold a PhD and are on a salary in excess of $180,000. Part-time lecturers with a Masters degree earn upwards of $80,000. The heads of each faculty who are highly qualified (many with more than one PhD) may well have come from 'industry', and that experience is worth its weight in gold to the University. They are the ones who set the curriculum for the students, and as you have stated, we invest heavily to give our students the highest standard of education in the world. The proof of that is in the list of top Irish executives in major US and other foreign corporations. If one want's quality in education, then we are prepared to reward those who can provide it. This so called 'expose' is nothing short of sensationalism from a very poor and clearly uneducated tabloid reporter.

Irish public-sector salaries are not easy to find out about from here, but according to international statistics available on the Internet, the average professorial salary-- for those who actually TEACH at universities-- is under $48,000 per year in the UK. It might be higher in Ireland, but it cannot be outrageously higher. This is not much lower than the average academic salary at public universities in the US. So, Cathy Hayes, now that you've misled your readers about "academic" salaries, perhaps you'll track down the actual salary for university TEACHERS: you know, the ones who actually teach, the ones in the classrooms, the ones who help students get degrees and enter professions, the ones who do the work of educating, the ones we properly call "academics"! Give us the real scoop-- the raw data-- on "Irish Academic Salaries Exposed," as your sub-headline asserts. I'm sure you'll find that the one out of 1,000 with a 6-digit salary has business training and has never seen the inside of a classroom except as a student and is not properly described as an "academic" at all.

Wow! My first reaction was to ask how'd they manage that, and without teachers' unions too? It must be that the Irish value education far more highly than Americans, I thought. Here in the US, only university presidents and other administrators get that kind of salary (with a few exceptions for top researchers with gov't grants at private institutions like Harvard, Yale, MIT). But then I took another look and noticed that this article IS about administrators: Des Fitzgerald is VP for Research--NOT a professor teaching courses and publishing in his field. DO NOT add in administrative and managerial salaries and call the mixture an "academic" salary! DO NOT mislead people into thinking that professors are highly paid unless they are! What salary does the average university classroom instructor in Ireland receive? I'm willing to bet that if you separate out the admins' and managers' salaries, you'd find that professors get about a third, on average, of Des Fitzgerald's salary, maybe less. This headline is greatly misleading-- so misleading that it amounts to deceit and slander! University administrators may have dual appointments-- admin professorial titles --but they are not teachers; their jobs are not "academic." They are the corporate execs and CEOs of higher education, at institutions that are top heavy with a vacuum.