If universities continue to heed the call of corporatisation, the role of the academic – as we know it – will become extinct

As an early-career lecturer in a post-1992 university, I often feel like a rare bird in an ornate cage struggling to maintain its dignity in a discount superstore filled with pets. This bird knows it could have been a proud representative of a noble lineage and chirrups dolefully as it ruffles its plumes, but the song is drowned out by the bustling sale of cheap, plastic imitation bird-objects around it.

The British higher education sector is in full-on crisis mode and those chosen or imposed to oversee this crisis are, in the main, non-academics and are recruited from the private sector. Academic ideals are being crushed by the visions of middle-management bureaucrats who view the progress and survival of higher education as requiring its surrender to private sector ideals. The changes in higher education over the past few years have been dramatic, with £9,000 a year tuition fees only the latest and most public step in what appears to be a wholesale corporatisation of the sector.

Along with this "progress" comes inevitable inequality. The University and Colleges Union (UCU) have recently joined forces with Unison, Unite and EIS to organise a series of strikes by members over unfair pay. According to UCU figures, last year the Universities and College Employers Association offered university staff a paltry 1% pay rise, which actually amounts to a 13% pay cut since 2009.

Were we all in it together, such an offer might be palatable. However, it came as pay for vice-chancellors rose an average of 5% over the last year. According to UCU, over the same period some vice-chancellors received up to 19% pay rises, while some senior managers received a 30% bump. To put this in context, their average salaries are around £320,000 a year; a junior lecturer earns between £31,000 to 36,000. Caterers, cleaners, security staff and estates personnel earn much, much less, and most of them are now employed by private firms.

The arguments for the grotesque inequalities of pay are twofold: the universities cannot afford to offer pay rises "given current conditions", and senior executive salaries must stay competitive to attract the best talent. While the former is simply untrue, the latter justification is devastatingly familiar and illustrates the new mentality pervading higher education.

While senior representatives of universities are pushing through deflated salaries, academics are being asked to undertake more and more administrative tasks. Many of these are in the service of surveys such as the National Student Survey, that sickeningly sibilant acronym guaranteed to send any lecturer into a spasm of despair. Such despair is not because we don't care about students; far from it. We work hard to help students develop strong, critical voices and use their time at university to cultivate a deep involvement in their subject.

It is the overbearing importance afforded to the pursuit of statistics that we resist. Students now supply their opinions on a host of irrelevant issues and are harassed into believing that their satisfaction should maintain a constant 100%. The more students engage in such processes, the more they are encouraged to forget their own responsibilities and commitment to study as well as their own academic aspirations. In such a culture, students are finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish their everyday role as a consumer from that of being a student.

Given that a good deal of universities (not mine ... yet) are now forcing academic staff into private sector-style open-plan office environments, I suspect we will see more and more academics treated simply as information providers, selling their products like plastic birds.

With diminishing research hours and dwindling understanding of pure research beyond the scope of manager-led strategy panels, academics are fighting for the time and space in which to undertake scholarship. If universities continue to heed the call of corporatisation, the precious bird of academia will become extinct, leaving only its exotic feathers as relics of rapidly fading ideals.

Would you like to write for academics anonymous? Do you have an idea for a blog post about the trials, tribulations and frustrations of university life? Get in touch: claire.shaw@theguardian.com

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Looking for your next university role? Browse Guardian jobs for hundreds of the latest academic, administrative and research posts