The NTEU said that the average starting pay for a senior lecturer had risen 2.4 per cent to about A$117,300. . Professor Tom Smith, who heads the department of applied finance at Macquarie University, said vice-chancellors salaries had been inappropriately benchmarked against government department and corporate chief executives since the 1980s. How Australian vice-chancellors ' pay came to average $1 million and The package of the average female university leader, which stood at A$900,000 last year, and was increasing less quickly, is set to pass A$1 million in 2020. The shift in the UK and Australian universities from collegial to more corporate forms of operating has engendered a corresponding shift in governance from stewardship to the agency. Gordon, who is now the chief economist at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Schmidt finished their PhDs within a few weeks of each other in 1993. I think a lot about how to get my meaning out without becoming a headline. Registered in England & Wales No. As does the Australian National University. << In the dominant agency form of governance used in business, shareholders are cast as principals and executives as their agents. By 2020, Australia had 39 self-governing and self-owning publicly funded universities. Universities 2018 annual reports and financial statements reveal that VCs salaries ranged from AUD $1,582,500 [867,998] at the University of Sydney to AUD $622,250 [341,302] at Charles Darwin University. While any remuneration for board memberships is not disclosed, non-executive directors of large publicly listed companies such as CSL can receive in the vicinity of $1,000,000. Dr Spence's estimated salary is $1.6 million but the UCL president earned $736,000 in 2018-19. /Type /Page He said Sydney was arguably the highest paying university in Australia in what is on average the highest paying university system in the world. /ExtGState 51 0 R Weve been struck by the biggest shock in the history of higher education, Schmidt says. He donated $100,000 of his share in the 10 million Swedish krona (roughly $1.5 million in todays money) Nobel Prize money to a primary school science program the federal government had just defunded. What would have happened to that ground-breaking research if he hadnt got the job? Core to that process has been the transition of vice-chancellors from being first among equals in academic communities to entrepreneurial chief executive officers of quasi-corporations. https://doi.org/10.32725/det.2021.023 It will be hard for an incoming Labor government not to put the screws on those universities that made money while laying off staff.. Table 3 lists the universities in England in 20172018 with the highest remuneration ratios. Consequently, the federal government established the Australian Universities Commission, which centrally determined [p]retty much everything on funding (Forsyth, Citation2014, p. 129).