Letter: Marking mad

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