The finish got here not with a whimper, however with whoops and applause. Genevieve Bell, the embattled vice-chancellor of Australian National University, was resigning. An all-staff assembly known as by ANU chancellor Julie Bishop erupted into cheers when she introduced that Bell was stepping down.
Bell is the thirteenth chief of ANU and by far essentially the most controversial. Her tenure has been marked by turmoil and scandal, unfavorable media protection, disastrous appearances at Senate estimates and a employees vote of no confidence.
Never precisely common, Bell was nonetheless cautiously welcomed when taking on the function simply two years in the past. Hired by ANU as a “rock star professor” just a few years earlier, she was tapped by Bishop to change the favored Brian Schmidt, a Nobel Prize winner, who had determined to step again from the highest job to return to full-time science.
The contrasts to Schmidt had been evident early. While Bell had educated as an anthropologist, her profession was within the tech sector, the place she helmed a high-profile lab at Intel and finally rose to vice-president. Soon after she took the reins, rumours began to flow into about her administration fashion, with employees claiming to the Australian Financial Review that she veered from eccentric to vindictive, typically inside the house of a single assembly.
Universities are infamous for his or her employees politics, however even by these requirements, ANU appears to have acute issues. Bullying, notably within the larger echelons, seems rife. A current exterior evaluate of the college’s former College of Health and Medicine by former Victorian Police boss Christine Nixon found widespread office toxicity. This ambiance has deteriorated additional. At an explosive Senate listening to earlier this yr, ANU employees consultant Liz Allen gave harrowing proof of alleged bullying by the hands of Bell and Bishop inside ANU Council. During a Senate committee, a union consultant additionally claimed a particular inspection of their HR file was requested by the ANU’s chief working officer.
What actually turned employees in opposition to Bell, nonetheless, had been her plans to slash a whole lot of jobs as a part of an bold cost-cutting program known as Renew ANU, which goals to chop $250 million from the college’s value base by 2026. With a lot of the expenditure at a college occurring wages, this inevitably meant swingeing job cuts.
When pressed about cost-cutting, college vice-chancellors prefer to resort to well-worn traces about paying the payments and residing inside their means. But it’s not clear whether or not ANU’s much-publicised cash troubles are as critical because it claims. The college’s financials are opaque and exhausting to interpret: ANU claims it’s in working deficit and nonetheless paying off the harm brought on by a hail storm in 2020. Despite this, the top-line figures revealed in its annual report present ANU had a surplus of $89.9 million in 2024 and $135.3 million in 2025.
It’s additionally true that current modifications within the sector have harm ANU’s working place. The college is very research-intensive. This is an issue, as a result of analysis is dear and sometimes doesn’t usher in a lot income. On the income facet, ANU has failed to usher in as many worldwide college students as its east-coast opponents.
None of this excuses the best way that Bell went about restructuring ANU, and her reign rapidly grew to become marked by important employees unrest. In a city like Canberra, leaks to the media had been inevitable. The AFR’s Julie Hare discovered ANU a cheerful hunting-ground for tales, whereas ACT impartial Senator David Pocock made its dysfunctional governance a campaigning level. Bell’s response to the media tales was to threaten employees that she would “search out” leakers, which solely exacerbated the disquiet.
Bell’s communication fashion notably rankled college employees. In particular person, employees typically described her as chilly and missing empathy. She had a behavior of penning lengthy and rambling messages to employees, interspersing information of job cuts with homilies about reminiscences of being a little bit lady on campus and seeing ANU as a “magical” place. The so-called “session” course of was top-down and officious. At one level, Bell advised employees there can be no additional pressured redundancies, regardless that there have been many pressured redundancies nonetheless taking place.
Lurking behind all of it was what some employees declare was a widespread local weather of concern and greater than a whiff of impropriety. In 2024, Bell was pressured to confess that she had continued receiving a paid function at Intel even after taking up the full-time function as vice-chancellor; a few of ANU’s council members declare they weren’t advised about this association.
Meanwhile, Bell’s tutorial division, named for the little-known tutorial self-discipline of Cybernetics, loved apparently limitless funding and featured extra employees than enrolled college students.
Then there have been the perks, frequent to a lot of the college government strata, together with journeys to Davos and advantageous wines at university-funded capabilities. Freedom of data requests revealed Julie Bishop maintained her personal workplace in Perth, at ANU’s expense. Senior government positions proliferated.
At the coalface, situations had been far much less snug. ANU has made at the very least 399 employees redundant as a part of its restructure, which incorporates plans to shut the Australian National Dictionary Centre and disestablish its acclaimed School of Music. It’s not shocking that employees, the media and Pocock have ganged as much as push for Bell’s removing.
Nobody claims operating a college is straightforward. They are massive and sophisticated organisations stuffed with good and sometimes grumpy folks. The coverage challenges are manifest. Australian universities have important value points, and income shouldn’t be simple to search out.
But many public managers face related challenges, from the principal of a public main faculty to the supervisor of a regional hospital. It’s troublesome to argue that the profitable salaries and gold-plated perks of Australian universities are justified by the efficiency of a distinctly mediocre cohort of prime executives.
While Bell’s tenure grew to become a lightning rod at ANU, her downfall is a microcosm of a broader disaster in Australian college governance. In current years, a lot of vice-chancellors have been pressured to resign after integrity scandals, together with University of New England boss Brigid Heywood, who pleaded responsible to behaving in an offensive method, and former University of Adelaide vice-chancellor Peter Rathjen, whom the South Australian corruption fee discovered to have engaged in critical misconduct. It turned out that complaints about Rathjen had been made at a earlier college.
While the manager class frolicks, college employees and college students are discovering the going powerful. There have been greater than 3,500 redundancies up to now two years at Australian universities, in response to current figures compiled by the NTEU. Domestic enrolments are flatlining, and college students are more and more discovering the college expertise alienating and disappointing. A current e-book by distinguished social scientist Graeme Turner summarised the sector as Broken.
This received’t be the top of the turmoil at ANU. A Senate inquiry continues, and a brand new vice-chancellor have to be discovered. For now, Chancellor Bishop holds on at ANU, however how lengthy she will retain her place stays open to query.
Disclaimer: Ben Eltham is an NTEU union consultant at Monash University.
