Documents released under FOI reveal ANU senior executives were considering a case against Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell as staff opposition intensified to her staff-cutting restructure last year.
In the weeks before Professor Bell’s resignation in September, university provost Rebekah Brown was discussing ANU Deans presenting an assessment of the Vice-Chancellor’s performance to the university’s governing council.
It followed months of staff opposition to workforce change proposals across the academic colleges and university administration.
The documents reveal that in July, Arts and Social Sciences Dean Bronwyn Parry complained to Professor Brown of “unconscionable behaviour” from “some folks” who “are repeatedly misrepresenting the work I am doing … to produce a balanced plan.”
The Provost was also aware that the university could be exposed on its distribution of the $253m National Institutes Grant to ANU and vital to its overall finances. The NIG is provided by the Commonwealth, “to support the long-term pure and applied research that marks ANU as a nationally and internationally significant research institution.”
“It has basically been allocated to consolidated revenue and college budgets so based on historical expenditure … so very lumpy and not as transparent as it should be,” Professor Brown stated in a message to Parry.
However Professor Parry also warned, “what is really behind quite a few questions and anger, (is) things that were possible at ANU and not other universities because of the NIG. It is part of what has made ANU special.”
Staff were “very, very angry” about funding cuts and “captured by this idea nothing needs to change,” she told Professor Brown.