. The estimated base pay is $97,675 per year. He is poised to potentially receive the largest remuneration package in the country from next month when former ABC managing director Mark Scott begins at the University of Sydney on $500,000 less than his predecessor, Michael Spence, who was paid $1.53 million last year. Source: Boden & Rowlands (2020). Vice-Chancellor's introduction It has been said that 2020 was an unprecedented year for the whole world - and ANU was no exception. 19 0 obj 5 0 obj DETUROPE - The Central European Journal of Regional Development and Tourism 2021, 13(3):130-141, doi: 10.32725/det.2021.023 /Contents 20 0 R I am literally doing the right thing and being financially disadvantaged by the current policies.Alex Ellinghausen. /ExtGState 34 0 R Yet, despite the eye-watering sums, executive pay remains less of a hot topic in Australia than in the UK, where vice-chancellor pay is much lower. Australian University Ranking | UniversityRankings.com.au. Ive got enough, Professor Schmidt told AFR Weekend during his Lunch with the AFR. Australian vice-chancellors also outearn their public university counterparts in the US, where full-year pay packages averaged about $560,000 (436,000) in 2016-17, according to the latest survey conducted byThe Chronicle of Higher Education. In interpreting the table, we need to be wary of changing vice-chancellor employment over the three years as this distorts remuneration. They don't have the training. endobj 141 Its where they raised their two children and planted 1.1 hectares of pinot grapes. I helped set up UFIT [University Foreign Interference Taskforce] so we can work constructively with government. Accordingly, this article advances understanding of the issue by exploring the dynamics of VC remuneration in the context of governance changes in universities as they have become progressively marketised. If not, we need to understand how salaries have been inflated and find ways to keep them in check. /MediaBox [0 0 595 842] Universities were penalised financially if these guidelines were breached. His predecessor, Michael Spence, earned more than $1.6 million in 2019, which included rent-free accommodation in a Victorian mansion in Sydneys Woollahra that has since been sold for $9 million. I keep reminding people that a university is not a corporation, says Schmidt. /Parent 2 0 R >> Were sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. Register a free Taylor & Francis Online account today to boost your research and gain these benefits: Paying the piper: the governance of vice-chancellors remuneration in Australian and UK universities, a New Social Research, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland, b School of Education, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia, Robbins remembered and dismembered, contextualising the anniversary, Department of Education Science and Training. 18 0 obj 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. /Rotate 0 University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell is due to become Australias highest-paid vice-chancellor from next month.Credit: Justin McManus. 5 Howick Place | London | SW1P 1WG. /ExtGState 48 0 R /Resources << /MediaBox [0 0 595 842] Following Jarratt, the government established a series of national funding councils that allowed it to steer universities at a distance using financial levers (Shattock, Citation2012). This approach was abandoned as marketisation set in. Most universities had awarded increases of between 1 per cent and 3.5 per cent, it said. /Resources << Jensen and Meckling (Citation1976) posit two ways to mitigate this problem. To put it plainly, ANU has had a rough few years. University councils, it argued, should assert their power vis-a-vis collegial senates. "Dr Spence is going to get half of what he does now, in a far more prestigious university," says Tom Smith. Campus Morning Mail is an independent newsletter written and published by Stephen Matchett, formerly a long-serving journalist at The Australian newspaper. In. 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. Indeed, some of Australias most highly paid vice-chancellors are attached to universities with relatively small budgets and well outside the worlds top-ranked institutions. 3435). "If Alan Joyce comes up with $10 billion in strategic options he's worth the $5 million they pay him.". This alignment makes it rational and efficient to trust the steward and extend them significant autonomy, with remuneration playing a less prominent role in motivating them. Julie Hare is the Education editor. Murray also recommended that universities be funded by specifically targeted recurrent triennial grants from the federal government, distributed via the states. The couple tied the knot in 1992. Executive compensation in public higher education: Does performance matter? University councils, which appoint remuneration committees, may therefore be insufficiently powerful or insufficiently self-interested as principals to control the process adequately. Print headline: Reeling it in: average Australian v-cs pay edges towards A$1m, Already registered or a current subscriber? That is, something ending with 999 or 000 would usually be a band. /Type /Page 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. Market-based salary setting mechanisms, such as benchmarking, appear to drive these increases. To unpick that, we explored the governance structures of universities. Licensed to the public under Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License license. They just keep going for more contracts and more casualisation, she said. /ProcSet [/PDF /Text] Help using this website - Accessibility statement, negotiated a salary that was $300,000 less than his predecessor, University Foreign Interference Taskforce. 18212506 >> Andrew Norton, higher education director at the Grattan Institute, said that university finance committees had become stacked with business people who have a very unrealistic sense of what salaries should be in the higher education sector. Soaring vice-chancellors' salaries in Australia and the UK reflect a "clear failure of university governance" that demands political intervention, researchers say. The evidence suggests that the presence of highly-paid staff impacts positively on VC pay. In 1957, the Murray Report found that Australian universities were grossly under-resourced and recommended the establishment of a grants commission to advise on funding requirements (Committee on Australian Universities, Citation1957). They are attracted by the fantastic health system and fantastic services. endobj >> Averages can be misleading because of the marked variation in size and nature of UK universities, but in 20182019 at British universities with income over 30 million a year, the average VC remuneration was 281,550 [AUD 530,182], with the highest being London Business School at 609,000 [AUD 1.10 million] (HESA, Citationn.d.). Australia has no comparable data set or consequent analysis; however, annual rises are dutifully reported in the press. Through Freedom of Information Act requests, the UK University and College Union found that, in 2018, 95% of VCs were either members of the remuneration committee that set their own salary or were entitled to attend meetings (Weale, Citation2018). Turning to the highest paid vice-chancellor in Australia, The University of Melbournes Professor Duncan Maskells salary is $1,469,999, a pay cut of $44,000 from 2020. It is an incredible honour, but to my mind an incredible responsibility at the same time.. The decline of public sector funding has contributed to a process of privatisation of the income stream, and corporatisation of the governance mechanisms and Im a beneficiary of that process, as deputy dean.. You are done. (Grove, Citation2018). Gschwandtner and McManus (Citation2018) also utilised this data, reporting that, between 2007 and 2015, VC remuneration rose by 20.6% in real terms. So, if universities hire highly paid marketing or communications staff, it drives up pay levels for those above (but not below) them. In giving evidence to the inquiry, Dr Spence acknowledged how well paid he and other vice-chancellors were. Jenny Anderson, reward lead Education & Research, at Mercer said there was a noticeable trend of restraint in the remuneration packages of new vice-chancellors compared to their predecessors. /XObject 45 0 R * provision of sector wide vice chancellor and senior remuneration data by the UCC including a sector annual report distributed to all members. For example, the vice-chancellor of Oxford University which was ranked second in the QS World University rankings this week was paid total remuneration of $A835,000 in 2019-20. Permission will be required if your reuse is not covered by the terms of the License. 2020, Universities Australia 2020 Higher Education Facts and Figures 2020, . Professor . NSW universities: op vice chancellors rake in million-dollar pay as In January, a NSW parliamentary inquiry urged the Auditor-General to review salaries paid to vice chancellors, arguing there was a failure of leadership when university bosses could earn 25 or 30 times more than staff, many of whom were in insecure work. Million-dollar-plus salaries are a PR problem with the government and the general public. >> 3 Approximately half of the chancellors of Australian university councils are remunerated (as are some council members) but in general the levels of remuneration are modest and do not compare with the fees paid to company directors. Relations between universities and the Coalition government are frosty, as the JobKeeper scenario spells out. Mr Norton said that it was ironic that vice-chancellor salaries attracted more criticism in the UK than Australia. Australia and the UK experience regular annual outrage over vice-chancellors' pay. Alex Ellinghausen. So there is a lot of mythology around the notion that academics in Australia are underpaid. Vanderbilt University Assistant Vice Chancellor Salaries 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. /MediaBox [0 0 595 842] 4 0 obj To request a reprint or commercial or derivative permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below. The UCC needs to make good on its promise to support member Universities in this transition through: * provision of best practice templates for the reporting of remuneration. In examining the public university annual reports for 2021, there are no disclosures per the voluntary code. But my happiness in life has nothing to do with the Nobel Prize. Professor Shields said that many Australian universities were now only nominally government institutions, with the bulk of their money coming from student fees and other private sources. Yet it is clear that the current system is not working in either universities or the public interest and also that mechanisms that limit VC remuneration (we suggest that limits on senior executive remuneration would naturally follow) can work. The Tribunal (Citation1974) found they were well paid in relation to equivalent roles elsewhere in society, a view unpopular with the then Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee and some individual VCs who protested that the tribunal risked undermining universities independence and should be abolished (Academic Salaries Tribunal, Citation1974). "Dr Spence is going to get half of what he does now, in a far more prestigious university, and the UCL salary is actually worldwide competitive," he said. Australias National Tertiary Education Union, however, has raised concern that vice-chancellors earned eight times the salary of senior lecturers in 2017. /Parent 2 0 R Davis et al. How Australian vice-chancellors' pay came to average $1 million and why Australias vice-chancellors are also paid considerably more than their peers in Britain and Canada. These reforms have since deepened and accelerated, especially in England where deregulation and student fees have heralded significant competition and marketisation. There is evidence that such deductions were subsequently made on a number of occasions (Academic Salaries Tribunal, Citation1985).