This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
The sorry spectacle of Cambridge’s Chancellorship race ended just as the last Critic issue hit the news stands. The victor was the man we tipped: Lord Smith of Finsbury, with a creditable tally — after transferrable votes — of 42 per cent of the 25,000 who cared enough to engage. That Sandi Toksvig ended up with over a quarter of the vote, and Gina Miller almost an eighth, is a sobering reminder of where we are.
Yet the whole election was a distraction from the real position of power in the university — the Vice-Chancellor.
Although notionally acting in the Chancellor’s stead, for the last half-millennium this “deputy” has held the reins.
Since Cambridge, like Oxford, was constitutionally opposed to any arrogation of central power, this office was held for only one or two years by a collegiate head of house: the Regent House voted on two candidates proposed by the Council of the Senate.
After serving, the Vice-Chancellor would return, Cincinnatus-like, to administrative, and often academic, life within their college.
All changed in 2003 with the appointment of the Provost of Yale, Alison Richard
However, in that transformative year for higher education, 1992, Cambridge’s Vice-Chancellorship was made a full-time appointment to be held for seven years. Since the serving VC, and his successor too, came into that role as masters of colleges, they were internal appointments who had earned their Cambridge stripes.
All changed in 2003 with the appointment of the Provost of Yale, Alison Richard, whose prior experience of Cambridge was limited to her undergraduate days in the late ‘60s. Her two successors likewise had only spent three years at the university: Leszek Borysiewicz, as a medical lecturer; and Stephen Toope, as a doctoral student. Whilst each brought knowledge of the wider world, their inexperience of the realities of Cambridge culture and custom was manifest.
Now, after Toope’s embarrassingly sub-standard tenure, Cambridge boasts its first VC who has had no relationship with Cambridge, or Oxford, or British academia at large: Deborah Prentice. After a narrow career in psychology, specialising in social norms and peer pressure, she spent six unsettled years as Provost of Princeton.
Once installed at Cambridge, despite strong pressure to decrease senior salaries, Prentice topped the UK’s list of VC remuneration in 2023–24, with a base salary of £409,000, to which was added over £100,000 in pension contributions and expenses, along with rent-free lodgings.
Although this is amongst the highest paid jobs in European academia, Prentice has remarked, “I make a lot less than I made in the US, and I wasn’t even head of an institution in the US.”
Yet power and responsibility are diffuse in Cambridge: the VC governs by chairing committees. Most technical work is delegated to the five Pro-Vice-Chancellors (a role invented for one person in 1991, doubled to two in 1996, and raised to five in 2003). Their salaries are not disclosed, but in 2024 Cambridge had eleven academic and administrative employees paid over £250,000 — an increase from five in 2023.
Is it all really worth it? Faced with financial deficits, internal dissent and rising recruitment troubles, the University waits to see what the clear markers of success for Prentice and her team will emerge to be.
