Good riddance, Julie Bishop. Your legacy at ANU is catastrophic

Julie Bishop’s resignation on Friday as chancellor of Australian National University brings to a close one of the most ignominious periods in modern higher education history. Bishop has, over her six-year stint as head of ANU’s council, overseen widespread reputational damage, unprecedented regulatory and political intervention, falling rankings, staff mistrust, falling enrolments and community furore.

While Rome burnt, Bishop deflected blame onto the very people who were doing their utmost to remedy a very dire situation.

Bishop has been in the headlines for months. First, because her hand-picked choice as vice chancellor, Genevieve Bell, had to resign less than two years into a five-year appointment. The reason was wholesale chaos emanating from a badly mismanaged and ill-informed $250 million cost-cutting exercise, known as Renew ANU, that was probably engineered on incorrect and catastrophised financial information but had the backing of Bishop and her council.

This is despite growing evidence that the council was not given sufficient or even correct information to understand the consequences of such a massive restructure in just a year, that they did not scrutinise fully the information they were given and never asked if there were alternative options.

Instead, they gave Bell their full support as turmoil was unleashed, including scandals too numerous to mention, such as multiple allegations of misinformation provided to senators. Bell finally resigned last September, after the deans wrote to Bishop issuing an ultimatum – either Bell went, or they did.

Demands that Bishop also resign started to build at this point. But Bishop was tone-deaf to such entreaties, arguing that she needed to see ANU through its period of crisis while not admitting her own contribution to that situation.

In the background, though, her ongoing role was becoming increasingly untenable. At least three separate reviews into governance and leadership at the university are due to land during the coming days or weeks.

One of them, by respected integrity expert Vivienne Thom, which examined serious allegations of bullying and intimidation by Bishop towards other council members, had been expected to be read behind closed doors during the scheduled council meeting on Friday morning.

There were also two federal government inquiries into university governance last year, neither of which ANU came out of well. Quite the opposite.

Ultimately, though, it was an unprecedented intervention by the higher education regulator that brought Bishop undone.

The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency forced the council to sign off on a “voluntary undertaking” last week, which removed its authority to appoint Bishop’s replacement. As TEQSA made clear, it didn’t trust the council to do the right thing by the university, or to even understand what the right thing was, given the track record over the past 18 months.

Bishop was never a run-of-the-mill chancellor. While it is not uncommon for former politicians to hold these roles – six other universities currently have them as chancellors and Bishop was preceded by Labor luminaries Gareth Evans and Kim Beazley at ANU – she was a peculiar choice. First appointed in 2020, her initial three-year term was extended by an extra four years in mid-2021, but not starting until the end of 2022, giving her seven years in the position.

While also running her own consulting firm, Julie Bishop & Partners, the job of chancellor does not bring financial rewards – a mere $75,000 stipend – but it did come with a big travel budget.

In 2024, she racked up $150,000 on travel, including trips to New York, London and Japan, all on ANU’s purse, while the rest of the university was under strict austerity measures. She was also the only chancellor in the country to have an office away from the main campus. Hers was in a glossy glass high-rise with stupendous views over Perth’s Swan River, which cost $800,000 a year to run. And that was after the university spent $800,000 renovating it for her in 2021.

Not only that, but her two Perth-based part-time ANU staff who were employed to assist her as chancellor were simultaneously employed by Julie Bishop & Partners. And her long-term political staffer and current business partner, Murray Hansen, was given contracts to write speeches for Bishop as chancellor – a conflict of interest that was never declared and only revealed during a Senate inquiry.

Why Bishop wanted to be a chancellor is difficult to comprehend. Even when education minister back in 2006-07, she never seemed to hold the sector in high regard, only that they were breeding grounds for leftie activists and future Labor MPs and staffers.

And her choice of Bell as vice-chancellor, who also doubled up with a paid job with her former company Intel while working at ANU, was particularly destructive, and the ongoing fallout of the damage stemming from Renew ANU, job cuts and reputational damage will take years to remedy. Bishop’s legacy is catastrophic. All that remains to happen now is for the appointed council members to read the room and also hand in their resignations.

Julie Hare is a freelance journalist who broke numerous stories in relation to ANU’s leadership and governance crisis during 2024-25. She is the former education editor at The Australian Financial Review.