Why I’m applying to be Buckingham vice-chancellor again

When the University of Oxford sought a new vice-chancellor in 2014, it issued a candidate brief. The first requirement, under “person specification”, was that applicants must “demonstrate the academic credibility and intellectual rigour necessary to lead one of the world’s foremost universities”.

The University of Buckingham is currently seeking a new vice-chancellor, and it too has issued a candidate brief. Its list of requirements “the person” must have is a “Master’s or Doctoral-level qualification”. But the rest of the document makes clear that no greater indicator of academic credibility is required because Buckingham’s trustees are really looking for a businessperson.

They have therefore made another big mistake. There’s a reason Oxford has come top of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for the past 10 years. And there’s a reason why, over those same 10 years, Buckingham’s standing has fallen dramatically. Those reasons are, respectively, the triumph and absence of academic leadership.

Buckingham’s slide on every common measure represents, I believe, one of the most dramatic collapses in British university history. In 2015, it was named The Times/Sunday Times Teaching University of the Year. It was rated gold in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). And it came top of the National Student Survey (NSS) for student satisfaction for the ninth time in the previous 11 years (the other two years it was second).

Buckingham had also reported a financial surplus every year for a decade, having grown over the previous decade nearly fourfold in terms of numbers of students, staff, income and acreage thanks in part to a 100-fold increase in donations. These enabled it to create nationally significant new faculties, including the UK’s first independent schools of education and medicine in a century.

But in 2025 Buckingham was rated silver in the TEF and in The Times/Sunday Times league table came bottom for student satisfaction (as based on the NSS returns) and was ranked 128th out of 130 universities overall.

In addition, it was identified by the Office for Students as awarding the highest proportion of “unexplained” (that is, inflated) first-class degrees in the country in 2023-24. A full 52 per cent of students achieved firsts, compared with only 17 per cent in 2010-11, and the OfS deemed 73 per cent of these grades as unexplained by its statistical modelling. This came after entry requirements had been systematically lowered.

Furthermore, Buckingham courted public contempt when, in October 2024, the chair of council, Mark Qualter, suspended the vice-chancellor, James Tooley, “with immediate effect …over serious allegations”. The damage to the institution was maximised when the news was emailed to over 4,000 people. Tooley was ultimately reinstated the following year after being cleared in an unpublished report but his contract was not renewed – hence the current vacancy.

The university’s financial situation has also deteriorated. It has reported deficits every year since 2017 bar one: some of those deficits were huge including, in 2019, one of £20 million on an income of £40 million. The deficit in 2024, the last year for which we have records, was £1.6 million; and unrestricted cash reserves have fallen from circa £35 million to circa £15 million, prompting rumours of a possible sale.

Redundancies followed, with Buckingham losing 42 academic staff in 2024, leaving only 143. This year, it has embarked on yet another round of redundancies.

It has ceased expanding, is suspending courses and aborting innovation (the proposed new dental school, for example, was cancelled). With donations slowing to a trickle, it has been selling assets.

What caused the collapse of the University of Buckingham? Council.

Between 2001 and 2015, Buckingham was run like a mini-Oxford or Cambridge. Put differently, it was run democratically by the academics in its Senate, to whom the deans on the executive committee deferred. The Senate was like a mini House of Commons and the executive committee a mini-Cabinet.

Meanwhile, the Council, made up of lay, external non-executive trustees, was treated as a mini House of Lords: that is, as a revising chamber. But it was very unhappy with this limited role and considered it – despite all the university’s success – a recipe for disaster. It simply never accepted – it literally could not credit – how the university’s success had emerged by its devolved culture of entrepreneurial experimentation by the academics. It wanted to impose strategic plans from the centre, and to reinforce them with elaborate monitoring and compliance mechanisms.

But great universities (and in 2015 Buckingham was a great university) are not like for-profit companies. A for-profit company can be compared to a pyramid – albeit an elastic one – that is inflated with external capital from above. The directors at the top of the pyramid, as custodians of that capital, are therefore bound to wield central plans, KPIs (key performance indicators), by performing PDRs (personal development reviews) and the rest of the for-profit, MBA-mandated management and surveillance apparatus on behalf of the external owners – for whom the staff can be little more than factors of production, not too far removed from Aristotle’s living tools.

By contrast, a university doesn’t leverage exogenous financial capital. It leverages endogenous human capital, so it grows from the bottom up. And, being a charity, it doesn’t have owners. It has members – mainly the staff.

A healthy university can thus be compared to a cauliflower, with each academic unit being a separate floret, permitted to grow in its own way. Some departments grow by research, for instance. Others thrive via by industrial links, others by innovative teaching.

But the Buckingham council never understood the cauliflower analogy, and in 2014 it mounted a coup. It dismantled the structures of devolved academic management, and it set up its chairman, Rory Tapner, a former banker, as executive chairman of the whole university. And thereafter the university collapsed.

Yet the university’s council will not learn from its mistakes. It seems determined to reinforce its failures and appoint a businessperson as the new vice-chancellor.

I am no such thing but, as a former Buckingham vice-chancellor, I shall apply for my old post because that seems the only way to hold a debate at Buckingham today. In the latest edition of The Critic magazine, for instance, the Buckingham monetary economist Tim Congdon laments that “for a body that has the fate of a university on its hands” the university council “is remarkably opaque about its goals and intentions”. I shall use my application to illuminate Council’s mis-goals and mis-intentions.  

I trust my application will be treated with the respect owed to the person who last rescued the university from disaster. And I trust that the process will facilitate a discussion on the proper management of a university between (to be blunt) someone who got it right and (to be equally blunt) a group of people who are getting it wrong.

Terence Kealey was vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham between 2001 and 2014. His friend Alistair Alcock, as acting v-c, maintained his policies into 2015.