The end came not with a whimper, but with whoops and applause. Genevieve Bell, the embattled vice-chancellor of Australian National University, was resigning. An all-staff meeting called by ANU chancellor Julie Bishop erupted into cheers when she announced that Bell was stepping down.
Bell is the 13th leader of ANU and by far the most controversial. Her tenure has been marked by turmoil and scandal, negative media coverage, disastrous appearances at Senate estimates and a staff vote of no confidence.
Never exactly popular, Bell was nonetheless cautiously welcomed when taking up the role just two years ago. Hired by ANU as a “rock star professor” a few years earlier, she was tapped by Bishop to replace the popular Brian Schmidt, a Nobel Prize winner, who had decided to step back from the top job to return to full-time science.
The contrasts to Schmidt were evident early. While Bell had trained as an anthropologist, her career was in the tech sector, where she helmed a high-profile lab at Intel and eventually rose to vice-president. Soon after she took the reins, rumours started to circulate about her management style, with staff claiming to the Australian Financial Review that she veered from eccentric to vindictive, often within the space of a single meeting.
Universities are notorious for their staff politics, but even by these standards, ANU seems to have acute problems. Bullying, particularly in the higher echelons, appears rife. A recent external review of the university’s former College of Health and Medicine by former Victorian Police boss Christine Nixon discovered widespread workplace toxicity. This atmosphere has deteriorated further. At an explosive Senate hearing earlier this year, ANU staff representative Liz Allen gave harrowing evidence of alleged bullying at the hands of Bell and Bishop inside ANU Council. During a Senate committee, a union representative also claimed a special inspection of their HR file was requested by the ANU’s chief operating officer.
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What really turned staff against Bell, however, were her plans to slash hundreds of jobs as part of an ambitious cost-cutting program called Renew ANU, which aims to cut $250 million from the university’s cost base by 2026. With most of the expenditure at a university going on wages, this inevitably meant swingeing job cuts.
When pressed about cost-cutting, university vice-chancellors like to resort to well-worn lines about paying the bills and living within their means. But it’s not clear whether ANU’s much-publicised money troubles are as serious as it claims. The university’s financials are opaque and hard to interpret: ANU claims it is in operating deficit and still paying off the damage caused by a hail storm in 2020. Despite this, the top-line figures published in its annual report show ANU had a surplus of $89.9 million in 2024 and $135.3 million in 2025.
It’s also true that recent changes in the sector have hurt ANU’s operating position. The university is highly research-intensive. This is a problem, because research is expensive and often doesn’t bring in much revenue. On the revenue side, ANU has failed to bring in as many international students as its east-coast competitors.
None of this excuses the way that Bell went about restructuring ANU, and her reign quickly became marked by significant staff unrest. In a town like Canberra, leaks to the media were inevitable. The AFR’s Julie Hare found ANU a happy hunting-ground for stories, while ACT independent Senator David Pocock made its dysfunctional governance a campaigning point. Bell’s response to the media stories was to threaten staff that she would “hunt down” leakers, which only exacerbated the disquiet.
Bell’s communication style particularly rankled university staff. In person, staff often described her as cold and lacking empathy. She had a habit of penning long and rambling messages to staff, interspersing news of job cuts with homilies about memories of being a little girl on campus and seeing ANU as a “magical” place. The so-called “consultation” process was top-down and officious. At one point, Bell told staff there would be no further forced redundancies, even though there were many forced redundancies still happening.
Lurking behind it all was what some staff claim was a widespread climate of fear and more than a whiff of impropriety. In 2024, Bell was forced to admit that she had continued receiving a paid role at Intel even after taking on the full-time role as vice-chancellor; some of ANU’s council members claim they weren’t told about this arrangement.
Meanwhile, Bell’s academic department, named for the little-known academic discipline of Cybernetics, enjoyed apparently limitless funding and featured more staff than enrolled students.
Then there were the perks, common to so much of the university executive strata, including trips to Davos and fine wines at university-funded functions. Freedom of information requests revealed Julie Bishop maintained her own office in Perth, at ANU’s expense. Senior executive positions proliferated.
ANU Chancellor Julie Bishop speaks to the media after an all-staff townhall meeting at the ANU campus in Canberra, September 11 (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)
At the coalface, conditions were far less comfortable. ANU has made at least 399 staff redundant as part of its restructure, which includes plans to close the Australian National Dictionary Centre and disestablish its acclaimed School of Music. It’s not surprising that staff, the media and Pocock have ganged up to push for Bell’s removal.
Nobody claims running a university is easy. They are large and complex organisations full of smart and often grumpy people. The policy challenges are manifest. Australian universities have significant cost issues, and revenue is not easy to find.
But many public managers face similar challenges, from the principal of a public primary school to the manager of a regional hospital. It’s difficult to argue that the lucrative salaries and gold-plated perks of Australian universities are justified by the performance of a distinctly mediocre cohort of top executives.
While Bell’s tenure became a lightning rod at ANU, her downfall is a microcosm of a broader crisis in Australian university governance. In recent years, a number of vice-chancellors have been forced to resign after integrity scandals, including University of New England boss Brigid Heywood, who pleaded guilty to behaving in an offensive manner, and former University of Adelaide vice-chancellor Peter Rathjen, whom the South Australian corruption commission found to have engaged in serious misconduct. It turned out that complaints about Rathjen had been made at a previous university.
While the executive class frolicks, university staff and students are finding the going tough. There have been more than 3,500 redundancies in the past two years at Australian universities, according to recent figures compiled by the NTEU. Domestic enrolments are flatlining, and students are increasingly finding the university experience alienating and disappointing. A recent book by distinguished social scientist Graeme Turner summarised the sector as Broken.
This won’t be the end of the turmoil at ANU. A Senate inquiry continues, and a new vice-chancellor must be found. For now, Chancellor Bishop holds on at ANU, but how long she can retain her position remains open to question.
Disclaimer: Ben Eltham is an NTEU union representative at Monash University.
