Equally outrageous
In the sheer gall stakes, the fabulously well-paid vice chancellor of Macquarie University, Di Yerbury, is right up there with the best of them. When students criticised her 79% pay rise recently, Yerbury complained that they were being sexist: if male VCs get enormous salaries, why shouldn't female ones? The fact that students have also campaigned against the palatial living standards of male VCs recently appears to have slipped her notice.
Yerbury's "it's harder to be a woman when things go wrong and the media get into the act" line was elaborated in a sycophantic article in the June 6-7 Weekend Australian. It ranged over her working class background, brightness, scholarships and workaholism. Her $150,000 a year pay, plus 10% superannuation, car and house were mentioned in brackets.
The Women's Department of the Macquarie University Students' Council spelled out the real issues in the special "Occupation for Education" edition of the student newspaper Arena.
"We do not support female Vice Chancellors earning less than male Vice Chancellors", the article ran. "The problem is that enormous pay increases are unjustifiable for male or female Vice Chancellors."
The article, signed by Women's Department members Fenja Berglund, Margaret Jones, Wendy Holz, Brigitte Cleaver, Jodie Wauchope and Lucy Blamey, pointed out that Macquarie is one of Australia's smaller institutions, and that "even a man would be overpaid at the new $165,000 rate".
Yerbury's "wage chasing" corporate mentality stood uncomfortably with her attempt to win sympathy on the basis of her working class roots and the fact that her whole education was either public or scholarship funded.
This "corporate mentality" supported "measures like full fee paying overseas and domestic students (eg Master of Commercial Law), and the loans scheme proposed by an ANU economist, set to undermine rather than improve the AUSTUDY grants scheme".
Such measures worked to "disadvantage and exclude groups to which women traditionally belong and to which she appeals for support. It is well recognised that women and working class people are the first to be detrimentally affected by any decrease in the availability, or increase in the cost, of education, particularly tertiary education." Access to tertiary education, they said, was "a major determining factor in the future of equal pay for women".
It was these issues that students attempted to highlight when they occupied the administration building on May 27-29 and again on June 1. Yerbury's cry of "sexism", they said, was a smokescreen clouding the real issues.
Meanwhile, there may be some who admire the way Yerbury smashed through the "glass ceiling" that keeps women executives from reaching the highest rungs. But the point is: if you've decided to be as ruthless as the next executive, don't expect a sympathy vote from the sods you've not only left behind, but are actively keeping down.
By Tracy Sorensen