ABSTRACT
A 2010 survey of academic salaries, undertaken by the Association of Commonwealth Universities, shows South Africa’s ranking as the second-best country, after Australia, in terms of academic remuneration levels. South Africa has the highest-salary scales relative to the national gross domestic product per capita; the overall average academic salary is seven times greater than the gross domestic product per capita (Maslen 2010). Thus, universities in general may offer competitive salaries, comparable to the best in the world. However, not revealed are inequalities in the universities, which are a legacy of the apartheid system. These inequalities have created an unequal playing field, where the best urban-based, research-intensive universities are able to compete for the best minds available in the country and the lower resource and smaller, rural-based or teaching universities are not able to offer such competitive salaries and, therefore, not able to compete.
