Be it the quality of institutional management, freedom of speech on campus, or measurable academic outcomes, Australia’s higher education system is in crisis.
Those of you familiar with the meticulous research undertaken by the IPA’s Bella d’Abrera and Brianna McKee will know that higher education in Australia has been in a death spiral for the past decade or so. With freedom of speech and inquiry deliberately suppressed on campus, and humanities curricula fatally compromised by what Sir Roger Scruton famously dismissed as the “Parisian nonsense machine”, our universities are plummeting down the international rankings.
So bad has the situation become, and so outraged the taxpayers who fund the nonsense, the federal government felt obliged in 2022 to initiate a review of the failing system by a Panel of Eminent Persons.
Another inquiry, convened by the Senate’s Standing Committees on Education and Employment, has been inundated with submissions from those infuriated by the salaries paid to vice chancellors of institutions notable only for their wokeness and bloated administrations.
In 2023, 38 vice chancellors in this country earned more than the Prime Minister. Nineteen of them earned more than $1 million per annum. These included the heads of 12 universities that did not make the top 200 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings in 2023.
In that year, the vice chancellor of the University of Canberra, ranked somewhere between 400 and 500 in the world, was paid $1.785 million. The vice chancellor of the University of Oxford, ranked number 1 for the last ten years, was paid £573,000 (AUD$1,073,000). So, the salary for the vice chancellor of Oxford, founded in the mid-12th century, was approximately 60 per cent of that paid to the bloke running what was initially a college of advanced education built in the suburbs of Canberra in 1967. (To his credit, the new vice chancellor of the university, former Labor leader Bill Shorten, took a massive cut in salary and earns a mere $860,000 a year.)
Another travesty is the salary of approximately $1.2 million paid this year to the vice chancellor of the Queensland University of Technology, ranked somewhere between 201 and 250, and where an anti-racism (read anti-Israel) symposium featured the infamous cartoon of “Dutton’s Jew”.
(We are reliably assured, however, that IPA Senior Fellow, John Roskam will be paid substantially less than the PM upon taking office as president of Campion College in December.)
As a result of the 2022-23 inquiry, a new agency, the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC), will supposedly address problems around university governance, excessive vice chancellor salaries, and unmanageable international student numbers.
But the danger is that ATEC will serve as a stalking horse for a woke federal government eager to dictate what is taught to whom. Given the abject failure of the federal government’s National Curriculum in our schools, we can only fear for the future of a higher education system run out of Canberra.
This article from the Autumn 2026 edition of the IPA Review is written by IPA Communications Manager Michael Barrett.
