There is a brawl over funding cuts at the Australian National University; the outcome could change the way universities across the country are run.
If ANU’s governing council were to direct management to back down it would set a precedent for activist academics exercising a veto power on workplace change at any and every university. And the union gleefully knows it.
Last week independent senator for the ACT David Pocock slammed ANU’s management and raised changing university governance with Education Minister Jason Clare. Clare flicked the complaint to the regulator, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency.
“This is a watershed moment in the National Tertiary Education Union’s campaign to fix the disgraceful governance crisis that has engulfed our public universities,” NTEU president Alison Barnes says. The union thinks university governing bodies have too many government-appointed business people and not enough elected staff and students.
There is no sign of ANU’s council giving up yet, supporting vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell and her boss, chancellor Julie Bishop.
But the pressure is piling on at the most privileged university in the country – ANU receives support from the federal government that other universities do not.
There no doubting ANU is a basket case but there is a choice of baskets. Management claims university finances are unsustainable and that $150m in operating savings and $100m in staff cuts are essential. Bell’s team did not help make the case with a cack-handed initial explanation of the cost to fix the finances.
This made it easier for the union to argue against the plan and that Bell’s management-style and the out-of-touch council were the problem.
The vice-chancellor’s corporate background does not help, and there is a common community assumption that she wants to run ANU like a big business.
The belated announcement that she was on a retainer from her former 20-year employer, tech giant Intel, appalled many, probably most, ANU staff.
But the culture clash is way bigger than Bell’s background. Canberra is a public service town and the ANU community has always assumed the state will provide what it needs to serve the nation – and if there is not enough to do what the university wants then Treasury will stump up.
There is a furious debate on campus about the state of the books, not helped by the 2024 financials still not published (they have to be tabled first in federal parliament). But in 2023 ANU had $1.6bn in consolidated revenue and a headline surplus of $135m.
Strip out variables income and earnings tied to specific projects (the model universities generally use) and there was an $128m underlying deficit.
It is way worse than that. ANU depends on a unique $220m annual payment from the federal government. This National Institutes Grant dates from the university’s foundation after World War II as a research resource for the nation, when other universities were all about teaching; ANU did not take undergraduates until 1960.
Now a half-dozen other universities can match, at least, ANU on research in fields important to government. But take the grant away and ANU is broke.
Despite this, the NTEU and its allies on campus, in the Canberra community and in the media are winning the argument over money and the way proposed staff cuts are being managed. Plus critics are playing the person, not the policy, with allegations, taken up in some media, against Bell’s management style and criticism of Bishop, who backs the VC.
What is missed is that both ANU baskets result from years of managements backing down when staff defeated change.
Ian Young, vice-chancellor from 2011 to 2016, had several goes at saving money by cutting courses that ran at a deficit and changing teaching practice. He proposed savings in the school of music, including a prescient proposal for less individual in-person teaching and more online tuition with the Manhattan School of Music – he was drowned out by the uproar on campus and the broader Canberra community. Young hoped the college of arts and social sciences would go for less lectures with a “forum” style of classes; staff were not keen. He wanted to reduce the power of the college deans, who were not having it.
Overall he lost way more major arguments than he won, forced to back away by recalcitrance among managers, opposition from staff and animosity from the union. What Bell is copping now with allegations against her personal ethics is a way more vicious version of what Young faced.
His successor, Brian Schmidt, did not do much reforming – the pandemic-precipitated emergency saw to that. But parts of what he did try prior never happened as intended. Like reducing the number of “less commonly taught” Asia-Pacific languages; they stayed and he maintained a budget subsidy for them. And the few job cuts that were scheduled as part of the proposals were condemned by staff as “unjustified for a school with such a record of demonstrated excellence”. The times were also against Schmidt, who had an admirable vision for ANU as a university as community, with a cap on enrolments and students from across the country living on campus.
Higher education analyst Frank Larkins, from the University of Melbourne, reports Australian undergraduate enrolments at ANU declined by 1700 between 2014 and 2023. The impact of Covid and lower local student numbers meant a revenue hit
Income is a big part of ANU’s problem but so is the university community’s self-belief that ends in an unwillingness to change. Larkins notes that ANU’s enrolment of Australians studying higher research degrees was down 22 per cent in the 10 years to 2023. “The erosion of ANU as a premier research university is well reflected in its declining international rankings in recent years,” he states.
Far worse, years of complacency among managers led to a toxic work and study environment that existed way before Bell arrived. In fact she is trying to fix it, appointing former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon to review the workplace culture in the medical school. Nixon’s findings in May are all the more scathing for her warning they apply across the university.
“ANU has a remarkable tolerance for poor behaviour and bullying … The most significant factor perpetuating this environment is that at ANU, poor behaviour doesn’t lead to negative consequences,” she stated.
Bell has adopted all Nixon’s recommendations but this has not quietened the campaign against her savings, indeed against her.
Some staff want her gone now; many, probably most, are less anxious than terrified about the precedent for job security and university culture that cuts would mean. Most would be happiest if ANU stayed the way it was, presumably without the bullying and harassment Nixon identified.
And that is the challenge for ANU’s council. For Bell to have to back down on her savings plan and most likely leave would only confirm what has long been the case at ANU – that vice-chancellors manage at the pleasure of the staff.
It would make finding a successor hard, very, very hard.
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