Academics call for cut to vice-chancellors’ pay

‘Obscene’ salaries for university vice-chancellors should be halved to $500,000, academics are ­demanding.

Academics are angry about high executive salaries at universities.​

“Obscene” salaries for university vice-chancellors should be halved to $500,000, academics are ­demanding.

National Tertiary Education Union president Alison Barnes said staff and students were bearing the brunt of university cost-cutting, as vice-chancellors continued to pocket million-dollar salaries.

“University vice-chancellor and executive wages are obscene,’’ Ms Barnes said.

“They are public institutions, yet the universities have business models that are premised on casualisation and wage theft. Universities need to prioritise staff and students’’.

Ms Barnes said the vice-chancellors of 37 universities averaged $1m salaries.

“That’s extraordinary, and particularly galling in the context of wage theft across the sector,’’ she said. “Their salaries should be capped at $500,000 a year.’’

Universities Australia chief executive Catriona Jackson defended the high pay on Monday.

“Vice-chancellors’ salaries are set by university governing bodies and are subject to carefully conducted benchmarking against similarly large and complex institutions,’’ she said.

“Post Covid-19, many universities are looking at the makeup of their workforce, including casual staff.”

Fair Work Ombudsman Sandra Parker has singled out 11 universities for investigations into staff underpayment this year, warning of “high-level enforcement action’’.

A Senate inquiry into wage theft revealed in March that half the nation’s 40 universities have been implicated in the underpayment of staff.

Federal Education Department data shows that universities have shed 29,000 full-time equivalent workers, including academics, since the start of the pandemic, when the loss of fee-paying foreign students blew a hole in university budgets.

Some vice-chancellors took a temporary pay cut but the latest university annual reports reveal that million-dollar salaries remain the norm, with other senior executives commonly paid more than $500,000.

At the University of Sydney, 11 executives earned more than $400,000 last year, including now-retired vice-chancellor ­Michael Spence, who was paid $1.6m. His replacement, former ABC managing director Mark Scott, has taken a 40 per cent pay cut.

Monash University is backpaying $8.6m to casual staff it underpaid over six years.

Its vice-chancellor, Margaret Gardner, who has publicly apologised for the underpayments, earned $1.2m last year while 17 other executives earned more than $400,000.

La Trobe University, which also apologised for underpaying staff, paid vice-chancellor John Dewar between $880,000 and $890,000 last year. The University of Melbourne had to backpay 1500 academics in 2020 after the union revealed that staff had been paid a set “piece rate’’ to mark ­assessments at the rate of one every three minutes.

Controversy over university executive pay coincides with complaints from the National Union of Students about a fall in the quality if teaching at universities during the pandemic.

Ms Barnes said staff cuts were affecting the quality of teaching on some campuses.

“Students are paying more for a range of degrees and staff are at breaking point over workloads,’’ she said.