Australian universities have been urged to create new oversight bodies that would have the power to remove leaders when things go wrong amid increasing challenges to institutions’ self-governance. 

Independent senator David Pocock said that bodies representing a range of university stakeholders should be given the power to appoint new council members and jettison existing ones.

“It’s become very clear that there are very few levers to course-correct when things go incredibly badly,” Pocock told ����Vlog. The proposed bodies – one of Pocock’s 17 recommendations in the Senate Education and Employment Committee’s report on university governance – would have the authority to remove university leaders in cases of “serious” failure, breach or loss of confidence. 

He cited the “havoc” at the Australian National University (ANU) under former vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell’s “ill-conceived” restructure. The process was wound back after Bell stepped down in September.

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Pocock said his proposal was rooted in ideas developed by a staff collective known as the . It wants the institution to align itself with “international best practice” by giving staff and student representatives the job of “comprehensively evaluating academic risk” and communicating “directly to council”.

“The crisis is not over at the ANU,” governance project representative Jessie Moritz told a November hearing of the Senate committee. “[There have been] no structural reforms to governance. There is nothing preventing another similar crisis in the immediate future.”

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Pocock’s recommendation follows revelations of an unprecedented intervention in ANU’s leadership processes by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (Teqsa), which regulates higher education institutions. Teqsa pressured the university not to begin recruiting Bell’s substantive replacement until former Australian Public Service commissioner Lynelle Briggs had finished investigating the institution.

Teqsa had  Briggs as an “independent expert” to assess ANU’s corporate governance, leadership and culture. Her brief includes scrutinising the council’s “breadth of perspective and oversight” and its handling of complaints, conflicts of interest and “risks” associated with the restructure.

Chancellor Julie Bishop initially resisted Teqsa’s demand, saying recruitment needed to start “as soon as possible”. Bishop told Teqsa CEO Mary Russell that the process would take at least nine months and Bell’s replacement would be appointed after Briggs’ investigation had concluded.

Russell doubled down, questioning the council’s ability to provide “competent governance oversight” of the appointment not only of a new v-c, but also council members. She warned that if ANU did not agree to delays, Teqsa would consider imposing restrictions on the university’s registration or requiring “undertakings” about its recruitment procedures.

Bishop, whose term concludes at the end of 2026, eventually agreed to hold back the recruitment of replacements for both Bell and herself.

Higher education consultant Michael Tomlinson, a former director of assurance at Teqsa, said the agency’s approach was “entirely reasonable”. It meant applicants could be quizzed about how they planned to implement the inevitable recommendations stemming from Briggs’ report, which is expected in April.

Tomlinson said regulatory intervention was preferable to direct intervention by politicians. Over the past 15 months, the resignations of at least three vice-chancellors and two chancellors have been publicly demanded by politicians including former federal opposition leader , Greens deputy leader  and New South Wales Labor MP Sarah Kaine.

Fellow consultant Claire Field, also a former regulator, said ANU had taken the “right decision” in the circumstances. “If you’re under investigation by a government regulatory agency for your governance, you need to put a pause on some of your major governance decisions, like who’s going to lead the university.”

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Nevertheless, ANU’s acquiescence represented a “big shift” from university councils’ instinctive resistance to regulatory interventions in their operations. “In a decade, under different circumstances…could you see the regulator overuse its powers? Potentially. That’s what I would be worried about.”

Pocock said Teqsa needed more powers to pry into university councils that tended to cloak themselves in secrecy. He said the regulator had taken months to address ANU’s “unprecedented governance issues”, and federal ministers lacked the authority to remove the university’s chancellors even in circumstances of egregious misconduct.

He said there were no “clear or independent processes” for managing grievances against council members “beyond referring the matter back to the council itself”. While corporate leaders who underperformed were “very quickly shown the door” through shareholder voting mechanisms, university councils were allowed to “mark their own homework”.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Pocock told THE. “You can’t say you’re running a big business, [with] no check on your power.”

He acknowledged that political interventions in university leadership were “fraught”, but said there was little alternative when governance structures provided no mechanism for the removal of leaders. “As an elected representative, I’ve got to listen to the community.

“Overwhelmingly…I was hearing that Genevieve Bell simply wasn’t leading the university in a way that aligned with what the university should be about.”

Tomlinson said university governance had “self-correcting” mechanisms in the form of regulatory oversight, ministerial influence – through appointments to councils – and public pressure. An example was Murdoch University, where last decade’s well-publicised governance problems had “died down” after a “seasoned” new vice-chancellor had arrived and “reduced a lot of the heat”.

Tomlinson said the oversight bodies proposed by Pocock would end up with the same mix of skills as universities’ governing bodies. “Why would you have a council overseeing a council?

“You have to be careful of redundancy. We’ve got a council. We’ve got an independent expert inquiring into these matters. We’ve got Teqsa employing the independent expert. Do we need another committee?”

But Field said something needed to change in a sector with a dearth of “well-led” universities with happy staff and no reported wage underpayments. While the Expert Council on University Governance had produced unfavourable findings, Field said the “pushback” the expert council had encountered in going about its work was even more telling.

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“[It suggests] denial about the challenges that leaders and governing councils need to pay attention to,” she said. “That says there’s an ongoing cultural problem.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com