Unions plan to rally members after vice chancellor Prof Genevieve Bell requests forgoing 2.5% December increase
Even with a 10% pay cut the VC will be remunerated over $1,000,000 per year, even despite the university’s poor financial performance.
Having worked at a university the waste is in plain sight. Vendor lock-in, consulting fees (especially with the Big 4), high executive pay, and compartmentalisation between professional and academic staff are high on the list.
In my area (different university) there was a constant stream of poor decision making. Moving to the cloud? Let’s hire a consultant to tell us what to do, and then do it in the worst possible way, instead of using internal capabilities! I suggested that the contract include provisions for “best practice” as listed by the vendor (HashiCorp) but this was ignored. The consultant gave us spaghetti Terraform code and an inefficient, high cost subscription layout.
The professional and academic staff barely talk in my experience. Academics do their own thing as much as possible. Professional staff throw solutions over the wall, mostly because of the existence of the wall in the first place.
The university was looking at using “crotch sensors” (motion sensors under the desk) to measure desk utilisation, spending money on “smart” ambient sound solutions etc. in the executive building, and other high cost solutions looking for a problem, at the same time as freezing staff and threatening redundancies. I was denied training but offered access to an LLM subscription (GitHub CoPilot) along with other IT staff, because AI is the going buzzword being parroted by the executives.
The higher education sector seriously needs an external review… and a proverbial kick up the bum.
Even with a 10% pay cut the VC will be remunerated over $1,000,000 per year, even despite the university’s poor financial performance.
Afaik the ANU VC earns about $650k (here). Not that this isn’t probably 6-8x what most others in the university earn.
Pretty much agree with everything you say though. I’m about to graduate from ANU and I’m glad to be leaving tbh.
I would just add that, while the unis are managed poorly, the cuts to the sector by successive governments can’t be excused.
I have family who work in the university sector. They frequently say people would shocked by what would come out if there ever was a royal commission into the field.
Strike and demand 5% instead.
Next headline “evil union forced the government to gut services at ANU”
