Why are you leaving?

One last big academic job before I hang up the boots, I think. If you read anything about leadership they all say that 7 to 10 years is about the right length of time. And after that, you’re in too close. You can’t necessarily see what the problems are, and fresh eyes over the organisation are healthy.

So you’re not leaving us in the lurch at all?

There are a lot of changes going on in higher education, so perhaps the timing could have been slightly better.

How much do you know about the Union’s financial discrepancy? Can you tell us how much it is, or what the University and Union are doing to fix it?

I’m not going to tell you how much it is because I literally can’t remember the figure off the top of my head. Any financial discrepancy in any respectable financial organisation is a worry, and needs to be investigated. The Union has its own system for doing that. But there is a requirement for oversight from the University. Appropriate action is being taken.

Did they ask the University to bail them out? Is this one of the reasons that their funding hasn’t been touched?

The sums of money were such that sort of intervention was not required.

You’ve talked before about the possibility of the University’s surplus reaching ‘dangerous’ levels. What’s the situation?

The overall big picture on the finances is that this. So we’re about £15 million total down in income, but we’ve saved about £30 million per year in annual costs, and we were therefore able to weather the storm.

What’s your proudest achievement as Vice Chancellor over the past decade?

Can I have two? The first thing I would say was bringing research to education, and getting a reputation for it and making it very real – having students engaged in the research process. Second: alumni. What happens to students after they leave the University, keeping association, and the importance of that for the future of the University. The alumni control the reputation of the organisation, they form a network that’s of value to current students and fresh graduates.

Let’s talk about donors like Lord Laidlaw and Jimmy Savile. How did these people slip through the net? How can you reassure us that won’t happen again?

Every major donation to this University goes through a gift acceptance committee process, of which the membership is predominantly lay members of the council. The executive don’t have a vote in that committee for obvious reasons, because we could be potentially conflicted, so people look at each individual case, case by case, against the background of information that we’re able to search for and find in the public domain. People make decisions about what is acceptable, what would cause reputational problems for the Uni. When the committee started, of course there were some cases that had gone through, Jimmy Savile would be one of those, but we did re-examine the Savile donation and we did decide not to accept the money. The other case that you mentioned, the committee did review that set of circumstances and decided to go ahead with accepting the donation.

Have our financial difficulties made us less careful when it comes to accepting donations and money?

Definitely not, if anything I think that the level of scrutiny has gone up. We certainly wouldn’t want to accept any money if there had been illegality, and we would always look at the reputation on issues. A lot of work goes on before we will accept a significant donation, and we look at every major donation to see if there are any issues that would be of concern.

Any regrets?

Things never go fast enough when you’re VC. So the change that you want to see happen, and the speed of improving excellence, you always ask yourself ‘If I had done something slightly differently, could we have gone a bit faster?’ I don’t have any major regrets, I’ve had a phenomenal time here. People have been very kind to me – even Leeds Student – by and large, and I’m incredibly grateful for the hard work everyone’s put in making this a better University. For a recording of the full interview, visit LSRFM.com

Words: Max Bruges and Sean Hayes