ANU chief falls to activist staff power in successful witch-hunt
But the university’s funding problems, born of undisciplined spending and a failed student recruitment strategy, will not disappear with her departure.
The campaign against her started with claims the university’s budget problems were confected by management, although, it was never explained why management would make them up. As cost-cutting proposals rolled out, the emphasis switched to problems with the process.
For all the allegations and abuse directed at Bell for months, she is leaving because the university community would simply not accept that an entrenched operating deficit meant there had to be savings, including $100m in staff cuts.
This was not only about outrage over people losing their jobs and calling course cuts a cruel loss for teaching and research … many, probably most ANU staff – including some of the most senior academic leaders – refused to accept that the vice-chancellor, on the instruction of the university’s council, had the authority and responsibility to make them.
While the National Tertiary Education Union organised a campaign against her, she is gone because staff believed that their university is as the name implies a national icon and as such must be provided for, however much money it lost.
Certainly, Bell, her boss, chancellor Julie Bishop, especially the former deputy Liberal Party leader, and the university’s governing council have failed.
The savings plan was poorly explained, badly managed.
Bell should not have kept accepting a fee from her former employer, corporate giant Intel, and she proved incapable of winning staff support.
Bishop should have saved the vice-chancellor from continual unforced comms errors. But the chancellor should also have had the political nous to know how her own ANU allowances would look to people in fear of losing their jobs.
She also faces allegations of her own in dealing with a member of the university’s council.
And past and present members of the university council, as a whole, have a great deal to answer for.
The unsustainable spending that is the basis of ANU’s problems did not start when Bell arrived – the problem was present on a smaller scale on previous vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt’s watch. But the council signed off on budgets and strategies.
Nor did council end the bullying and harassment that was endemic at ANU for decades before Bell arrived – indeed, she commissioned an independent review by former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon to fix management culture.
What is being missed in the celebration of the successful witch-hunt against Bell is that the university regulator has launched an investigation into ANU that extends way beyond her and includes the council.
Senior ANU academics have just published a paper on its website on how universities as a class should be run, as self-governing communities of scholars “producing knowledge for its intrinsic and public value”.
And to make sure that happens, a committee of them should oversee vice-chancellors and the councils they report to.
It would formalise where ANU is now – a worker’s soviet, managed by an acting V-C, who is subject to an informal veto power from a popular front of activists and union officials who have just destroyed a vice-chancellor who defied them.
This sets a question for other vice-chancellors across the country who face the brutal reality of endless endemic deficits without cuts to staff and services: does the prospect of being sacked without accomplishing anything make it worth the risk?
For university leaders, the old aphorism is true: when the going gets tough, the tough get going.
And on Bell’s example, where they go to is dismissal and defeat.
A warning on the rise of Japanese aggression
The resignation of Australian National University vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell will not miraculously improve its failing finances and her sacking is a warning to all other vice-chancellors who should now fear they too govern at the pleasure of activist staff and their union.