Jarvis has faced an almost impossible job this year. By a quirk of history – and likely hubris of past leaders – UUK is inexplicably responsible for representing institutional members of the USS pension scheme, despite the existence of a perfectly decent employers’ representative body UCEA, and despite the fact only a minority of UUK’s own members are part of the USS scheme.
And so it was UUK, led by Jarvis, in the firing line when the dispute ramped up earlier this year, derailing UUK’s ability to lobby for the whole sector to government on critical issues from Brexit to funding and beyond. The ferocious nature of the ad hominem personal attacks Jarvis faced on social media during the dispute would cause most people to walk away. That many of his own vice chancellors decided to throw him and UUK under the bus rather than suffer such opprobrium locally served mostly to make them appear self-interested and short-termist. But under the bus he went, a self-inflicted wound on sector cohesion and its external influence at a critical moment, seriously damaging UUK’s political capital and inevitably leading to a big drop down the Power List for Jarvis this year after several years of gains.