Left to right: Edward Bailey, Matt Waddup and Sally Hunt
They are the key agitators behind the university strikes who are accused of making students suffer.
Sally Hunt
As general secretary of the University and College Union she has been at the forefront of those criticising the large salaries for Vice Chancellors.
But Sally Hunt, 53, is not so keen to talk about her own remuneration and benefits, currently amounting to £138,682 a year. That includes a £3,557 a year car allowance, which has almost doubled in the last six years. It is all paid for by the union, whose 153 staff are paid an average of more than £50,000.
The lecturers who fund Ms Hunt’s salary, meanwhile, start on just £34,000, typically rising to £55,000 for those in more senior roles.
She was born in Germany while her father was teaching in an armed forces school, and studied at a comprehensive before achieving a 2:2 degree in international relations from the University of Sussex. She still lives in a Brighton, now in a £650,000 house.
And it may come as a surprise that she has never been an academic, instead working as a nightclub bouncer and in a bookshop before starting at the union.
Miss Hunt told the Guardian in 2005: ‘I don’t pretend to be an academic.
‘I wouldn’t expect them to have to go and do a negotiation. Equally, I think they don’t need me to be running their seminars.’
Newcastle university student Kelly Mashiter, 22, studying politics and Spanish, said of the union chief’s pay: ‘It seems hypocritical that UCU leaders are enjoying a substantial salary and benefits and yet they are critical of university vice chancellors for their pay.’
A spokesman for UCU defended Ms Hunt’s pay and benefits, saying she needed a car, and that her pay had only gone up by around 5 per cent in recent years, a third of the hike enjoyed by already better-paid vice chancellors.
Ed Bailey
He works as the deputy campaign chief of the University and College Union and has talked with relish of dancing on the grave of Margaret Thatcher.
Mr Bailey, 44, made the bad-taste reference in 2008 on Facebook, when he wrote in reference to the former Tory leader: ‘Party in Trafalgar Square the Saturday after Thatcher dies remember. A generation will dance on Maggie’s grave.’ In keeping with that, he also has shown his approval on social media for left-wing groups including the Young Communist League of Britain. And his Facebook page has featured a picture from a demonstration in Gaza in 2009 decrying ‘Israeli terrorists’, as well as ‘likes’ for the Jeremy Corbyn-supporting organisation Momentum.
Mr Bailey, who lives in an £850,000 house in St Albans, Hertfordshire, also campaigns against the badger cull which the Government launched to stop TB spreading to cattle.
Matt Waddup
The national head of policy and campaigns at the University and College Union certainly seems to have made trade unionism his life.
Mr Waddup, 50, returns home at night to a house in Brighton he shares with his partner Justine Stephens – who is the UCU head of campaigns.
His union activism began in the 1990s when he was a spokesman for the RMT, and worked on a four-day strike by 12,000 rail workers.
He moved on to university unionism, and in 2004 and 2005 helped supervise strikes at Bath, Brunel and Nottingham universities.
Mr Waddup has used a tactic known as ‘greylisting’, involving encouraging academics to turn against institutions in disputes with the union, and talked of making Brunel ‘a pariah university’ after it issued redundancies.