The uni rich list: Vice chancellors on $1 million salaries revealed

Australia’s top-earning vice chancellors are pocketing six times the salaries of their university’s most senior professors, as the tertiary education union calls for an inquiry into growing wage theft scandals.

The latest annual reports reveal that five of Victoria’s eight universities paid their vice chancellors more than $1 million last year, as did about half of Sydney’s universities.

Analysis by this masthead found about half of Australia’s vice chancellors have now cracked the million-dollar club, often outstripping the salaries of their counterparts at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions.

Monash University’s former vice chancellor, Margaret Gardner, topped the list before her departure last year, earning nearly $1.6 million – about $190,000 more than she was paid in 2022, including entitlements, in a role later taken over by acting VC Susan Elliott.

The University of Sydney’s VC, Mark Scott, received a pay rise of around $75,000 in 2023, taking home more than $1.17 million.

The outgoing VC of Melbourne University, Duncan Maskell, was on more than $1.4 million, though he took a pay cut of about $60,000 compared to the year before, while Latrobe’s then VC, John Dewar, took a roughly $20,000 cut.

But most universities gave their vice chancellor a pay rise in 2023, including those recording deficits.

Universities, squeezed by decades of government funding cuts and then the COVID-19 pandemic, have been mired in staff underpayment scandals and redundancy rounds. Yet vice chancellor salaries still regularly double those of prime ministers and premiers.

Oxford professor of higher education Simon Marginson, previously of Melbourne University, said vice chancellors’ pay should be closer to that of their staff, but acknowledged running a university was a difficult job.

He said competition for prestige in the sector had inflated salaries, as VC pay packets became a sign of where each institution sat in the national pecking order.

A public process legislated by the states for stable remuneration, governed beyond just closed-door university councils, could help rein in salaries, Marginson said.

The tertiary education union’s Joo-Cheong Tham, also a Melbourne University law professor and integrity expert, called on university heads to reduce their pay to meet community expectations, as former ANU vice chancellor Brian Schmidt did in 2020.

Tham’s own analysis of 2023 figures found the highest vice chancellor salaries in Victoria were more than six times those of their university’s senior professors – and 20 to 30 times the wages of junior staff.

This “spectacular inequity” fuelled disconnect on campus, he said, with vice chancellors “seemingly treated as a species apart from their staff”.

Some in the sector, however, have defended vice chancellor pay as justified given their mammoth remit: running complex institutions the size of ASX top 10 companies, with more staff and huge numbers of enrolments, yet operating with less research funding than many comparable universities overseas.

“It’s a multibillion dollar industry,” said Professor Emeritus Frank Larkins, a higher education researcher at Melbourne University. “To attract world-class leadership I think the million dollar plus salary is not unreasonable in this day and age.”

Australian universities are also spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year hiring consultants from firms such as PwC.

Victorian universities, which are required to disclose their spends, splashed more than $70 million on consultants last year – more than before the pandemic, though down from $80 million in 2022.

Vice chancellor salaries are often double those of prime ministers and premiers. Credit: Jason South

Analysis by the union reveals wage theft in the sector is even higher than previously thought, topping $380 million nationally on “a conservative tally”.

In their latest annual reports, nine universities across Australia included $168 million worth of provisions for staff underpayments not previously disclosed, including nearly $10 million at Melbourne University, and more than $70 million each at Sydney University and the University of New South Wales.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has vowed to overhaul university governance after his Accord review of the sector flagged it for priority reform last year, and has slammed wage theft as unacceptable.

A national expert council to examine university governance, including executive salaries and board make-ups, is being set up. But experts say support for a crackdown has been lukewarm so far from states, long wary of federal overreach into the sectors they regulate.

In 2021, a NSW parliamentary inquiry urged action, finding it was a failure of leadership for vice chancellors’ salaries to be at times “25 or 30 times more” than those of staff.

The union’s national president, Alison Barnes, said governments needed to rein in “overpaid and unaccountable vice chancellors”.

Yet Group of Eight’s Vicki Thomson said universities were among the most complex institutions in Australia.

Group of Eight chief executive Vicki Thomson.Credit: Peter Brai

“This success is driven by the leadership of our universities – our vice chancellors, whose salaries are rightly determined by their governing councils,” she said.

With Broede Carmody

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