Public outrage at the scale of the salaries enjoyed by SA’s university vice-chancellors, exposed by an investigation by the Council for Higher Education, is entirely predictable.
It is easy to decry the generous remuneration accorded to vice-chancellors as a misuse of scarce public funds, given that in 2019 more half of them were taking home more than President Cyril Ramaphosa. Leading the pack was the University of Johannesburg which provided its vice-chancellor with a R7.17m package, almost double the president’s R3.9m salary at the time.
But there are much bigger questions that need to be grappled with: who gets to decide how much vice-chancellors are worth, how should their pay be linked to the performance of the institutions they lead, and why is there so little transparency about what they earn?
The council’s report has yet to be made public, but a summary of its findings has made its way into the public domain. It shows there is no consistency in how the remuneration of the vice-chancellors and senior executives of SA’s 26 universities is determined, and that at more than a third of these institutions the chair of council single-handedly conducted vice-chancellor performance evaluations and determined their financial awards.
Poor performance rarely resulted in penalties, and there were numerous discrepancies between the information supplied to the council and that disclosed in annual reports, with a slew of fringe benefits hidden from public scrutiny.
Just like public servants, the vice-chancellors were consistently awarded above-inflation annual increases during the 15-year period reviewed by the council, and their average total cost to company compared favourably with their counterparts in developed countries in US dollar terms. Yet there was no apparent link between vice-chancellors’ remuneration and the research output of their universities, the number of master’s and doctoral graduates they produced, or the size of their academic enterprise.
There are many troubling aspects of the council’s findings, indicating the need for better institutional governance and greater public accountability. But there is a broader, and equally problematic issue raised by the investigation that needs probing too.
Higher education, science & innovation minister Blade Nzimande commissioned the council investigation in 2020. Its report was completed three years ago, and has sat with him since then.
Last week, he cancelled a presentation to parliament on its findings at the last minute, saying he first wanted to present the report to university council chairs. That is entirely inappropriate: he and the council are answerable to parliament, not to the institutions found lacking by its investigation.
Parliament’s supine legislators were entirely remiss in not insisting the presentation go ahead. And while the council presentation has made its way into the public domain, the report itself remains under wraps and it is anyone’s guess whether politically unpalatable aspects of it were conveniently excised from the version that was to have been offered up to MPs.
There is no justification for continuing to shield university vice-chancellors from thorough scrutiny: it is time for the minister to publish the report and for parliament to hold them and their institutions accountable. Only then can the debate about what they should earn get truly under way.
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