Isaac Newton had to leave town for several months or years. But the comparison is wrong because vice-chancellors run public institutions, students are different to employees and there is little evidence any VCs have created new strategic directions in the face of the hit to their income during COVID-19. But the big difference is, if the CEOs of big companies are doing a good job strategically and bringing in billions of dollars, then shareholders are happy if they get a couple of million, Professor Smith said. For instance, a vice-chancellor may start in May and have eight months of remuneration recorded. To unpick that, we explored the governance structures of universities. The role of the Academic Salaries Tribunal means that Australia has a relatively well-defined point at which VC salaries were deregulated and the effect of this can be demonstrated empirically. 10.32725/det.2021.023 Gwilym Croucher, a higher education policy expert from the University of Melbourne, said: There are obviously big questions to be raised about where the money is being spent, given that universities are public entities and that their job is to not make surpluses, but to be sustainable.. /R7 57 0 R This approach was abandoned as marketisation set in. Until the 1990s, academics were the primary collegial decision makers and VCs were primus inter pares (Marginson & Considine, Citation2000; Shattock, Citation2017). Covid 'just a blip' in rising Australian vice-chancellor earnings << At least 28 of Australia's 41 vice-chancellors have accepted salary reductions, a Times Higher Education analysis has found. /Parent 2 0 R << Rockhampton-founded Central Queensland University has posted a $24.3 million loss while the Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Nicholas Klomp was paid an annual salary of up to $794,999, the . /Resources << I just dont care that much about money, the 54-year-old says. Australian universities are a millionaire factory for those who can scratch their way to the very top with the top 10 highest paid vice-chancellors all raking in million-dollar salary packages over the previous year. >> Professors Tom Smith and James Guthrie from Macquarie University Business School said the average pay of Australia's 39 vice-chancellors - the university equivalent of a chief executive - is $985,000, compared to just $670,000 in the US and $635,000 in the UK. In 19931994, VCs salaries averaged 93,498 [AUD$168,300], whilst the most junior lecturer grades had a mean salary of 20,412 [AUD $37,038], a ratio of 4.6, and senior lecturers 29,543 [AUD $53,607], a ratio 3.2. Governments could, for instance, set fixed ratios between VCs remuneration and mean academic salaries. Similar, but less extreme, trends are evident in the UK. There is evidence that such deductions were subsequently made on a number of occasions (Academic Salaries Tribunal, Citation1985). People overseas are scrambling to come and run a university here. As part of Deakin's COVID-19 response Professor Martin chose not to seek any portion of his contractual performance incentives for 2020. endobj Brian Schmidt, the worlds only Nobel Laureate to head a university, was Australias lowest paid vice-chancellor in 2020 pushing his earnings to nearly half the sector average. Bachan and Reilly (Citation2015, p. 53) detail the remarkable 59% remuneration growth (in real terms) enjoyed across the sector between 1997 and 2009. 2021: Vice-Chancellor agrees to unlock salary increases to ease COVID >> The government pushes freedom of speech and foreign interference agendas, but shows little interest in the role of universities in producing the next generation of doctors, nurses, lawyers, diplomats, architects, engineers, teachers and social workers. Yet, despite the eye-watering sums, executive pay remains less of a hot . Associate Professor in Education Leadership, Deakin University, Chair Professor, New Social Research, Tampere University. Source: Boden & Rowlands (2020). /ExtGState 31 0 R Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine. University vice-chancellors' pay is "ridiculous" compared to their overseas counterparts and COVID-19 has exposed the inability of most of them to deliver the performance that would be expected if they were earning the same money in the private sector, say two leading business academics. 141 In 1975, our research suggests, vice-chancellors at elite Australian research-intensive universities received about 2.9 times the pay of regular lecturers on Level B the second-lowest and most numerous academic grade. In the Group of Eights [sandstone, research-intensive universities] you dont, because the power is in the professoriate. /MediaBox [0 0 595 842] I think a lot about how to get my meaning out without becoming a headline.. Source: iStock. In 1983, the Hawke governments education minister, John Dawkins, commenced reduction of direct [state] control of the internal business of higher education institutions (Wells & Martin, Citation2013, p. 203, emphasis original). The estimated total pay for a Assistant Vice Chancellor at Vanderbilt University is $148,517 per year. "A CEO offers strategic direction. Many bosses lead from the front, ceding 20-plus per cent of their pay to help plug pandemic shortfalls . >> University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell is due to become Australias highest-paid vice-chancellor from next month.Credit: Justin McManus. I am literally doing the right thing and being financially disadvantaged by the current policies.Alex Ellinghausen. /Contents 33 0 R The salary gap between Australias university bosses and their staff has widened after solid pay rises launched more vice-chancellors into the million-dollar club. Thirteen Australian vice-chancellors earned more than A$1 million last year, up from 11 in 2016, with signs that others will soon join them. Shifting cultures to create student partnerships, Four ways for students with disabilities to access university, Why Uni Wollongong created an Integrity Division, Universities lack resources in academic language and learning, Backward mapping assessments in a programme-level approach, Big Accord issues are access and research, Myth-busting on curricular approaches to student wellbeing, The purposes of higher education: social status and economic outcomes not what they once were, How Uni Wollongong learned to manage change. >> Do not underestimate the halo effect of having smart people around you, Schmidt says. Salaries are paid in contractual exchange for work undertaken and are a cost of production. Warm Regards, Jenn Stringer, Associate Vice Chancellor for IT and Chief Information Officer. Copyright 20102023, The Conversation Media Group Ltd. An exception to the rule, Australian National Universitys Brian Schmidt is a Nobel laureate and vice-chancellor of one of the countrys most prestigious universities, but was the second-lowest-paid on about $650,000 in 2019. VCs and their representative bodies consistently justify this increased remuneration with agency rhetoric, arguing that it reflects their appropriate share of university performance improvements. Further, there is a demonstrated link between these increases and formulaic pay-setting mechanisms such as benchmarking (Gschwandtner & McManus, Citation2018). Benchmarking therefore casts an aura of market-based objectivity, but is essentially self-fulfilling (Essaji & Horton, Citation2009). From the nineteenth century, the state increasingly funded universities, but the government took care not to exercise control as a consequence (Ainley, Citation2014). Million-dollar-plus salaries are a PR problem with the government and the general public. If they lose confidence in you, its game over. See how your uni Vice Chancellor's pay compares to everyone else's They generate strategic direction and that equals value creation," said Professor Smith who is the head of the Department of Applied Finance at Macquarie University. /Resources << Top 10 Vice-Chancellor Salary Packages; Rank Uni VC Name Salary Package ($) 1: University of Melbourne: Glyn Davis* 1,589,999: 2: University of Sydney: Michael Spence: . To put it plainly, ANU has had a rough few years. << Ive got enough, Professor Schmidt told AFR Weekend during his Lunch with the AFR. /Rotate 0 Im just not interested.. /Type /Page $100 million a year, still wouldnt do it. /Pages 2 0 R 2022-02-20T17:38:29+01:00 % UK university council members are currently volunteers and are not remunerated. We are doing that. Karleen Minney. Australia has no comparable data set or consequent analysis; however, annual rises are dutifully reported in the press. SolenSoftware Actavia 3.4 (Journal system) /Contents 47 0 R Westacott joins academic gravy train as VC salaries go up and profits /Resources << << The international student sector, which props up Australian universities and their research efforts, started collapsing after borders were hastily closed last February. The Australian market is way out of whack with the rest of the world but fundamentally the market does work. Imperial College London's Alice Gast got a bumper pay package of 554,000 last year, placing her top of the table of VC pay, The Tab can reveal. Rent-seeking points to a significant breakdown in university governance. The propertys name is Maipenrai a Thai word meaning shell be right, no worries that they inherited from the previous owner. The extent to which these have been effective remains moot. Over the past 30 years, Australian and British universities have been marketised, emulating private-sector for-profit organisations. In the first half of the twentieth century, they were largely funded by the states, supplemented by student fees (Forsyth, Citation2014). It also gets him an invitation to Davos every year, which he accepts. /Subject (DETUROPE - The Central European Journal of Regional Development and Tourism 2021, 13\(3\):130-141, doi: 10.32725/det.2021.023) Mr Norton said that it was ironic that vice-chancellor salaries attracted more criticism in the UK than Australia. In interpreting the table, we need to be wary of changing vice-chancellor employment over the three years as this distorts remuneration. Schmidt and Gordon have a pretty bush block near the small town of Sutton, a 30-minute drive from Canberra.