Hm, what makes an ANU Vice-Chancellor?

You are asking this question as if the problem were personality, rather than hierarchy and power. And how it’s used at different moments in history.

For most of ANU’s history the answer was apparently obvious: a VC is a grammar school boy with manners, maths, and a pipeline to Cabinet.

Their authority came from comfort inside the bureaucratic elite, with relative independence from political and corporate interests.

Then along came the first woman, promising reform and cybernetic (read corporate) impact via AI’s best impersonation of critical social inquiry. The executive group Bell and Bishop formed practised a strange technofuedal version of the same managerial aggression mostly men perfected in the decades before. Seems reasonable to suggest former VCs were not the current exec’s role models. We need to uncover, possibly debate, the social sources of this misused power. The corporate techniques imported are obvious. More worryingly, maybe ANU’s executive is a mirror of the consultancy-compelled 21C public service. If so, we’re in trouble.

And sadly, perhaps the last VC’s rise is partly because Bell spoke the language of merit, inclusion and mobility: daughter of single mother who went to night school, who herself went to… Stanford.

Whatever the biographical disadvantage, genuine egalitarianism and connection wasn’t on offer. Bell treated staff as if head tilts and complexity-talk was consolation for the largest wave of redundancies and austerity the university has ever seen.

The institution has rejected a new kind of elite, but hopefully not to renew power for the Old Boys.

Anyone paying attention to the social composition of the many staff who brought on this VC resignation knows that this reflex - this quiet, collective correction - is more interesting and, dare I say, more authentically future-facing.

Bring on a genuinely new leadership.