Recently, media outlets were awash with reports of university vice-chancellors’ salaries. The reports emanate from a Council on Higher Education report commissioned by the former minister of Higher Education, Science and Technology, Dr Blade Nzimande, in 2020.
Although the report has yet to be publicly released, the results suggest that we may be facing a real crisis in the South African higher education sector. In their presentation to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Higher Education, Science and Innovation on 21 February 2024, the council reported that university vice-chancellors’ median total cost to company packages was around R3,966,069 in 2019.
If the reported numbers are to be believed, the institution with the highest total cost to company salary appeared to be the University of Johannesburg (UJ), which was said to be sitting on R7,166,995 for its vice-chancellor’s earnings in the year 2019.
The “poorest” earning vice-chancellor in the country appeared to be from the University of Venda, who was earning a “meagre” R3,033,988.
To put these reported numbers into perspective, the top six universities with the reported highest total cost to company packages for their vice-chancellors are UJ, the University of South Africa, Stellenbosch University, the University of Zululand, the University of Limpopo and the University of the Witwatersrand. Their six vice-chancellors are said to have collectively earned just above R31.7-million.
Staggering
If that doesn’t shock, then you would be equally unmoved to know that senior executives are reported to also have shared in the university spoils. From 2005-2019, senior executive medium basic salaries were reported to have grown by a staggering 208%, from R524,278 to R1,617,733.
What was particularly mind bending and truly sobering was when a News24 article revealed that a former vice-chancellor of UJ whose term ended in February 2018 earned R54.8-million over a five-year period, which included R10.1-million in performance bonuses and an additional R18.8-million in deferred compensation.
If these reported numbers are true, then something is fundamentally broken in our higher education system.
Looking at these exorbitant and highly inflated packages, there is no real justification or rationale. According to the Council on Higher Education report, there is no connection between the high financial packages awarded to the vice-chancellors, and 1) the management of the university enrolment; 2) the financial management and health of the university; and 3) the knowledge production and capacity of the institution.
It is worth highlighting that what is usually ignored and often underemphasised in our public discourse is the extent to which the South African higher education sector is still largely precarious in nature and heavily reliant on short-term, part-time and economically insecure contract staff who fulfil the bulk of its responsibilities.
The reported excessive and unjustifiable vice-chancellor remuneration packages are an insult to the growing precarity that a lot of staff members face in our universities.
Why the excessive remuneration packages are disturbing
From the latest 2021 publicly available data from the Council on Higher Education, we now know that at least 57% (86,549) of all staff members in our public universities are on temporary and short-term contracts.
In gender terms, the bulk of precarious and casual workers are women who are sitting on 82,594, compared with only 68,828 men who are on part-time contracts. In racial terms, we had 48,425 African, 7,721 coloured, 5,029 Indian and 24,130 white employees on part-time contracts.
The dangers of having a precarious higher education system are plenty. Firstly, this is devastating and debilitating for the staff members who must live on short-term contracts under the hope and prayer that they will someday be permanently employed. The less said about the effects on their lives, well-being, mental health, family, anxiety, frustrations, constant fears of contract renewal and ability to live, the better.
Secondly, having the bulk of your staff members as casual employees is terrible for retaining institutional memory, staff building and capacity training.
And perhaps worse for those of us who value teaching and learning and the importance of a quality undergraduate education, this creates a pattern of outsourcing teaching to tutors, postdocs and/or contract lecturers who often have little experience. And they sometimes struggle to engage with the politics of curricula, or what the late philosopher Wally Morrow called epistemological access – that is, access to the curriculum and disciplinary goods of the university.
Thus, the reported exorbitant and excessive vice-chancellor financial packages in light of current pressures on universities to absorb part-time staff members into permanent employment is deeply concerning, and troubling.
The way forward
Firstly, the Council on Higher Education is on point in recommending that reporting of executive remuneration in university annual reports must be made more detailed and comprehensive. This level of transparency will give us insights into how the different universities currently plan and allocate remuneration, who is involved, and the different justifications.
Blindly trusting that universities will have the ethical capacity to financially remunerate their vice-chancellors and plan accordingly because they have institutional autonomy and academic freedom is naive at best, and silly at worst. Universities in South Africa are facing a credibility and trust problem, and the reported excessive vice-chancellor financial packages are not helping.
Secondly, a Department of Higher Education and Training-led national committee is required to reign in what the Council on Higher Education calls the “runaway train” of vice-chancellor financial packages in the country. It is simply immoral, unethical and deeply concerning that a vice-chancellor would reportedly be earning more than R7-million in a higher education system where postdoctoral research fellows have been vocal about the challenges of precarity, casualisation, employment insecurity and the pressures in their lives.
This national committee will hopefully result in the establishment of national norms and standards of what fair, equitable and just vice-chancellor remuneration could look like in our differentiated higher education sector.
The growing precarity and casualisation in South African universities is unsustainable. Thus the Department of Higher Education and Training, especially under the new minister, Dr Nobuhle Nkabane, must come to the party and offer new and innovative funding solutions to help absorb the growing part-time staff members into permanent posts in higher education.
Anything less will only reinforce the 2015/2016 #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall movements, which argued that ours is an elitist, uncaring and alienating higher education system. We can, and surely must, do better. DM