Vice-chancellor pay debate overblown, Senate inquiry told

The boss of the Australian National University (ANU) receives A$300,000 (£146,000) less than her governing council was originally prepared to pay her, a submission to a Senate committee has revealed.

ANU said its vice-chancellor’s salary had been “benchmarked” at A$1.3 million in February 2023, 10 months before Genevieve Bell began in the role. However, she and the council had agreed on a total package of A$1.1 million and Bell had requested a further 10 per cent cut last October, as the institution confronted a financial crisis.

Executive remuneration is a hot topic in submissions to the Senate Education and Employment Committee, which is inquiring into university governance. ANU is among the institutions accused of overpaying their leaders following revelations that Bell pocketed earnings from her former employer, Intel, for 10 months after becoming leader.

The submission from the University of Canberra, which paid its former vice-chancellor Paddy Nixon a sector-record A$1.785 million in the year of his abrupt departure, said its legislation required its governing council to “act always in the best interests of the university as a whole” on matters including executive remuneration.

The submission from the Australian Catholic University, which paid A$1.1 million to reverse the appointment of an allegedly pro-abortion law dean, says nothing on the topic of executive remuneration.   

ANU, however, devoted almost a page to the topic. It said it had tightened its reporting of senior executive remuneration on the urging of the auditor-general’s office, and had expanded its use of “market salary benchmarking data” in 2024.

It had also “tested” its proposed vice-chancellor’s salary with the president of the federal government’s Remuneration Tribunal, whose act requires it to advise ANU and Canberra on executive remuneration – although it has not answered Times Higher Education’s questions on whether it has performed that role.

Shadow education minister Sarah Henderson has vowed to refer all vice-chancellors’ salaries to the tribunal if her Liberal-National coalition wins the forthcoming federal election. Western Sydney University’s submission to the committee supports that approach, while a bill tabled by cross-bench senator Jacqui Lambie would limit vice-chancellors’ salaries to A$430,000 – roughly equivalent to the federal treasurer’s pay.

But Andrew Deeks, vice-chancellor of Murdoch University and former president of University College Dublin, warned against such measures. He said that when Irish university leaders’ salaries had been capped to the prime minister’s pay, local universities had “struggled to recruit leaders from outside Ireland and the best Irish leaders went elsewhere”.

Deeks said Australian vice-chancellors’ salaries were in the “expatriate band” needed to convince experienced university leaders to move their families to Australia. “The strategy has been effective in bringing a diverse range of experienced individuals into the roles,” his submission says.

“Comparisons with Oxford and Cambridge universities are misleading, because those universities are smaller than many Australian universities, much of the teaching is done in the [independent] university colleges…and there is a prestige factor.”

Charles Sturt University said the “debate about excessive vice-chancellor remuneration” had been overblown. “Executive pay is a tiny percentage of expenditure,” its submission says. “Even steep reductions in vice-chancellor remuneration would make an imperceptible difference to the budget available for education, facilities or research.”

But the Psychosocial Safety Climate Observatory, at the University of South Australia, said around 80 per cent of university staff believed that vice-chancellors were overpaid or “extremely” overpaid – a disapproval rating roughly coinciding with their vulnerability to work-induced mental injury.

“A sense of injustice is wearing on university staff,” the observatory’s submission says. “In…a sector which has seen volatility, job losses, an ebbing of government oversight and now well-publicised underpayment cases, steady increases to executive-level remuneration elicit increasing public and personnel disbelief and anger.”

The committee has extended its reporting date by four months to 1 August 2025. This means that it will not issue a report before the coming federal election, and may not publish one at all.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com