A book in which three editors and 30 contributors address a single question inevitably risks repeating the same information, and the editors of this volume, all of them media academics (or "hackademics" as they style themselves) seem not to have worried too much about duplicating facts or even making them consistent. Some facts, however, do bear repetition, and I was happy to come across the following figures twice. When John Smith quit as chief executive of BBC Worldwide in December 2012, his BBC pension pot stood at roughly £5m. He wasn't fired – he left to become chief operating officer at Burberry on £575,000 a year. Nonetheless, he also took with him a bonus of £222,000; another £386,000 comprising deferred bonuses, profit-sharing bonuses and taxable benefits; and a year's salary in lieu of notice. Altogether the BBC paid him £1,396,000 in his last year of service, though he later returned half a year's pay (the sum was either £205,000 or £244,000 depending on which of the book's writers you believe).

True, Worldwide is the BBC's commercial wing – the part that makes money rather than spends it – and during Smith's eight-year tenure it made a steady profit (£112m in 2004/05, £125m in 2011/12, both figures at 2014 prices). But Worldwide couldn't exist without public funding; in Michael Grade's definition, its core role is to exploit the intellectual property funded by the licence fee. And in any case, Smith had spent the previous 15 years of his career in the BBC mainstream, shielded from the allegedly brutal hire-and-fire of the free market. A pension pot of £5m was certainly a grand reward, potentially yielding a tax-free lump sum of £1.25m and a lifetime's income of £200,000 a year, even at today's miserable annuity rates.

Of all the uproarious scandals that have recently beset the BBC – the unexposed guilt of Jimmy Savile, the tarnished innocence of Lord McAlpine – the one least easily explained as a combination of unfortunate coincidences are the lavish pay-offs engineered by what the present director-general, Tony Hall, calls its "officer class". Under pressure from the BBC Trust to reduce the corporation's bureaucracy, the then DG, Mark Thompson, sacked 150 senior managers over the years 2010-2012 at a cost of £25m in severance payments, £1.4m of which the BBC was not contractually obliged to pay. The management was ingenious in its generosity. It found a way, for example, to give nearly £400,000 to its director of marketing and audiences, who was strictly ineligible for severance pay because she'd worked continuously for the BBC for only 17 months. Of the excess as a whole, Margaret Hodge, the chair of the Commons public accounts committee, blamed the corruptions of the club. "There was a culture at the top where people had known each other for years and years … it seemed right [to them] they should look after each other when they lost their jobs, giving out lots of money in unacceptably high pay-offs."

But big pay-offs need big salaries. How did the BBC come to pay its executives so much in the first place? Nicholas Jones and Suzanne Franks, two former BBC journalists, name John Birt as the culprit. The BBC governors had acquiesced to his demand that his DG's salary be paid to him via his private company, thereby reducing his tax burden. Nobody would have objected to this arrangement at Birt's previous employer, London Weekend, but it caused outrage at the BBC. To appease opinion, the corporation put Birt on staff and PAYE, but at the same time increased his salary to compensate for his extra tax liabilities. Franks describes the episode as "the beginning of the collision of private sector and public service expectations". The old officer class balanced relatively low salaries against job security, generous pensions and perks such as Centre Court seats. The new officer class wanted (and got) salaries and bonuses that compared nicely with their rivals at ITV, while their perks now ran to private health insurance.

In Franks' words, managers were paid "eye-watering salaries on the basis that this was what the market required to retain their talents. But it was never really explained where exactly the temptations might come from to lure away their services." Adjusted for inflation, Thompson's "package" as DG in 2008/9 was four times as much as Alasdair Milne earned in the same job 20 years earlier. Meanwhile the titles and numbers of the boss class lengthened and increased, alienating the programme-making staff who kept the BBC's reputation alive in a climate that has often been politically and commercially hostile, with enmity from governments on the one hand and the Murdoch family on the other (if, that is, those two hands can be differentiated).

Trimming this executive largesse became essential when in 2010 the incoming coalition froze the licence fee at £145.50, which meant cutting the budget by 16% until the present term of the BBC's royal charter, renewable every 10 years, runs out at the end of 2016. None of the largesse had been a secret. In a celebrated Today programme encounter the novelist PD James told Thompson that the BBC seemed to her "like a very large and unwieldy ship that's been floating there since 1920, taking on more and more and more cargo, building more decks to accommodate it, recruiting more officers, all very comfortably cabined, usually at salaries far greater than their predecessors enjoyed and with a crew somewhat discontented and some a little mutinous." It became scandalous mainly in retrospect, after the chair of the BBC Trust, Chris Patten, agreed that his ill-fated DG, George Entwistle, receive a £450,000 pay-off after only 54 days in the job. It was twice his legal due.

Of course, to a banker this money (aka "a reward for failure") would be chickenfeed; even in the etiolated world of newspaper editors, it wouldn't raise too many eyebrows. But £450k to the average licence payer represents a large multiple of their annual earnings and is therefore an attractive snippet of evidence that a government can add to its argument for reducing the BBC's power and scope. "The political vultures have already been circling," writes Raymond Snoddy of the next licence-fee negotiation, pointing to a warning by Grant Shapps, the Tory party chair, that the BBC could lose exclusive rights to the licence fee unless it tackled what he described as a culture of secrecy, waste and "unbalanced reporting". Snoddy predicts that the next negotiation over the licence will be "the most difficult and unpredictable there has ever been".

Britain has no more culturally important institution than the BBC; it is to Britain's soft (and softening) power what the Grand Fleet was to the hard-edged empire, loved at home and respected abroad, one of those things that in Grade's description helps define "the curious, often mystical aura of Great Britain". Politicians who would like to weaken it – by, for example, "top-slicing" and redistributing the licence fee – are surely no more than pygmy ideologues who lack the imagination to understand the irreparable consequences of their dreams. Still, does the BBC try to do too much? Would it be better if it did less? The hostility it attracts from newspapers isn't always prompted by political belief (the Mail) or the drive to increase the market share of the newspaper publisher's associated TV station (Murdoch). The BBC's ambitious online news site, which can be accessed without charge anywhere in the world, holds back newspapers from monetising their own digital output from fear of losing their traffic to their publicly funded rival. Perhaps nothing can (or should) be done about that, but Peter Preston, a former Guardian editor, makes a good case for the BBC abandoning its commitment to local radio on the grounds that England's 39 stations have damaged local newspapers, which "founded bottom-up in existing communities" – rather than planted by BBC diktat – "are more natural growths with deeper ties". Local radio piggybacks for its news on the local paper; unlike the local paper editor, however, the station manager earns £100,000 a year.

Preston's is one of many insightful essays in an anthology that does itself no favours by describing its writers as "an unprecedented galaxy of movers and shakers (past and present) in British broadcasting". Vin Ray's day-by-day narration of Newsnight's lamentable McAlpine episode, which cost Entwistle his job, stands out as an excellent piece of sympathetic reporting. David Elstein's case for subscription funding is also impressive as a fact-strewn polemic – until that is, one reaches the strangest passage in the book, in which Elstein, recounting the reasons the licence fee might survive, writes, "first, population growth has resumed, and is forecast to accelerate. Although the BBC might feel nervous about being one of the few public bodies with a vested interest in mass immigration, the connection between that phenomenon and BBC revenues is little understood among the general public." (What connection? And with what result?)

So is the BBC in crisis? The consensus seems to be, not yet – though it soon may well be. Steven Barnett predicts a gathering tide of anti-BBCism from Tory politicians and newspapers in the runup to the charter renewal. He writes: "If Britain wants to sustain a cultural institution which is still trusted and enjoyed by the vast majority of its own citizens while being praised and admired throughout the world, we must have the political will to make the resources available." In other words, an inflation-linked licence fee must be restored (and wisely spent). That, rather than the history of the sexual predators it once employed, will be the BBC's make or break.

• Is the BBC in Crisis?, edited by John Mair, Richard Tait, Richard Lance Keeble, is available from Arima at £19.95.