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Professor Grant |
Jet set life of UCL’s provost
High-ranking professor’s £62,000 world trips while jobs are cut at university
THE provost at a university which axed staff jobs in a controversial cost-cutting drive used travel expenses to fly across the globe and stay at some of the world’s landmark hotels.
Documents released by University College London show how the search for savings was not extended to the accommodation used by Professor Malcolm Grant during a hectic timetable of overseas business trips which saw him rack up £62,000 in expenses claims over five years.
The jet-setting UCL chief was booked into a series of expensive hotels such as The Beekman Tower, a five-star art deco skyscraper in downtown New York and the high-class Grand Hyatt Hotel in Hong Kong.
The university defended the spending, insisting Professor Grant’s foreign travel promoted UCL’s interests abroad and helped recruit some of the best academics.
However, the breakdown of where Professor Grant has checked in and out of has caused some raised eyebrows around the Bloomsbury campus as it is only recently that the university has turned around a deficit budget running to nearly
£9 million.
While there is no suggestion that Professor Grant has acted inappropriately in his post at the top of the university’s hierarchy, any revelation on how money is spent at UCL remains a sensitive point among the academic staff.
One long-serving professor said: “If there are savings to be made, it should be across the board – from what goes on in the lecture halls to any expenses bills.
“The same thinking should apply across the university.”
Professor Grant’s world tour was unearthed by our enquiries through Freedom of Information requests for his overseas travel in the last five years.
Papers released showed the provost had stayed in Hong Kong, Dubai, San Francisco and repeatedly in New York. On nearly every trip he stayed at a landmark hotel, incurring expenses running into thousands of pounds.
The way the budget at the university has been carved up became a major issue two years ago when an internal row over cutbacks boiled over into a public campaign to save teaching jobs.
This week, Sean Wallis, from University College London’s teaching union, said: “Over 167 staff were ‘encouraged to leave’ over the three years of UCL’s ‘regeneration programme’. These included senior professors and lecturers. This is a form of educational vandalism that UCL is still recovering from.”
A UCL spokesman said: “UCL is a global university, currently ranked in the top 10 in the world. We are able to achieve this only because we put time and effort into building our international links.
“Representing UCL abroad is a major responsibility of the provost, and Professor Grant takes it very
seriously.” |
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