The ANU Governance Project was featured on 12 September 2025 in The Canberra Times.

You can access it at The Canberra Times, through a pdf copy available here, or we have reproduced the text below. 

ANU's crisis runs deeper than the leadership. Here's how we save the university

By ANU Governance Project

12 September 2025

Headlines and opinion pieces tell of a lack of transparency, perceived conflicts of interest, inadequate disclosure, misstatements over its budget deficit, accusations of misleading the Senate, forced redundancies, school closures in all but name, alleged bullying, poorly thought-through change management proposals, and ongoing failures in both leadership and governance.

The federal university regulator, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) is currently undertaking an investigation that includes concerns around the "culture of ANU's council and executive leadership".

This is on top of the ANU-commissioned Nixon review, which made 17 recommendations that the university executive has committed to implementing. The Nixon review found a longstanding dysfunctional culture of bullying, sexism, unfair workloads and nepotism that predates the appointment of the current vice-chancellor.

All this evidence points to a university in a polycrisis; one that is impossible to resolve without transformational change. This story is playing out across the sector.

As Australia's only national university, the ANU has generated the most national and international interest.

A first step proposed by the National Tertiary Education Union, and endorsed by at least two federal senators, is for the most senior leadership, vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell and chancellor Julie Bishop, to step down or be stood down.

We, as a group of independent, informed and concerned ANU academics and professionals that helped establish the ANU Governance Project, believe that we need more than a "new crop at the top" to effectively respond to the ANU's governance crises.

There must be a fundamental change in how our university is governed.

This requires much more than the appointment of a new vice-chancellor. The ANU community also told us that staff and students must be part of a selection or endorsement process for all our university leaders, including the next vice-chancellor.

Urgent changes include proper checks and balances on the university's executive, much greater transparency and accountability that builds trust and improves decision-making, deliberative processes about how key decisions (including senior leadership appointments) are made, a revamped and a well-informed university council, and much, much more.

Our goal is for the ANU to have governance founded on the values prioritised by the ANU community, best-practice governance principles and practices and to draw upon the diverse expertise of ANU staff, students and stakeholders.

A second principle is that the governing body of the ANU - its university council - has the required capacity, expertise, and relevant and timely information it needs to provide high- quality oversight and to deliver best-practice governance for a $1.6 billion entity with 24,000 students and 5000 staff.

A properly functioning council requires the good governance triangle of shared governance. This means dialogue over strategic high-level performance, an executive subject to regular independent oversight by the community it serves, and meaningful and respectful deliberations on key decisions between the executive, governing body, and elected representatives of academics and professional staff.

In early August 2025, we embarked on bottom-up process of deep listening, so that everyone who has a skin in the game and has knowledge and experience was given an opportunity to share their views and ideas on the ANU's current and future governance.

This process has involved a public survey that received inputs from more than 600 members of the ANU community (staff, students and other stakeholders completed 590 survey responses and 75 participated in moderated kitchen-table conversations).

We were told by the ANU community that reformed governance must be informed by our university's national and public mission (funded by an annual federal-funded National Institute's Grant worth $238 million in 2024) and be based on, and structured around, key principles:

• Integrity
• transparency
• accountability
• participatory decision-making
• meaningful representation of staff and students
• procedural fairness and
• academic freedom.

We have synthesised the many inputs we have received into a draft report about how to improve ANU's internal architecture (e.g. how the council operates) and ways of working (e.g. policies, processes and practices). The findings of the report will inform a submission to the Senate standing committee on education and employment inquiry into the "quality of governance at Australian higher education providers".

The report is currently open for community consultation and feedback.

Informed by the public survey and kitchen-table conversations, the ANU Governance Project held a deliberative workshop with more than 40 students and staff (academic and professional) on September 1. From the many proposed solutions, this workshop prioritised, a subset of recommendations for dialogue with the university executive and council.

The ANU Governance Project met with the Chancellor on September 8. We welcome the Chancellor's support and encouragement for University Council to engage with the project working group.

Meaningful governance reform at the ANU cannot happen without dialogue between the ANU's Executive, University Council, the federal Education Minister Jason Clare, and the broad ANU community (e.g. academics, professional staff, students). And by dialogue we don't mean to merely consult or converse or a simple-two-way communication.

Nor do we propose convening yet another so-called expert group, to decide what wrong and how to fix it.

Rather, we are offering an opportunity for ANU to lead the nation in following a governance reform process that involves reflection and problem-solving that includes all voices and results in agreed-on actions and processes, founded on learning and accountability.

For us, dialogue is the antithesis of either top-down or bureaucratic decision-making. It "acknowledges the place of risk in the interactions between participants, as they make themselves vulnerable by engaging with a wide range of people, some of whom they might not ordinarily choose to engage with."

The dialogues we propose offer the best chance to save the ANU. Dialogue will help the ANU to become a place of learning and listening. It will help us become a community that can thrive, not just survive, despite the challenges facing it and the Australian higher education sector.

Other universities will have their own specific challenges, but we hope the reforms and processes initiated by the ANU Governance Project will be a successful example for others to follow.

Let's do it.