Julie Bishop’s replacement as chancellor of Australian National University has been named: Gordon de Brouwer, a former senior public servant, a Canberra man through and through, and an alumnus of the university.
It’s fair to say that de Brouwer is the polar opposite of his predecessor. He does have an Instagram page, but it has just 75 followers and no posts. A former commissioner of the Australian Public Service, de Brouwer is no show pony.
To have taken on the job, de Brouwer must be very clear about the task at hand. Not only does he have the responsibility of getting ANU back onto a stable footing after the indiscriminate carnage of the past few years — which I’ve written about for Crikey here — but also his first job will be to find five council members whom the ANU community can trust.
That’s no small feat in an institution that was sent to purgatory by a stacked, complicit council and devastatingly incompetent leadership.
A new, frighteningly generic and unspecific strategy was released last week: “ANU by 2030”, published under interim vice-chancellor Professor Rebekah Brown. Thankfully, it leaves Renew ANU — the university’s $250 million cost-cutting program axed last year following controversy, leadership resignations, and a critical federal audit — in the dust.
But whether de Brouwer embraces the learnings (God, I hate that word) of the ANU governance project will be a test of his leadership.
He’s also walking into a new policy environment that will impose government command-and-control over both domestic and international student numbers, as Education Minister Jason Clare ushers in his deeply problematic Opening the Doors of Opportunity Bill, which aims to reshape higher education funding.
This agenda is anti-Group of Eight: the coalition of eight leading, research-intensive Australian universities, of which ANU is a member. It seeks to shift student preferences toward outer-metropolitan and regional universities, ignoring the mountain of evidence that students do — and should — choose what and where they want to study.
This bill is unlikely to be kind to the likes of ANU, an institution populated by “elites”. These are not the sort of kids Clare thinks will benefit from his overly ambitious, some might say fabulist agenda to increase university attainment by 2050, and even by 2030.
Those ambitions are based on untapped demand: a cohort of students, particularly males, who have never seen university as part of their life plans. We have seen how the demand-driven system failed them, and I wonder if Clare’s targets — 55% of school-leavers obtaining a degree — will fail them again.
But back to de Brouwer.
ANU was taken to its knees by narcissistic incompetence. As a Senate hearing heard a couple of months ago, the reputational cost of that sits around $100 million. Institutions are the sum of their history and present. ANU, once the most highly ranked and esteemed university in the country, is no longer either of those things. But it should be.
ANU should be different. It has a national mandate to be part of the national conversation, to help us become better and wiser people, and to contribute to a better, more functional economy. That is important, and it receives an additional $200 million a year for it.
We need ANU to be a university that meets the very high expectations set down in its founding legislation.
I, for one, hope that de Brouwer is the person who can get the university back on track.
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[li]Julie Hare is the author of the Substack page The Hare Report, which examines the governance, leadership and policy in higher education. She was most recently the education editor at The Australian Financial Review and has more than 20 years’ experience as a writer, journalist and editor, mainly specialising in education. Her award-winning work includes articles on the intersection of international students and migration and the politicisation of migration during the past election.[/li]
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#[url=https://friendica.opensocial.space/search?tag=auspol]auspol[/url] #[url=https://friendica.opensocial.space/search?tag=anu]anu[/url]
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;]Indiscriminate carnage has followed Australian National University over the past few years. Will a former APS commissioner be able to clear up the mess?[/attachment]