Bullying claims, expensive shoes and a $186,000 trip: Inside the scandal enveloping Julie Bishop and ANU
By Jordan Baker
If anyone is qualified to advise embattled Australian National University vice chancellor Genevieve Bell on the symbolic power of a pair of shoes, it’s her boss, chancellor Julie Bishop. The sparkly red satin shoes worn by the former foreign minister when she resigned from a male-dominated cabinet became such a compelling statement of female empowerment that Bishop donated them to the Museum of Australian Democracy.
Bell’s choice of footwear has been interpreted differently. Amid anger at the ANU’s decision to slash jobs and courses to dig itself out of a deep financial hole, the “derelict chic” Golden Goose sneakers she wore to the opening of the university’s new Lowitja O’Donoghue Cultural Centre earlier this year – which retail at between $690 and $1315 – prompted outrage. Bell says she bought them cheap on eBay. Her critics don’t care.
ANU’s Julie Bishop and Genevieve Bell with their controversial shoesCredit: Stephen Kiprillis
The shoes have become a symbol of the rebellion against Bishop and Bell’s leadership. “Resist Sneaker Capitalism. ANU fights back,” read posters around the Canberra campus, while angry staff, students and alumni are posting pictures of their own footwear to a website called Shoes of ANU. “I just want to run away,” posted one academic under a pair of pink Crocs. One posted a poem below a picture of his bare feet. “Solidarity is not a whisper,” he wrote, “but a step taken in pain.”
Many Australian universities are in financial trouble, and are slashing courses and staff to reduce costs. But the issue is particularly fraught at ANU, which was set up by an act of parliament to research subjects that are in the country’s national interest. Consternation about the cuts are exacerbated by concerns about a lack of transparency at the top, allegations of strong-armed management, and claims that the university’s governing council was asleep at the wheel while its financial position nosedived. The university regulator is now investigating.
Further missteps by Bishop and Bell – such as Bell being on a US tech giant’s payroll for her first year in the job, a $186,000 executive trip to Switzerland to host a reception of dubious value to the university at the World Economic Forum, and claims that Bishop bullied a senior academic (which she denies) – are intensifying the scandal. Some argue that the campaign against Bell in particular is sexist, but many of the university’s students, staff – even its “gender experts” – and alumni disagree. They want them gone.
ANU’s council, headed by Julie Bishop, appointed Genevieve Bell (above) as vice chancellor in September 2023.Credit: Oscar Colman
“What’s happening is a disaster for the ANU and its reputation,” says Senator David Pocock, who represents the Australian Capital Territory. “I just do not see how the current chancellor and vice chancellor can turn it around.”
Career turns
Bell is the daughter of ANU royalty. Her mother is the pioneering anthropologist and feminist Diane Bell, who spent long periods of her career at the Canberra university and would take young Genevieve to remote parts of the Northern Territory while doing field work on the role of women in Indigenous societies. Bell became an anthropologist too, and taught at Stanford in the United States before her career took an unusual turn.
It was the late 1990s, and tech company Intel was looking for social scientists to study how people used technology in their homes. They wanted product ideas – the plan was to turn experts in human behaviour into technology soothsayers. During Bell’s interview, she warned the company that she was “a radical feminist and an unreconstructed neo-Marxist”, The New York Times reported in 2014. Intel was undeterred. It welcomed her forthrightness, which, she told the newspaper, could be a liability in the academic world. “At Stanford, they didn’t like it when you told the faculty they were dead wrong, whereas here, that was a cultural value,” she said.
In 2017, Bell was brought back to Australia by another rock-star scientist, then ANU vice chancellor and Nobel prize-winning physicist Brian Schmidt, to lead a new institution looking at the intersection of artificial intelligence, data and human experience (now known as the School of Cybernetics).
ANU’s council, headed by Bishop, appointed her as vice chancellor in September 2023 (VC is the equivalent of a company chief executive). Still, she remained on the Intel payroll until November 2024, 10 months into the top job (she reportedly earned about $70,000 for 24 hours’ work from the company in that time). When her secondary employment was eventually revealed, it took many in the tertiary sector by surprise. “It was a shocking look,” said an executive at another major institution, on the condition of anonymity so they could speak freely. “Being a VC is a full-time gig.”
“Dorothy-red stilettos against a sea of men’s dark shoes”: Julie Bishop’s shoes made a statement when she announced her resignation as foreign affairs minister in August, 2018. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Questions linger about the disclosure of the Intel gig; Bishop has said she approved the paid nature of the arrangement, but ANU then told the Senate that its council did not require members to disclose remuneration when calling for disclosures of interest.
Stepping into the VC role wasn’t an easy personal transition for Bell. She’d explained to the Times that she embraced her femininity while working in the masculine computer world by wearing French perfume and high-heeled shoes. But in the first few weeks of her job as vice chancellor, she was told to adjust her image. “She was advised to fix her wild red hair, to watch her weight, to swap her backpack for a briefcase,” her head of public affairs, Amy Capuano, wrote in a post on LinkedIn, which was posted in response to the sneaker saga.
But Bell’s professional challenge was far greater. She took over a university that was in bad financial shape. Before COVID, Schmidt had deliberately kept a lid on student numbers to stop the university from becoming mass-market education like major institutions in Sydney and Melbourne, which were trying to recruit as many international students as they could. The university was also rebuilding ageing infrastructure and fixing the damage caused by a wild weather event in 2018.
All this meant that ANU had no financial buffer when the pandemic hit, and the then-Coalition government refused to allow universities to claim JobSeeker payments. Budgets were further eroded by the Coalition’s Job-ready Graduates package, which cut Commonwealth funding for teaching local students across many courses and therefore reduced the viability of smaller courses for many universities, not just ANU – a policy that Labor has not repealed.
Bell also walked into cultural problems. A report on the former ANU College of Health and Medicine by former Victorian chief commissioner and NSW assistant police commissioner Christine Nixon, published in May, found staff described “a deeply dysfunctional culture across the college and the broader university marked by bureaucracy, territorialism, bullying, entitlement and resistance to change,” it said, adding that the university could not provide an environment of psychological safety while this behaviour was considered acceptable.
“You could argue that she inherited a situation that had been building for a number of years,” says Andrew Norton, a higher education policy expert who worked at ANU until last year and is now at Monash University. “On the other hand, you’ve got to think of the appointments that council has made; two VCs in a row without extensive prior university administration experience.”
There remains confusion over the extent of the financial problem at ANU, and how it got so bad. Bell and Bishop say it’s dire; in a statement in late July, Bell said ANU had been operating with a deficit since COVID and last year spent $2.7 million more a week than it earned. The 2024 annual report outlines an operational deficit of $140 million. They say the financial crisis position justifies the plan to cut $250 million from the budget, of which $100 million involved staff cuts; more than 220 people have already left through voluntary or forced redundancies (on Wednesday, Bell said there would be no more forced job cuts).
Pocock, however, says the extent of the financial problems remains unclear. “Because there’s such a lack of transparency, [it’s uncertain] whether the finances actually warrant this level of cuts,” he said.
Norton says that if the university’s position is as bad as Bell says, then its council will need to answer questions about how it let it get there. “This is one of the key issues that TEQSA [Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency] is looking into,” he says. “If the ANU’s finances are as bad as Bell and Bishop say they are, why wasn’t this issue addressed earlier on? How did [ANU] get into this situation, and being in that situation, did it hire the right people to get it out?”
The fury of staff, students and alumni has been inflamed by revelations about the cost of supporting the chancellor, Bishop (chancellor is like a company chair, and works with the vice chancellor on strategy and financial oversight). In 2023, the university spent $186,000 flying Bishop, Schmidt, Bell and three other executives to the World Economic Forum in Davos, where ANU hosted a $78,000 reception. Bishop doesn’t receive a salary for the role (she is entitled to an honorarium of about $75,000), but her costs are significant; her Perth office, travel expenses and staff cost about $790,000 last year, The Australian Financial Review has reported. Bishop has also been accused in the Senate of hiring her former media adviser, friend and business partner Murray Hansen to write her speeches (ANU says this was done by the events team at arm’s length from Bishop).
The scandal intensified last week when Dr Liz Allen, an ANU demographer and former council member, told a federal committee that Bishop had laughed at and blocked her from leaving a room when confronting her with allegations of leaking confidential information to the media. “I believe chancellor Bishop is hostile and arrogant to staff,” she told the Senate inquiry. Bishop rejected the allegations, saying she always showed staff members respect.
Glass cliff position
Bishop has been at the university since January 2020, but Bell has been there for only a year and a half. Some say the vice chancellor is being pushed off a “glass cliff” (a descriptor of jobs given to women when there’s barely any possibility of succeeding in them).
Bell has described the campaign against her as tall poppy syndrome. “Sexism is alive and well and living in Australia,” she told the ABC, pointing out that the campaign has been personal in a way that her male predecessor never experienced. Some agree. In a Canberra Times piece decrying the National Tertiary Education Union’s campaign against her, ANU professor John Blaxland argued that Bell was in an invidious position. “Now is not the time to push beyond the glass cliff,” he said. “Now is the time to recognise the scale of the challenge she faces and get behind her.”
But female academics hit back. An opinion piece by anonymous “ANU Gender Experts” argues that they have seen no evidence of sexism in the union’s campaign, and that Bell was a privileged woman who was failing in her job. “Women in powerful positions cannot be immune to criticism, nor should their gender protect them from scrutiny,” they wrote, expressing their frustration “with what we see as a blatant weaponisation of gender and to raise our voices against it.”
Pocock also disagrees with the glass cliff argument. He gave Bell the benefit of the doubt at first, but “that argument wears very thin when you see the way things are being managed”, he says. “A lot of the issues now are of their own making, clearly under the decision-making of Bishop and Bell and a council that’s potentially been starved of information or hasn’t been willing to stand up to them.”
Bishop’s predecessor is unforgiving, too. Gareth Evans, also a former foreign minister, albeit in the Hawke/Keating Labor government (there’s a long history of political alumni as ANU chancellors), wrote to a group of emeritus professors in March, the AFR reported, saying, “No competence. No judgment. No shame. How much more of this can ANU tolerate?”
The matter is now in the hands of TEQSA. Its chief executive wrote to Bell in late June, raising issues ranging from a lack of financial transparency to the management of the cuts and concerns that staff were too intimidated by senior executives to speak up about the process.
“TEQSA is concerned ANU’s council may not have fulfilled its obligation to exercise competent governance oversight of, and be accountable for, all ANU’s operations,” Dr Mary Russell wrote.
In a statement, ANU acknowledged the changes had been challenging and said it had already achieved $59.9 million in savings. “We know this period of transformation hasn’t been easy and we thank and acknowledge the work and dedication of our community to support ANU during this time of change and continuing to strive for collegial relationships,” it said.
In an interview with the Canberra Times in June, Bell said she believed ANU was on the right course. “I was raised to be really clear about why you do things,” she said. “To believe that your work should make the world different through the dint of your labour.”
Bell also discussed the “aesthetic pleasure” she found in shoes, with options so much wider than the black or brown for men. “I own a lot of them,” she said – but “considerably less than [Imelda] Marcos”. In Capuano’s LinkedIn defence of her boss last month, as the shoe issue blew up, she wondered why, in 2025, people were still questioning a woman’s decisions about her shoes. “I can’t seem to remember any commentary about the last VC’s choice of footwear.”
Undeterred, the Shoes of ANU campaign marches on. Pictures mount of worn-out work boots, flimsy thongs and “UGGs of despair”.
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