Australia’s national university: a modern university fit for the 21st century

A message from ANU Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Genevieve Bell:

This week we turned a corner in our University’s difficult – and, yes, painful – journey to reach long-term financial sustainability. We’ve reached the point where we can close the door on new involuntary redundancies, which I know will be welcome news to many people in our community. We still need to keep reshaping our organisation and reducing our salary costs, but we are now in a position to manage this moving forward through other levers, including voluntary separations, recruitment controls and attrition.

Is this good news? I would answer with a qualified yes. Yes, because I know many in our community will be relieved to have more certainty about these painful decisions, and to see some light at the end of the tunnel. Qualified, because I know we still have a lot of work to do, and because there is still hurt and distress across the campus about the changes we need to make, and how we ended up in a position where radical transformation was necessary.

When I became 13th Vice-Chancellor of The Australian National University in January 2024, I came to the role with all kinds of optimism and hope. It was – and remains – a privilege to become the steward of this remarkable institution. When I was little, I thought that universities were magical places, where ideas were made that ultimately changed the world. ANU was that kind of place – we have been at the forefront of policy and research for nearly eight decades, and millions of Australians are the beneficiaries. We have also educated thousands of students who have gone out into the world to become leaders (in every form that takes), change makers, entrepreneurs and better global citizens.

As the national university, we have a responsibility to our government: to support, champion and shape national discourse. After all, our University was built on the promise of an optimistic future. It’s even enshrined in our Act – ‘advancing and transmitting knowledge, by undertaking research and teaching of the highest quality’. You don’t get a much better mission statement than that.

Having experienced the pandemic at ANU, I knew our national University had fallen behind many in the sector. But I also knew that we had opportunities to expand our research, interdisciplinary focus and funding pathways, and to connect better with the next generation of students. We needed to modernise, and that is never an easy transition.

So when I started the job, my plan was to spend the first year talking and listening to the community about how we could shape the future of a place so many of us love. It wasn’t to be. We might have emerged from the pandemic, but it has had much longer shadows than many of us could have imagined. Change was not a passing option, it was suddenly critical.

In my first months, I found an organisation that was spending $2 million more per week than we were earning. And there were lots of contradictions. People didn’t want things to change, but people also kept saying that things felt unfair and uneven, and many systems were inefficient and had been so for a long time. We talked about being remarkable, even as our rankings had been in decline and our competitors were securing more students, along with critical grants and funding. And under the surface, we had deeply ingrained cultural problems, where respect and collegiality had fallen by the wayside.

Renew ANU has been our program to return our national University to a stable financial footing whilst also ensuring that we had common service and support platforms – rather than a host of different supports across the campus, which were unwieldy and – often – unworkable. All of this has been in the service of ensuring we can deliver against our national mission now and into the future.

Our choices have been highly contested, within and beyond the University, and not every step has landed as we had intended. I know from talking and hearing from colleagues and students that this path has been very confronting and has felt both fast paced and achingly slow all at the same time.  As a community, we value respectful collegiality but, as a whole, we haven’t always lived up to our values and much of that has played out to great distress publicly in the media. We have to get better at all of this as we continue on our journey, and we each have a shared responsibility to ensure our workplace is safe, open and welcoming for everyone regardless of their role or time served at ANU.

Overhauling an organisation of this scale, following the disruption and instability of the pandemic, was always going to be difficult, especially when there was so much that needed attention. I’ve been holding small conversations across campus in recent months listening to staff who said they wanted to engage in discussions about our choices and our future direction. At one of these sessions, an academic reflected to me that “everything is changing all at once, and it feels a bit much”. Change has been met with both vocal opposition, but also with quieter and steady support which doesn’t garner the same attention.

I have heard from our University community, loud and clear, that this process has been immensely difficult. Now that our Renew ANU program is entering a new phase, I hope our community will continue to come on our journey. What we can do now, having spent the last year building strong foundations, is look to the future of our national University. The plan is simple: ANU turns 80 in August next year, and we will be launching a 20-year blueprint ‘ANU to 100’. Every person at ANU is invited to take part in this plan, as are our critical friends, champions and alumni who share our vision for a great national University fit for the 21st century.

I am often asked what this looks like, and my answer is always the same: we must offer transformative educational experiences; we must do impactful research; and we must do it all in the service of our community and country. And that is both an extraordinary responsibility and an awesome opportunity. But it is not enough that we teach and research. We must also create a culture that supports, encourages and ensures every person in our community is able to fully and openly contribute in meaningful ways. We have work to do, but I know that ANU staff and students, and the broader Canberra community, remain committed to supporting us to get there and will move forward together.

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This article first appeared in The Canberra Times.