Ƶ universities are facing one of the most turbulent periods in their history with student recruitment down, costs rising and a decline in the international education market.
Whilst public trust in higher education institutions has been steadily eroding, the response from many university leaders has been worryingly predictable namely cutting courses, announcing redundancies, hoping things improve, and carrying on as nothing has really changed.
But everything has changed and what’s needed now isn’t cautious crisis management but bold leadership that deals with the growing set of competing demands from staff, students, governments and the wider public.
So why do so many vice-chancellors run these institutions as if they’re still operating in a world of predictable funding, unquestioned autonomy and no accountability?
Most businesses facing this volatility wouldn’t have acted in the way universities have behaved. Instead, they’d reorganise, reprioritise and double down on clear strategic delivery and that is exactly what higher education must do if it wants to survive the next few years.
Indeed, the best-run organisations in both the public or private sectors share a common set of disciplines that drive clarity, resilience and results. If vice chancellors adopted even half of these, many of the governance failures, financial meltdowns, and cultural breakdowns we’re seeing across the sector could have been avoided.
First and foremost, university leaders must start with having a clear strategic direction, which means not having some opaque “2030 strategy” but a coherent three-year vision and institutional goals. It also means working closely with staff to develop and deliver that strategy to ensure it serves students, employers and the institution’s mission.
But vision without communication is worthless and one of the biggest failings in university leadership today is a lack of open dialogue between senior leaders and the rest of the organisation. Strategies are crafted in ivory offices, shared in management-speak, and never embedded resulting in the current bunker mentality which has characterised the growing divide between senior management and academic staff.
Vice chancellors must become more visible, more transparent, and more accountable. This includes regular engagement with frontline academic and professional staff, honest discussions with student representatives, and a willingness to be challenged.
And bringing charges against staff for questioning the way that the institution is managed, as one Welsh university did recently, is not acceptable in any organisation.
It also means clearly linking every decision to a coherent strategy because as every business leader will tell you, when staff understand the ‘why’, they’re more likely to stay engaged even if they disagree with the ‘what’.
Financial rigour must be non-negotiable as in the best-run companies, cash forecasting, capital allocation and scenario planning are standard practice. Yet in many Ƶ universities, there remains a surprising absence of basic financial discipline and over the years, I’ve seen institutions approving multi-million-pound capital projects without robust payback analysis, negotiating poor deals with overseas recruitment agents, and failing to cut cost inefficiencies in a bloated administration.
In any business, the CEO should know what is going on with finances and every vice chancellor should be reviewing a rolling 13-week cash forecast, challenging hidden costs, and regularly stress-testing their financial model under different scenarios.
There should be clear criteria for investment decisions with a focus on long-term sustainability over short-term appearances. If the businesses I work with behaved the way some universities do with money, they’d be bankrupt.
Another glaring gap is the way universities handle culture and performance and the corporate world has long since recognised that culture isn’t a “nice to have”, it’s a critical asset.
Yet in many universities, we have seen the development of toxic internal environments, weak accountability, and outdated HR practices that continue to fester unchallenged and much of this starts at the top.
University leaders must treat their people as their most important resource and that means hiring and promoting based on values rather than because you agree with the boss. It also means tackling poor performance and bad behaviour quickly and transparently, no matter how senior the individual.
The same goes for operational efficiency as any business serious about performance maps its key processes, identifies bottlenecks, and automates routine tasks. Rather than seeing developments such as AI as a threat, technology should be a cornerstone of modern university leadership who should be using real-time dashboards to track student progression, research income, or space utilisation. It means reviewing cybersecurity, reducing legacy systems, and embedding digital tools that make work easier, not harder.
Crucially, all of this must be underpinned by a stronger approach to risk and governance given that too many boards in higher education act as rubber stamps rather than critical friends.
Those who sit on such bodies often lack the financial, commercial, or sector expertise to challenge senior leaders with reporting opaque, decisions undocumented and accountability thin. Instead, there needs to be more diverse and capable boards to improve transparency and reporting performance against meaningful outcomes.
Time and time again we have seen senior management blame everyone but themselves for the mess that universities have found themselves in and yet the best leaders take full responsibility not only for their actions but the consequences of those actions. In over thirty years in academia, I have been lucky to have worked with some outstanding vice chancellors who epitomised the best aspects of leadership, but I have also known individuals who had been promoted well beyond their abilities and, frankly, couldn’t organise a p*ss up in brewery.
In that respect, the blame for such poor appointments must be placed at the door of those governing bodies who seem unable to comprehend that vice chancellors are no longer running protected, academic fiefdoms but high-stakes, high-impact organisations. In this context, it is not about inflated salaries, global travel, or defensive PR statements but about clarity, courage, and competence.
At this critical time, the sector could do with a lot more of all three, and if those running universities are unable to change and deliver on these, then they should step aside for those that can.
