When the most challenging question faced by Scotland's universities is how to balance the books, it is alarming that they appear to think the answer is paying more in management salaries.

How Scotland’s higher education sector is run is currently under review by the Scottish Government, coinciding with a wider consultation on the future of universities.

Both Glasgow and Strathclyde universities earlier this year produced proposals to reduce the range of subjects on offer and cut non-core activities, such as adult education in the case of Glasgow and a theatre and gallery in the case of Strathclyde. In both cases the plans resulted in a storm of protest, not only from students but from the wider community, and have since been modified.

Nevertheless, redundancy programmes have reduced the number of academic staff at these and other universities and the legacy of the way the cuts packages were handled is growing distrust of senior management teams by lecturers. The review of governance was set up by the Scottish Education Minister, Michael Russell, in response to these concerns. As The Herald reveals today, they include the steep rise in the cost of management which has grown from £12 million to £16m between 2005 and 2010.

This partly reflects a general rise in salaries for all university principals in recent years triggered by the return from the US of the former principal of Aberdeen University, Professor Duncan Rice. In some cases the universities justify very high salaries by the success of principals in raising substantial endowments but above inflation increases at a time of job losses is poor management.

The other reason for the rise in costs is an increase in the size of management teams, which have increasingly taken over the running of universities from academics. In some cases this has led to accusations that management is out of touch with the learning ethos of universities. One difficulty in prescribing how Scotland’s universities should be run is that they differ widely in size, structure and the role they play in their local community and the country.

Universities are autonomous but ultimately dependent on the Scottish Government, through the Scottish Funding Council (SFC), for a substantial part of their income. Generally, the ancient universities tend to receive a smaller proportion of their costs from the SFC and the newest the majority of their income and there is a similar gulf in the way they are governed. Business acumen is no doubt required as fees from non-Scottish students become an important part of the income but the views of academics are essential in any university worth the name.

So far the debate on the future of Scotland’s universities has been largely reactive to Government policy, both at Westminster and Holyrood, and to the general economic climate. These must be major factors but in the process of adjustment to the changed financial landscape of different levels of fees for students from different parts of the UK, the question of who calls the tune must also be tackled.