This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
As is now well known, a crime has been perpetrated at the University of Buckingham. Its vice-chancellor, James Tooley, was humilatingly suspended by the governing council on the basis of flimsy and unproven allegations from his estranged wife before being reinstated when the allegations were shown to be unfounded.
Perhaps we should not be surprised, for the governing council at Buckingham has for a long time been both dysfunctional and abusive. An external consultants’ report from August 2023, which is available on the university’s website, describes how it had been
… poisoned by infighting. One interviewee commented that “it was the worst Council possible to imagine” … it was reported that members of Council had allegedly placed unreasonable pressure on senior staff and engaged in treatment which witnesses found uncomfortable.
The consultants trusted such bullying could be consigned to history, but in its abuse of Tooley the council has, if anything, actually degenerated. If in the past the council had been poisoned by acrimonious infighting, in its attempted trashing of Tooley it was united.
Buckingham opened, initially as a university college, in 1973, admitting its first students in 1975. From its inception it was a rarity, a university college independent of the state and of government funding. In its early years Buckingham was spectacularly successful, driven by a cohort of outstanding scholars who had been alienated by the statism of British higher education.
On the morning of 14 October 1977, for example, when James Meade heard he’d won the Nobel Prize in economics, he was preparing to deliver an undergraduate lecture at Buckingham. Another economics Nobel laureate, Ronald Coase, made a considerable donation.
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Buckingham has three great achievements to its name, each of which was associated with a great scholar. First, under the leadership of Max Beloff as principal, it opened. The bien-pensants supposed that without state aid, Buckingham could never get off the ground, yet it did, under the motto alis volans propriis (flying on our own wings).
Second, in 1983, under the leadership of Alan Peacock, first as principal and then as vice-chancellor, Buckingham received its Royal Charter, thus graduating as a university.
And third, in 2004, under the auspices of the university’s legendary registrar, Professor Len Evans, Buckingham came top of the National Student Survey (of satisfaction), a position it further occupied in 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2014. In 2007 and 2011 it came second, but those were only temporary blips. Today the university comes a woeful 128th out of 143 universities.
The explanation for this fall from grace lies in its governance. British universities are typically governed by two bodies: council and senate. Council is the forum of the lay, external, non-executive trustees who make the business decisions. Senate is the domain of the academics who address only academic matters.
In his classic Red Brick University (1943), Edgar Peers (a Cambridge graduate who moved to a professorship at Liverpool University) wrote that academic leaders come in two varieties: senate men (they were all men in his day) and council men. Peers found that when vice-chancellors were senate men (democrats who ran their institutions with their fellow academics), their universities thrived. But when vice chancellors were council men (authoritarians who aligned themselves with council to run their institutions by diktat), their universities languished.
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The three great leaders at Buckingham were all senate men. Len Evans so despised council that he boycotted its meetings. Alan Peacock so loathed it that in 2000, on my joining the university as vice-chancellor, he sent me a letter warning that the council was a cancer that would, if unchecked, kill the university.
And in the one long conversation I had with Max Beloff, he complained how difficult it had been to run Buckingham with so many external non-executive directors on the board of what was then a company limited by guarantee. How he had missed the governing body of All Souls, whose members — all academics — were well-informed, shrewd and intelligent.
University councils are newfangled. None of the surviving medieval English institutions of higher education have councils. They were founded as guilds, to be managed by their members democratically. To this day Oxford, Cambridge, their 70 or so constituent colleges, the Inns of Court and the medical royal colleges are still run democratically by their members. And being council-free, they are successful.
Universities are driven and financed from the bottom up
Governing councils were unleashed on the mass of British universities by the first of the Victorian creations, Manchester, which was established in 1851 by local businessmen, who then presumed to run it. But who failed. Their failure led them to hand control to the academics, and thereafter the trustees limited themselves to fundraising. The formula worked, and over the next century Manchester came second only to Cambridge for the number of Nobel laureates it nurtured.
Yet the culture of council-led philanthropy died after 1919. The Great War had impoverished the universities by inflating away their endowments and by reducing their student rolls, so in 1919 the government established the University Grants Committee (UGC) to subsidise them. But the subsidy crowded out private philanthropy (why donate to an institution in generous receipt of government money?), which was further reduced when taxes as a share of GDP rose from 12 per cent in 1914 to today’s levels.
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Happily, the universities found another winning formula. Under its model charter, the UGC funded them via their vice-chancellors. Which, by design, further empowered their senates. Councils were relegated to observer status. The formula was described in 1970 by Noel Annan, the leading vice-chancellor of the day, thus: “Is there a university in the country where [the council] is not a dignified rubber stamp? The true governing body is the senate.”
But Mrs Thatcher categorised academics as socialist enemies within. She replaced the UGC (staffed by professors) with higher education funding councils, which were staffed by businesspeople instructed to empower university councils to crush the senates and to run the universities like for-profit companies managed by boards of directors. Adding to the damage, between 1981 and 2000 Thatcher and her acolytes cut the income per student by 45 per cent.
The result was the empowerment of a new class of administrators. Clearly councils filled with lay external trustees who know nothing about university governance cannot actually run them day-to-day. That was left to administrators who until then had been little more than factotums. Indeed, in 1971 Eric Ashby, a former vice-chancellor of Cambridge, wrote that “there was no administrative estate in the British universities” (i.e. the universities were academic democracies whose administrators did as instructed).
However, the Major government’s 1992 Further and Higher Education Act placed universities under the oversight of the Quality Assurance Agency, which not only empowered university councils but which also required the universities to employ more and more administrators to execute the decisions of those councils: Sue Shepherd from the University of Kent has shown how, between 2005 and 2012 alone, the numbers of administrators in the older universities increased more than 40 per cent, and they have increased inexorably ever since.
But council and administrative rule is a cancer: in 2018 Terence Karran and Lucy Mallinson of the University of Lincoln reported a strong correlation between university excellence and academic autonomy. The more power senates retained, the better a university was at teaching, research and scholarship; the more power councils and administrators grabbed, the weaker was the university.
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Universities are different from for-profit companies run top-down by directors who are accountable to and in receipt of capital from external investors. Universities are driven and financed from the bottom up: only academics can attract student fees, research grants and donations.
Universities must, therefore, be run differently from companies. The late Geoffrey Burnstock, a head of department at University College London under Noel Annan, would tell his staff, “Scientists are creative people exactly like artists. I am going to treat you like an artist. You can do anything you like — anything short of anarchy. My main job is to keep the bureaucrats off your back.”
Which is indeed how UCL flourished in the days of Annan. But understanding academics seems beyond the ken of the average lay, external, non-executive university trustee. Consider the case of the University of Buckingham.
Buckingham started well, but, by virtue of its Royal Charter, it was after 1983 run by a council. By 2000, therefore, the university was failing. Its dominant figure had been Nigel Mobbs (chairman of council 1987-1998), a local property developer who, having been sent down from Oxford, bore universities a lifelong grudge. He would openly deride academics as “jumped-up school teachers” and by 2000, thanks to his ministrations, Buckingham had only 650 students, appeared in no league tables and ran frightening deficits. But that year the senate — enraged by the perennial stupidities of the council — passed a motion of no confidence in the management of the university and for the next 15 years the senate ran the university.
Consequently it flourished. After 2004 the university not only dominated the National Student Survey (NSS), it also increased in size four-fold (both in student rolls and acreage). Furthermore, it created the first independent schools of medicine and education in Britain in over a century, its fundraising was transformed, its balance sheets moved into the black — and in 2015 it was named The Times/Sunday Times Teaching University of the Year.
The university’s rise was born of its success in the NSS, which owed everything to a senate whose members were not only unusually dedicated teachers, examiners and mentors but who were themselves satisfied by the autonomy they had won after their vote of no confidence: students will not be satisfied unless the staff are.
In the years of failure under Mobbs, the council had spoken only of marketing, key performance indicators, personal development reviews, strategic plans, dashboards, scorecards, action plan logs, project evaluation plan templates and SWOT analyses; but the university’s transformation exposed these imperatives as the malign distractions they had always been.
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Then, in 2014, the council organised a counter-coup and took back the running of the university. To catastrophic effect. The problem, now that they do not donate, is that there is no role for lay, external, non-executive trustees in a university because their for-profit experience does not usefully transfer. And their human quality is often poor.
Of course the occasional council member will be gifted (Robert Tomkinson was a Buckingham chair who had senate’s back in the early 2000s), but Buckingham’s council is not a gifted body collectively — and under its control the university, as summarised by the consultants, was brought “perilously close to catastrophe” whilst “a vacuum of leadership was thought to have enabled some individuals to pursue their own personal agendas at the expense of the best interests of the University”.
The vice-chancellor between 2015 and 2020 was Anthony Seldon. Having inherited a flourishing university, Seldon reduced it within 4 years to near bankruptcy, both financially and academically.
During his tenure he became an adviser to GEMS (a chain of for-profit schools headquartered in Dubai), which in a press release reported how Seldon was also:
… co-founder of Action for Happiness; honorary historical advisor to 10 Downing Street; UK Special Representative for Saudi Education; a member of the Government’s First World War Culture Committee. Currently he is also a director of the Royal Shakespeare Company; the President of IPEN (International Positive Education Network) and co-founder of the Institute for Ethical AI in Education; Chair of the National Archives Trust and patron or on the board on several charities in addition to being the founder of the Via Sacra Western Front Walk.
Further, as Seldon reported in the Times Higher Education, during his five years at Buckingham he “wrote six books, several booklets and chapters in academic journals and edited volumes and countless articles”. Seldon is a biographer of prime ministers, and in 2017 he recorded a three-minute talk for the BBC Daily Politics programme on how to be a prime minister:
if any [cabinet minister] steps out of line, fire them. You’re the boss. Find a cabinet fixer to be chief prefect, to yap at their heels and keep them in order.
That was the culture Seldon imposed on Buckingham, and he twice revised the Royal Charter to sideline senate and to empower only himself and the chair of council, a banker called Rory Tapner. It was a classic route to catastrophe.
Together, Seldon and Tapner trashed the university’s finances. In 2019, a university that had for years recorded surpluses was, on an income of £40 million, reporting expenditure of £60 million. Buckingham also collapsed on every academic measure: the university fell from the top third of the league tables to the bottom 20 per cent, and the university fell from having the lowest grade inflation in the country (a proud boast) to the highest (according to the Office for Students, it had the greatest number of unexplained first-class honours degrees of any university in the UK.)
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Donations died as successive donors were slighted, whilst — as the BBC reported with incredulity on 4 March 2016 — police dogs prowled the halls of residence to identify any student in possession of marijuana.
Today, the university still struggles. It still comes bottom of the league tables, student numbers are still stagnant, staff are still being made redundant and degree inflation is still out of control (the inflation was turbocharged in 2023, yet the university registered the greatest fall in The Times league table of any university.)
In 2023 the university finally registered an operating surplus, but this was spoiled by one of the university’s perennial half-truths: it had registered a surplus of £6 million due to two one-off adjustments. the real surplus was £0.3m.
Consider its handling of the vice-chancellor, James Tooley. First, in an act of gross favouritism, the council appointed him by internal promotion, without external advertisement. Then, after his estranged wife made absurd claims against him, the council — instead of investigating discreetly — suspended him publicly. The council claimed it had to go public because of legal advice yet the following of legal advice is discretionary. Council actually suspended Tooley because he was asserting a lawful right to the extension of his contract, and — out of spite — the council lashed out to publicly humiliate him even although an independent investigation eventually found him innocent of any impropriety.
Irrespective, the Tooley years have not been great for the university because an institution like Buckingham has only one currency — its league table positions. Yet Tooley is a league table sceptic who even kept the university out of the Research Excellence Framework. Hence its league table standings have not recovered. Nor, consequently, have the enrolment of students, staff and donors. Tooley is anti-woke, which aligns with the university’s original free-speech mission — which has helped recruit high-profile campaigners including Eric Kaufmann. But anti-wokery should supplement, not replace, a league table strategy.
The story of Buckingham might be only of parochial interest but for the horror of so many universities’ precarious finances. Three-quarters of all universities are today making losses, and mass redundancies have become commonplace. But the sector has been run by councils that have not limited their role to the reinvestment of surpluses in the academic staff, research and teaching quality. Rather, like the local businesspeople they generally are, they have taken on debt to build facilities, which are now redundant as student rolls fall.
Mrs Thatcher’s experiment of empowering councils and disempowering senates has, in short, failed, and we need to remodel our universities’ governance on Oxford, Cambridge, the Inns of Court and the medical royal colleges, none of which are going bust.
The power to reform lies with the academics, for only they can teach, research and examine. Every senate should go on strike until the last chair of council has been strangled with the entrails of the last CEO of the Office for Students.
