The Importance Of Social Responsibility In Universities

Nowadays social responsibility is everywhere. Businesses can be socially responsible, non – profit organizations can be as well and even people. It all depends on their actions and how do they interpret social responsibility. General definition of social responsibility according to Cambridge English Dictionary is “the practice of producing goods and services in a way that is not harmful to society or the environment.” (2016a). I would add to that definition, that nowadays “not harmful” is not enough and often it is replaced by a word “beneficial”. And, although the concept of social responsibility has been in use for quite a long time now, its description and application is still an object of discussion (Richard E. Smith, 2011). This means …show more content…
As a consequence of that, some problems arise in universities. For example, just this May a two day UK wide university employees’ strike occurred. The reason for that was too small pay rise of 1.1% whereas universities’ vice – chancellors annual salary increased by 5.1% (Weale, 2016). Another sensitive topic, which debases universities as socially responsible institutions is wage gap between genders. Even though, the gender equality is very important nowadays and is highly addressed issue in every workplace, UK’s higher education system is flawed in regards to this issue. The total male academics salary spend accounts for £1.3bn bigger sum than for female academics (UCU, 2016). To summarize, in order for university to be a socially responsible institution it should have a positive effect on its environment and community and it can demonstrate it in a lot of ways, but sometimes universities act opposite of their words and not socially responsible in any