Leading universities when the old rules no longer quite apply

For those attending this year’s party conferences, join HEPI for our 2026 Party Conference ringe events, at the Labour Party Conference on Monday 28 September in Liverpool and the Conservative Party Conference on Monday 5 October in Birmingham.

At both conferences, HEPI will host two events exploring some of the biggest issues facing higher education:

• Higher Education Question Time, bringing together sector leaders to answer your questions about the key challenges and opportunities for universities,
• Soft power in a hardening world: is the UK making the most of its global assets?, examining the UK’s international influence and the role of higher education within it.

All events take place outside the secure zones, so no conference pass is required. Register your interest now. As with all party conference fringe events, attendance is first come, first served and registering does not guarantee you will get a seat.

This blog was kindly authored by Ben Tucker, Partner at Minerva.

There has probably never been a harder time to be leading a university. That is not a plea for sympathy. The vice-chancellors, principals and presidents we interviewed for our recent report (Leading in Times of Turmoil) were not self-pitying, nor cynical, nor seeking to present themselves as heroic figures standing alone against the storm. If anything, what came through most strongly was sobriety: a deep commitment to their institutions and to higher education, combined with a very clear-eyed sense that the job has changed.

For the past few years, the sector has been menaced by a many-headed beast: funding shortfalls; volatility in international recruitment; regulatory and political pressure; pensions; energy costs; AI; changing student behaviours; culture wars; and repeated restructuring. What is striking is not simply that these pressures exist, but the speed with which leaders now have to respond.

“The timing has become much more compressed.”

In this context, the first task of leadership is not frantic activity, but clarity. Again and again, interviewees returned to the importance of knowing what sort of university they serve. In easier times, institutional mission statements can feel ornamental. In harder times, they become practical: helping leaders decide what to stop doing, where to invest, what kind of growth is worth pursuing, and what must be protected.

One of the report’s clearest themes is that

“crisis management is not the same as strategic leadership.”

Universities do need to address deficits, reduce costs and improve productivity. But if everything becomes only a financial exercise, institutions risk losing the very qualities that make them universities. The best leaders use strategy as both a rallying call and a discipline.

The second task is more prosaic, but just as important: running the business. There is now no plausible version of the vice-chancellor role that allows someone to stand apart from the finances. “Business-like” is sometimes used pejoratively in higher education, but the leaders we spoke to were not trying to make universities less human. They were trying to ensure that they survive.

This is also why team-building matters so much. Vice-chancellors are not, and should not be, solitary problem-solvers. Many described the work of building executive teams that can operate across institutional siloes, challenge each other honestly, and own shared problems. Leaner teams only work if they are more trusted, more candid and more focused.

Communication has changed too. A few years ago, discussions of university leadership often circled around authenticity and personality. In the present moment, the tone feels different. Leaders need to front things up: to stand in rooms, answer questions, explain the burning platform without theatricality, and offer enough hope to keep people moving.

But the most important focus at the moment may be governance. Governance is no longer a periodic process that sits politely alongside executive leadership; it has become one of the central conditions for whether leadership succeeds. As one interviewee observed,

“Governance has changed a lot. Board members can no longer turn up, eat sandwiches and go to a graduation.”

This matters because the increasing business dimension of a vice-chancellor’s life is paralleled by an increasing need for business-like governance. Leaders talked about absolute openness with boards, regular contact with chairs, informal conversations and the discipline of “no nasty surprises”. One described spending 10–15 per cent of each week on board work. The board relationship is not peripheral to effectiveness; it is increasingly part of the job itself.

This does not mean boards becoming executive teams by another name. The challenge is subtler: to govern in the realm of what is possible. Lay members can bring immense value, but they are necessarily at some distance from the lived realities of the institution. In difficult times, that distance can become dangerous if boards ask impossible levels of performance from exhausted organisations. One leader captured the problem bluntly:

“Stop asking for the moon when you know we can’t deliver it.”

For those appointing leaders, this has real implications. Governance can be one of the biggest shocks for people arriving in vice-chancellor roles: suddenly they become the singular focus of intense board attention. Candidates need business understanding, strategic clarity, resilience and humility, but they also need to know how to build trust with a chair, work constructively with lay members, and keep a board close without allowing it to drift into operational management. Boards, in turn, should invest more consciously in board culture, chair development, realistic performance expectations and induction for new vice-chancellors.

There is no single model that will work for every institution. Higher education is becoming more multiple, not less. Different universities face different combinations of challenge and opportunity. Some will become more specialised; some will collaborate more radically; some may merge where there is no better alternative. The task is not to pretend that one sector-wide answer exists, but to steward institutional distinctiveness intelligently.

These are not tranquil times, and they are unlikely to become tranquil soon. But turmoil can clarify as well as threaten. If universities can use this moment to become sharper about purpose, more honest about performance, more open in governance and more thoughtful about leadership, then the sector may emerge not unscathed, but stronger in the places that matter.