If you care about higher education, it’s time to set aside your naked jealousy and stop publicly carping about Vice-Chancellors’ pay packets.
Feel free to obsess in your private time, grow your hernia a little more each pay day when you see how little you are getting compared to the lucky duck in the big chair, even put it on the agenda of your staff meeting as a standing item so that everyone can get a rant of their chest.
But stop making snipes at the boss your key gripe about everything that is wrong with the sector, because it’s just bad strategy. You and your colleagues hear another blow landed for the proletariat, but the public just hears that your institution has too much money and isn’t spending it well, while real issues such as untied sector funding and effective performance management are suppressed.
Our celebrity-enslaved culture makes it a popular pursuit to pile on with righteous commentary about individuals, but pretending that our institutions have been presidentialised and that changes to the personnel or pay in VCs roles will unlock the change we need is infantile. VCs are positioned as the public face of the institution, but caught between ambitious Deans, Councils, staff and external stakeholders, all the while trying to ensure compliance with spiralling levels of government regulation, our beloved leaders have far less power than most perceive.
At a time when research funding in this country is an abomination, billions of dollars below parity with rivals; at a time when HECS-HELP interest rates robbed graduates of thousands of dollars, rising at 4.8% in 2024 and a whopping 7.1% last year, why are we trying to initiate industrial warfare over the remuneration of VCs?
I am not saying that the salaries are reasonable or deserved (although if someone wanted to sling me a million a year I wouldn’t be saying no), but what I am saying is the annual round of VC salary payments don’t rate a blip in sectoral funding issues. Monash and Melbourne reported revenues of around $3 billion yesterday, but headlines still chugged on about whether VCs deserve a million – 1/3000th of those budgets. Even if VC salaries were cut in half, or pegged to the packages of VCs in other nations, it won’t fix anything in your institution. At all.
This is a reductionist tall-poppy story that continues to sell the sector short. There is a bitter glee from the noisy few who like to position the industrial mess that continues to hobble the higher education sector as a class-based struggle, wasting oxygen prosecuting pyrrhic battles over VC bathrooms and salaries that are meaningless to the employment conditions or security of the staff they claim to serve, and of even less significance to the students who are too often selectively remembered when we want to trot out platitudes claiming student-centricity.
As for the argument that it’s symbolic of excess and poor procurement, it’s immoral, etc, I advocate a pragmatic approach – count the headlines on VC salaries vs stealthily slashed research funding, immoral degree pricing regimes or student poverty and then identify which issue is winning the public minds. A hint – VC salary stories are an annual staple of the press, as predictable as death and taxes, and have so far done nothing to change the status quo. You really think that changing the headline figure of how much a VC is going to create a cultural renaissance?
Do we want to be known as the sector of fanciful excess or the underfunded underdog? The VC salary stories blunt any campaigns for more cash because of their vacuous simplicity, perpetuated by bitter people with no experience in effective communication strategy implementation. Bile sticks far longer than begging.
There is a much larger, but related issue that does not get aired, because it is messy and wildly misunderstood, and because stories like VC pay suck up too much oxygen – allowing underperforming managers to continue their work unseen, hindering progress for staff and institutions. That issue is performance management.
We are happy to talk about performance management in our football codes – managing stars to achieve optimal individual and team outcomes by giving them less game time when injured, or changing their positions on the field. But we don’t apply the same positive approach to embracing performance management in institutions.
Performance management should have the same meaning and effectiveness in higher education as it does in sport. It should be regarded as something that is necessary and positive for every individual and for the team. Instead, it is almost always a burden. Almost all academic staff I speak to are chained to impossible time calculators and unreasonable allowances for preparation, marking or writing; while far too many professional staff have unclear job descriptions, no clear idea on KPIs and too little opportunity to create or thrive.
VCs receive incredibly large pay packets and the issue is not just sticker price shock, but also value – we don’t believe they are seven times more valuable than ourselves (or whatever multiple lies between your pay grade and the VCs).
But performance value of one individual is often almost inconsequential compared to performance of the thousands that they lead, even when they are controlling our direction.
Performance management is seen as the cause of unhappiness by many staff – but that is simply because it is done so poorly. Universities are being asked to teach twice as many students within a generation – fundamentally changing the model of delivery that we offer. The change, enabling access to cohorts who are currently underserved by the sector, is overwhelmingly seen as a positive, but the transformation required to achieve the Accord’s goals is massive.
We are only going to achieve the changes that we all want to achieve if we start to seriously reconsider the factors that are important in driving change and bringing staff and the wider public on track.
Will Future Campus continue to run VC pay stories? You’ll probably see the odd one, as part of our approach to covering a spectrum of news from across the sector, but it won’t be a regular headline. Accountability is critically important, but so is context.
But you’ll also see far more content about the issues that really matter. Celebrity journalism is not taking the sector anywhere. We won’t get blinded by the easy potshots.
