Australian Uni Bosses Are Paid Obscenely High Salaries For Absolutely No Good Reason
In the UK, there was outrage over a vice-chancellor earning $800k. In Australia, they earn millions.
Last week, the vice-chancellor of Bath University in the UK was forced to resign because the public was (rightly) outraged to find out she was being paid £468,000 ($812,500) each year.
It’s an obscene amount of money, especially when you consider how little cash academics and students have at their disposal. And yet, in Australia it would actually a pretty low figure. Our highest-paid vice-chancellor (the University of Sydney’s Dr. Michael Spence) actually makes almost double that, bringing home a cool $1.44 million each year.
In the UK, the vice-chancellor of Bath resigned after controversy over an "outrageous" salary of $810,000. In Australia, 27 vice-chancellors make more. https://t.co/kJ8gSZRZ06
— Naaman Zhou (@naamanzhou) January 21, 2018
In fact, The Guardian has run the numbers, and it turns out 12 Australian vice-chancellors are earning more than a million bucks a year, while 27 earn more than the Bath University salary that sparked national protest in the UK. The vice-chancellors at Newcastle University, James Cook University, and the University of Southern Queensland all earn more than the vice-chancellor of Oxford (and she herself is on $600k).
If this seems somehow wrong or unjust to you…you’re right. National Tertiary Education Union president Jeannie Rea described the salaries to The Guardian as “extremely embarrassing” and “out of proportion”, and Minister for Education Simon Birmingham has been calling for the salaries to be slashed for years.
As for the people making the big bucks, it won’t surprise you to hear that they’re not actually keen on earning less. Belinda Robinson, chief executive of Universities Australia, described pushes to cut vice-chancellor salaries as just the government’s attempt to distract from its own recent funding cuts to universities.
“This distraction strategy will not hoodwink the community,” she said, as though the people earning over a million dollars per annum are somehow the underdogs here.
And look, she’s partly right — the community won’t be hoodwinked, because they’re perfectly capable of holding two thoughts in their heads at once. It’s possible to be pissed off about the government’s cuts to higher ed (more on that here) and also mad about university heads earning more than twenty times the average Australian salary.
You can read The Guardian‘s article on vice-chancellor salaries here.