Genevieve Bell case rings a warning over power and cash
Certainly there have always been university CEOs who get the message they should spend time on research. Some are sacked because they were not up to the job. There are also cases where people left after utterly inappropriate, and in at least one case illegal, personal behaviour.
But Bell resigned as VC of the Australian National University because she lost staff support over a poorly sold and ineptly implemented savings plan, including for $100m in staff cuts. There is no doubting the university was in a mess before she arrived, in need of budget repair and a campaign to root against a culture of bullying junior staff, for starters.
Bell did something about the thuggery – hiring a former Victorian police commissioner to state the problem and propose solutions – but she got nowhere in making the case for retrenching staff and, within two years of taking over, was driven out of her job.
It was the first occasion of its kind in a generation, but what made it especially significant is that ANU staff alone did not bring her down. In a precedent-setting erosion of university autonomy, the university’s management became a political issue.
Her savings plan was hammered in the Senate, notably by ACT independent David Pocock, for whom the state of ANU is a constituency matter. Plus Greens and Labor senators got involved, supporting the position of the National Tertiary Education Union, which wants to transform the way universities are run, starting with more staff on university governing councils and fewer external appointments, preferably none with business backgrounds.
As Labor’s Tony Sheldon, who has chaired a Senate inquiry into university governance, put it: “Universities are public institutions … but too often, they have been run like personal empires by executives and governing bodies who believe the rules do not apply to them. This must be a turning point – not just for ANU, but for the entire sector.”
ANU is already turning. The surely shell-shocked chancellor, Julie Bishop (yes, the former deputy Liberal leader), now under pressure to leave, has announced council will engage with a collection of mainly academic elders who want a transformation in the way ANU is run. They point to a mass of issues that need changing, including opaque management, nepotism, executive pay and exclusion of staff from council. There would not be a university in the country where staff did not have similar complaints, and it is more than a bit rich for Bell to cop the blame for problems in place long before her term.
But there is more to this than the usual staff complaints about remote management – academics at ANU speak for their colleagues across the country in arguing the right sort of people should run universities – them. Instead of professional managers on staff, and business leaders on council, they argue universities would be better led by men and women whose careers and commitment are to teaching and research.
A new paper by senior ANU academics Marija Taflaga, Francis Markham and Keith Dowding, published on the university website, argues universities are unique, that neither corporate nor public service governance applies and they should have their own management structures.
“Because academics directly rely on the knowledge they and their peers produce, they have an intrinsic stake in its quality. University governance, therefore, cannot be understood simply as principals directing agents, but as a self-governing system where producers and consumers are the same community,” is the pitch.
This ignores the common conflict-of-interest issue at universities, which sees staff-elected members of council who are also union members thrown out of meetings when pay negotiations are on the agenda. But if academics are the university, their representatives are the people to decide what they should be paid. Note, academics: there is always ambivalence when this case is made by professors about including professional staff, who account for more than half the staff at Australian public universities.
As to keeping vice-chancellors and governing boards in their box, Taflaga and colleagues propose a governance model that give academics, plus students and maybe some others, ultimate authority over management.
An elected academic senate could have authority over a university council, with the power to nominate appointed members and oversee elections for others. It could dismiss members, “recommend” the removal of deans and senior executives, and presumably have a word with council members when it is time for the vice-chancellor to go. Plus, a committee system “would oversee each area of governance within the university, ensuring that decisions are informed by those closest to the core academic mission”.
And all would be well until a hypothetical university – let’s call it the National University of Australia – got the revenue projections wrong but kept negotiating pay rises it could not fund, only to find the academic senate rejected savings proposals that included sacking staff and cutting courses. Or until the supreme senate divided between supporters of rival deans with big-spending plans.
As the campaign to destroy Bell’s career demonstrates, university politicians take no prisoners. And when it suits them, they ignore the sad reality that there is never enough money to fund all worthy causes. Beyond denouncing her $1m pay packet and deploring ANU’s consultants bill, no one ever proposed a nicer, kinder savings program.
This is one good reason independent governing bodies, sceptical and stringent when it comes to vice-chancellors’ plans, is not occurring to people at ANU, perhaps because its council was not tough enough when the present mess started years ago.
Nor will it occur to staff at other universities, where employees unhappy with management will look to follow the ANU lead. As Lachlan Clohesy, an architect of the NTEU triumph there, sums it up: “Genevieve Bell will not be the last vice-chancellor to go in these circumstances if other universities fail to heed the lessons of what has gone wrong at the ANU. University staff deserve to be valued, supported and respected.”
And so they do, which will happen at any university where scholars, expert in many fields other than management and accounting, have deciding power – until money gets tight.
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It’s about to be easier for academics to get rid of vice-chancellors and for universities to go broke – what happened to Genevieve Bell last week at the Australian National University shows how.