We here at The Spectator Australia are an iconoclastic bunch. Give us a lively, interesting argument and our brave, sainted editors will send your article out into the world for Australia’s most enlightened readers to consider. We’ll give you different takes on the merits of the Trump presidency and the war in Ukraine and not bat an eyelid – and what other legacy media outlets can boast about that? It’s all part of the rich tapestry of life, as my wife likes to say.

I needed to remember that core-level Speccie commitment to giving non-conformist, heretical views a run when earlier this week I came across my fellow Spectator Australia columnist Mark Humphery-Jenner’s defence of the seven-figure salaries of Australia’s university Vice-Chancellors. Mr Humphery-Jenner came not to bury our VCs, but to praise them. The gist of his ‘they are not at all overpaid, dear chap’ argument went something like this. Firstly, it’s a tough job they’ve got. (It’s not a pleasant job. These are complex organisations. Lots of high-egos to manage. VCs have to deal with ‘the public relations disasters that arise from universities allowing free speech and academics expressing themselves indelicately’.) Next we were told Aussie unis are so world-class in the rankings that we need to pay what the Americans pay their university Presidents. You see the Yanks set the baseline. It’s no good pointing to Britain or Europe with a good deal lower VC pay. Why? ‘An international calibre Vice Chancellor will not consider them for employment’, asserted my fellow Speccie writer. You see, there are ‘myriad’ – yep, myriad, which for those with a more circumscribed vocabulary means ‘countless’ or ‘an extremely great number’ – other universities (and given his earlier claims he implicitly means unis in the US) to which these incredibly adept Australian VCs could supposedly zip off to and scoop up equally high pay packets (or remuneration if we’re still playing the big word game). The jobs would almost come to them apparently. Next, thirdly, it is argued that university VC pay could, and should, be compared to publicly-listed CEO pay. Seriously. There are 400-odd big company CEOs who make over AUS$1 million per year, he notes. So what’s the problem paying VCs? That’s the thinking. Then the argument is rounded off by noting that a big cut in VC pay would compress the pay relativities across the university. He asserted that no one would take the job, with its really irksome (my word, not his) pressures, without these seven-figure rewards. And then, as a sort of piece de resistance argument (or in my terms, the weakest claim), it is stated that our unis will ‘bleed talent to industry’. All of that leads my Speccie fellow writer to his inevitable endpoint, the pronouncement that Australia’s, ‘…Vice Chancellors are not overpaid. Indeed, one could argue that they are underpaid.’ Quod Erat Demonstrandum or QED, to recall my math and philosophy first degree days.

So here I am asking myself, ‘Where do I start in replying to this argument?’ I suppose I should make clear to readers (though many of you will know this already) that I am a conservative law professor who has worked his whole life in orthodox left-wing institutions. (I include my few years at a big Toronto law firm, by the way, not just my 35 years of law school life.) I value small government. I like market economies. I’m not remotely envious of people on huge salaries if they’ve taken risks, brought innovations to market, faced the prospect of bankruptcy, and had to compete in that dog-eats-dog competitive capitalist system. Good on them for succeeding. The problem is that our universities look nothing like that. Nothing at all. All but two of our unis are public ones, not private – making any comparison to the US a bit off right off the bat as the great US universities are overwhelmingly private. Moreover, there is zero risk, and I mean zero, of any Australian university going bankrupt because the Commonwealth and state governments would not allow it. There are lots of voters in the various campuses of these unis. If VCs make dumb calls, say they let in way too many foreign students from just one country, and things go really wrong, it won’t be the Vice Chancellors who bear the costs of those errors. They’ll lay off other staff. Corporate CEOs get fired. Often. It’s not clear what you have to do – or not do – to get fired as a VC in Australia.

Then there is this fact. All talk of our universities being billion-dollar businesses is Penn & Teller level misdirection. You know where almost all the revenue comes from? Student fees (so basically, government guaranteed monies), direct government money to the unis, and foreign student fees (so if you’re like me and think our world’s almost highest per capita numbers of foreign students – especially in the business schools – are coming in the hope of eventual visas to stay in Australia, not because they are getting a remotely great educational experience, again means it is in essence a government guarantee of sorts that brings in the revenue). That’s one side of the ledger. The other side of the ledger, costs, would see ‘salaries’ as its biggest component. Locked in revenue. Locked in costs. Sheer all that away and what you are left with looks nothing like a top 400 Australian publicly-listed business which might go bankrupt, which might not see much government money or contracts, which has shareholders who demand returns, and where things can most definitely go wrong. How many top 100 companies are still there 50 years later? That’s not to say that an Alan Joyce here and there might not take away more money than most of us think was warranted. But, you know, that was ultimately the shareholders’ fault and they are most certainly paying a price for it now. Or they’ve sold their shares.

I once said in the pages of The Australian that when it comes to what Australian VCs can affect (certainly not salaries much and certainly not fees), that a moderately numerate Year 11 student would do as good a job running these places. I still think that. The undergraduate experience for local Australian kids could only get better. The huge DEI edifice that VCs in this country have erected, and that amount to affirmative action and left-wing social engineering, would not have been erected by my mooted year 11 student. Most of the rest of the Australian public, were any of them VCs, would not have sat by for ages as Jewish students were intimidated by Palestinian encampments (and yes, I know this first hand as I sat in UQ’s Jewish counter-encampment most mornings and know how intimidated some of the young students were). The public wouldn’t have trotted out the wrong-headed claim that it was a free speech issue because nearly any lawyer could tell you that even US 1st Amendment jurisprudence does not let you go onto someone else’s property and yell your views at them. These students and non-students were trespassing on uni lands. They could have been moved on immediately, as they were in some southern US state universities. Or expelled. It was the choice of Australia’s VCs to leave them where they were – and, based on this issue alone, I suppose that just maybe an Australian VC could hope for a job at Columbia or Harvard. And as for free speech on campus, it’s simply much, much more difficult for conservatively-inclined academics to speak their minds than for the nine-tenths who lean left. Codes of conduct are discretionarily enforced. Meanwhile, lots of students know to self-censor. Put bluntly, Australian VCs have done a terrible job on the free speech front.

Nor is it remotely convincing to see most Australian VCs as particularly good business people. They have climbed up the ranks of the most top-down, centralised university system in the world. When I arrived here in 2005 from New Zealand I had never seen anything like the Aussie university. It made me think of General Motors in the 1950s, or even the East German economic model. All decisions flow from the top down. Decision-making was all centralised. In the US law schools vote and they have real power. In Australia there is really no reason ever to go to any meeting as all decisions are made from the top down.

So let me run through Mark’s claims. Firstly, I don’t believe that the global rankings systems of universities around the world are remotely believable. More foreign students are treated as a proxy for quality, rather than as a sign that it’s easy to get a visa. And academics (make that 90+ per cent left-wing academics) are surveyed what they think of other unis. The system is designed to downplay the resources and quality of US universities. Want the blunt truth? In the hard sciences and medicine and probably most of the rest of a university, the top 50 unis in the world would be 48 US ones and Oxford and Cambridge somewhere in the top 10 and falling fast. Secondly, I doubt more than one current Australian VC could get a job at any of the best 150 US universities. Heck, I doubt any could. A main job in the US (even in the state unis) is fundraising. Our VCs and our unis are rank amateurs compared to US unis (and even Canadian ones) at this. I believe you would have to live in another world to the one I inhabit if you believes a disgruntled Australian VC could just hop on a plane while sifting through all the US job offers. British VC pay very much is relevant to Australia. We’re massively overpaying for terrible outcomes (though in part that’s due to government over-regulation and necessary reporting back functions). Pay here is set by remuneration-type committees where (as with the corporate sector, truth be told) every incentive is geared towards ever higher pay. And taxpayers get no real say how their money is spent.

Next, and as above, I don’t for one second think running an Aussie uni is anything like running a top publicly-listed company. Look at how many Aussie VCs have social science and humanities degrees. The days when half the top NYSE CEOs had philosophy degrees because of the powerful training one got in clear thinking, well those days are gone. The market for a VC in today’s Australian private sector (as CEOs) is basically non-existent. Fourthly, for me it beggars belief to think that there would be any noticeable drop-off in the quality of university leadership were the VC pay to be halved tomorrow. There is no other job they could do that would pay even that much. And really, how much worse could the running of our unis get? How much more woke and PC? How much more blatantly left-wing? (Readers will recall that two-thirds of Australian universities came out explicitly for ‘Yes’ in the Voice referendum. The other one-third stayed neutral, though many of those ran blatantly pro-Yes ‘information’ sessions for weeks. And not a single one came out publicly for ‘No’.)

My fellow Speccie writer says that the government’s inquiry into higher education governance and VC pay ‘begs the question’ of whether VCs are actually overpaid. Leave aside the now common misuse of that phrase from its original meaning of ‘assuming the answer to what is being asked’. The inquiry is one of the few good things coming out of this Albanese government. (I wrote that phrase and half-expected to be struck down by lightning. But I’m still here folks.) What stuns me even more is finding myself in agreement with anything Jacqui Lambie suggests. But she’s right here. Our unis have become over-bureaucratised, top-down, centralised cesspits where viewpoint diversity is basically nearing extinction. Over half of employees neither teach nor publish. They administer and impose wokery. Elon Musk fired three-quarters of the employees at Twitter (now X) with no obvious loss of service. I’d bet half of Canberra’s bureaucrats could similarly go. And about the same as regards our universities. This has been brought to you in large part by the very same Australian VCs whom some are keen to praise. But I’m afraid that praise, and seven-figure salaries, should be made of sterner stuff.