Rescuing arts institution ‘required a CEO, not a principal’

With his college sandwiched between Kent and Greenwich, Randall Whittaker says he has been asked multiple times if he will join the recent merger between the region’s universities as part of their plans to create a “superuniversity”. 

But after salvaging Rose Bruford College from the depths of financial despair, Whittaker, principal and CEO of the arts institution, is not ready to let go that easily. 

When he joined Rose Bruford in 2023, it was suffering from significant financial losses, having reported an operational deficit of £214,000 the previous year. 

Like others in the sector, the institution had fallen on hard times during the pandemic and the subsequent decision to rehome students from the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts (ARLA) when that college went bust in 2022 compounded the financial issues it was facing. 

Witnessing “data poverty” and slow, emotion-based decision-making “by these huge [internal] consultation groups”, Whittaker said he immediately went into transformation mode to make the college more agile. “The oil tanker is coming at you at such a pace and you’re sitting in endless deliberative meeting structures.”

He started by appointing risk, finance and HR experts on to the board, and insolvency practitioners and corporate restructuring professionals to the executive team. 

At the time, Rose Bruford – a 75-year-old institution that has produced the likes of Jessica Gunning, Toby Jones and Gary Oldman – also had operations spread across most of the UK, as well as Berlin and even Connecticut.

Whittaker closed these sites, telling Times Higher Education that expanding the brand had been a “huge expense” without any “financial modelling on the impact”. 

“They were writing and developing new courses without any market intelligence, appointing the staff to it, and then you end up in a situation where you’ve got three members of staff with two students on a programme,” he said. 

While it is important to protect the student experience, he added, “if the place goes insolvent, no one’s experience is protected”. 

This meant, at times, being ruthless about the college’s bottom line. “I spent my first year refusing to use my principal title. I just referred to myself as the chief executive because it’s so important that staff and students understood I was here to run a business.”

Whittaker, who was formerly a pro vice-chancellor at Leeds Arts University, said he was “continually surprised by the lack of financial acumen at senior levels”.

“If I wasn’t able to change the board, the Dundee situation would have happened to Bruford. The institution that stepped in to rescue ARLA would have gone because no one was spotting the signs that the institution was going into severe distress.” 

While there are ongoing efforts across the higher education sector to improve governance, Whittaker is sceptical. “It comes across a little bit like the sector marking its own homework,” he said. 

He added that the norm of not paying board members is adding to the strain as these often senior executives are expected to take on more. “You can’t govern a university the same way in the current circumstances as you were even able to do 10 years ago. It’s just not possible.”

Now, coming out of the crisis – Rose Bruford generated a slim surplus of £100,455 in 2025 – Whittaker is resisting the movement in the wider sector towards consolidation. Instead, he insists the UK higher education system’s strengths are in diversity. 

“Studying a degree in acting here is different to studying it at a large multi-faculty institution. It simply is.” Thus, Rose Bruford merging with other larger and more traditional institutions would be “problematic”.

He is also against the idea that higher education institutions can or should simply grow themselves out of trouble. “We have focused on what we can do and what we can do really well and…in our circumstance, it means we’re actually contracting.”

And as for his title? He’s no longer as tied to the status of CEO as he once was. “Now I’m really enjoying being the principal because it’s absolutely, absolutely glorious – but it was touch and go.”

helen.packer@timeshighereducation.com