No doubt this letter below that I wrote last month will fall on deaf ears at the Australian National University but I had to say something. The corporatisation of ANU has been going on for 26 years. Labor’s John Dawkins started it and when John Howard got in he radically intensified the destruction of higher education, appointing people in key positions who were actively hostile to academia. It’s been horrible to watch this process unfolding and tragic for our country.
Vice Chancellor Professor Genevieve Bell et al
Subject: Proposal Document of 3 July 2025
Dear Professor Bell, Prof. Parry et al,
I understand that you propose to disestablish two key positions as part of the Proposal above, those of Drs Amanda Stuart, Environment Studio, and Erica Seccombe, Foundation.
Accepting the invitation extended by your consultative process and as an ANU alumna – BA (Hons) 1985 – and former employee of ANU for over ten years, I write to express my alarm at your idea to cut the positions above. Your proposal to establish a new School has only vague aspirations (‘reimagine and expand’) that spell lip service to anyone schooled in the English language as I was lucky enough to be in the English Department of the ANU in the days before managerialism took over. I have a pre-Dawkins degree so my lecturers were able to spend all their time on their job: giving me the best education that money couldn’t buy.
You claim that the changes will be a transition that ‘could’ integrate various disciplines. More vagueness. And to ‘support a transition’ by destroying what you already have is illogical and wasteful. The logical thing to do is to continue supporting these areas (Environment Services and Foundation) and the people who run them. In particular, I know that the Environmental Service has had stunningly positive feedback from students and from the Indigenous people it collaborates with.
It’s important that the Environment Studio and Foundation remain as they are because they perform a valuable job. The Environment Studio has had a measurable positive impact on reconciliation objectives. But many aspects of both of these programs, while not necessarily measurable by the quantitative methods in current use, are nonetheless invaluable. If your proposal goes ahead it will destroy a crucial dialogue of the ANU with Indigenous people, which relies on continuity, the relationship with particular people whom they, the Indigenous people, have learnt they can trust. Chopping and changing personnel doe not sit well with people who have been repeatedly betrayed by white Australians over the course of more than two centuries. The relationships that have been built up over many years are priceless.
If you go ahead with this proposal it would be not only to the detriment of ANU and to the individual lecturers and students involved, but to Australian society as a whole. Over its history the ANU has been at the forefront of innovation in a vast range of fields. This was because of smart, dedicated academics doing what they do best: research and teaching – going deeply and widely into their field of expertise. To maintain this tradition and to uphold the reputation of the ANU you need to support the academics who make this possible.
There are many things in life, arguably the best things, which famously are unquantifiable, which give to their participants and to those participants’ society incalculable benefits, such as improving students’ critical thinking skills and preparing them for an uncertain future.
As award-winning entrepreneur and author Margaret Herffernan, writes in her book Uncharted: How uncertainty can power change (2020) that artists and other creative thinkers have the capacity to live productively with uncertainty and ambiguity, to see it as a rich source of discovery and exploration. ‘Instead of trying to reduce complexity, they mine it, undaunted by contradictions and paradoxes. They address the future with courage, imagination and independence’ (p. 178).
This is what our future needs and this is where the ANU could be excelling. The ANU already has some of these people left, for example, Drs Stuart and Seccombe, and it should be valuing them for the riches they are providing to our future leaders and the future of our country. What is needed is a vision beyond that provided by accountants who can only see from a narrow perspective and only provide one small piece of the whole.
I trust that your process is genuinely consultative and that passionate yet reasoned responses like mine will be taken into consideration as well as the reductive bottom-line arguments already put forward. The ANU has a duty to continue to provide education crucial for Australia’s future, a future that is precarious and uncertain without the wisdom of Indigenous people and graduates who have benefited from this wisdom. It is insightful educational practices like the Environment Studio and Foundation that are doing this right now and whose practitioners need to be left to do their job precisely the way they are doing it.
Thank you.
With kind regards,
Dr Penelope Hanley.
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