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Am I quite mad? I have just completed the external examination of a PhD thesis. I was paid ?105 plus second-class fares from London to Swansea. The fee works out at ?2.92p per hour - about two-thirds the rate of the national minimum wage.

I had to wait over a month for payment and then it arrived only after I protested at the delay.

With vice-chancellors earning a self-allocated average of over ?125,000, is it just me who is mad or is this a collective idiocy to which academics are prone?

Gerald Mars
London NW3