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Campbell in 2001: a divisive figure, rarely troubled by self-doubt. Below, a building on campus was named in his honourSir Colin Campbell’s vision, drive and
ruthlessness made him a key figure in
British higher education and public life
for 30 years. During his lengthy tenure
as vice-chancellor of the University of
Nottingham he helped to raise the in-
stitution’s national and global profile,
opening campuses in Malaysia and
China, the first foreign university to do
so. For a time, he basked in Margaret
Thatcher’s apparent claim that he was
her “favourite vice-chancellor”.
It was perhaps inevitable that such a
successful career aroused controversy.
In his final year academics protested at
his defence of the arrest, under the
2000 Terrorism Act, of a Nottingham
student and member of staff who were
held for six days and released without
charge. By then his salary of £585,000
was the highest among vice-chancel-
lors. The Times called him “the Sir Alex
Ferguson of VCs”.
Earlier, in 2001, academics at Not-
tingham were astonished when he
accepted £3.8 million from British
American Tobacco to establish a
Centre for Corporate Social Responsi-
bility. The irony of tobacco cash going
into studying company ethics was
described as “baffling” by the charity
Action on Smoking and Health, which
branded the support “blood money”.
Campbell had anticipated opposition
from the anti-smoking lobby but not
the mass resignation of the 15-strong
team from his university’s renowned
Cancer Research Unit. Yet he remained
unrepentant, insisting that BAT was
working hard to address the “changing
expectations of society and its stake-
holders”.
It was par for the course for Campbell,
a divisive figure who was rarely troubled
by self-doubt. Under his leadership Not-
tingham was the first British university
overtly to espouse a managerialist phi-
losophy while also becoming adept at
raising money.
When he arrived in 1988 he was, at 43,
the country’s youngest university vice-
chancellor, though he saw the role as
more chief executive than chairman. He
introduced centralised management
methods, including reducing the uni-
versity senate in size and its five-hour
sessions to under two hours. “Any other
business” on the agenda became “any
other competent business”, with the
vice-chancellor deciding what was
competent.
There was no doubt he disliked long
meetings and wordy interventions,
particularly when they did not support
his desired outcome. His short fuse did
not cope well with opposition and his
critics recall being cold-shouldered for
some years after a disagreement.
Departments were informed of his cof-
fee requirements when he arranged to
visit them. “He is no easy conversation-
alist,” said one higher education expert.
“He’s not a lovable fellow.”
Campbell played an active role in
appointing deans, making them mem-
bers of his central management team
rather than representatives of their fac-
ulties, and took virtually single-handed
control of professorial salaries. “What I
do here is make sure we choose the
right professors. I have missed only one
interview in all my time here,” he told
The Independent in 2004. He refused to
entertain trade union concerns about
appraisals and performance-related
pay.
Fellow vice-chancellors regarded
Campbell with a mixture of admiration
and suspicion. Some were aghast at his
call in 1999 for universities effectively
to be privatised “to help them be global-
ly competitive”. When he campaigned
in favour of tuition fees, the National
Union of Students predictably made
him their public enemy number one.
Ministers by contrast admired him for
speaking out when other VCs agreed
with government but were too scared to
say so in public. He saw tuition fees as
the only way of funding expansion
while maintaining the quality of more
elite universities. This corporate ap-
proach continued apace. Once he even
bought newspaper advertising space to
describe Nottingham’s progress in the
manner of a company’s annual report,
saying: “Universities need to be run in a
businesslike manner and this includes
letting people know of our achieve-
ments and activities.”
During his tenure there was a
marked turnover of professors and
administrators. After the dismissal of
one senior officer in 1992, a visiting
judge, to whom the case was referred,
ruled that the university had breached
the rules of natural justice and a large
and embarrassing settlement followed.
In 1994 David Regan, a right-wing pro-
fessor of local government and minis-
terial adviser, took his own life, leaving
letters complaining about the vice-
chancellor’s style of management.
After a visit to China in 1997 Camp-
bell threw Nottingham into establish-
ing links with that country, setting up a
China Policy Institute, electing a Chi-
nese national as the university chancel-
lor and opening an office in Shanghai.
He opened campuses in both China
and Malaysia. In Britain the Notting-
ham campus welcomed growing num-
bers of students from those countries.ence that the detention of the “Notting-
ham Two” was not a matter of academic
freedom and that there was “no right” to
access and research terrorism materials
dismayed academics, especially those
teaching terrorism studies, who won-
dered if they too might be hung out to
dry by their employer.
Colin Murray Campbell was born in
Glasgow in 1944, the son of Donald and
Isabel Campbell. The family moved to
Aberdeen, where he was educated at
Robert Gordon’s College and took a first
in law at the University of Aberdeen,
though he never qualified as a lawyer
and never practised as one. In his youth
he was a competent soccer player, being
scouted for Rangers, and never lost his
athletic build or competitive instincts.
He lectured in law at Dundee and
Edinburgh, but at 29 was promoted to a
chair of jurisprudence at Queen’s Uni-
versity Belfast, a bold appointment
given his modest publication list but one
that apparently recognised his potential.
There he worked on the philosophy and
sociology of law and contributed to aca-
demic volumes on a bill of rights and the
interactions of computers and law and
between medical law and ethics.
In 1974 he married Elaine Carlisle, a
sociology lecturer from Queen’s. He is
survived by their son, Andrew, a chief
executive officer, and their daughter
Victoria, a hospital consultant. The mar-riage was dissolved in 1999. In 2002 he
married Maria Day; they separated.
At Belfast he developed a penchant
for university management, becoming
dean of the law faculty and, in 1983, a
pro-vice-chancellor. Queen’s finances
were under pressure and he balanced
the books by using a mixture of charm
and menace to persuade several senior
staff to take early retirement. The appar-
ent relish with which he carried out the
cull meant that an invitation to his office
was known only partly in jest as a call
from “the angel of death”.
His path of advancement would now
be university leadership, though in later
years he was sometimes wistful about
having turned his back on scholarship.
In 1988 he became vice-chancellor of
Nottingham, which had sound finances
thanks to the generosity of Jesse Boot,
founder of the Boots company.
Passionate about Nottingham
becoming a globally renowned and re-
search-led university, Campbell was also
clear about his priorities: maintaining
stable finances through expansion;
boosting research income and business
links; recruiting and retaining high-
quality staff; and maintaining the fabric
of the university campus. On his watch
full-time student numbers quadrupled
to more than 30,000; he authorised the
building of a swimming pool, a nursery
and an arts centre; and in 1999 a £50 mil-
lion Jubilee Campus was opened by the
Queen on the site of the former Raleigh
cycle factory.
Campbell had a life outside of Not-
tingham and impressed the kingmakers
in Whitehall. The local MP was Ken
Clarke, deputy chairman of British
American Tobacco who also served at
various times as education, health and
home secretary. His hand was evident in
Campbell’s external appointments,
including to the chairmanship of the
Human Fertilisation and Embryology
Authority.
He was one of the few vice-chancel-
lors to sit on the Higher Education
Funding Council, which until 2018
decided the allocation of funds for uni-
versities, and spent seven years as chair-
man of the Food Advisory Committee.
Under New Labour he continued to
flourish and was the first lay commis-
sioner for Judicial Appointments, criti-
cising the slowness of procedures for
appointing judges. He stepped back
from public duties in 2008 after a period
of ill health and retired to Epsom. Later
he lived in Edinburgh with his new part-
ner, Julia Yu, and enjoyed walking their
dogs.
Writing in the British Medical Journal
at the time of the BAT funding uproar,
Campbell declared: “In years to come,
few people will question the fact that the
University of Nottingham accepted
funds from the tobacco industry. What
they will see instead will be the high-
quality, globally relevant input to corpo-
rate social responsibility led by the uni-
versity’s business school.” He may be
proved right on the latter, but the
centre’s website no longer boasts of the
tobacco-stained funding with which it
was established.Professor Sir Colin Campbell, university
vice-chancellor, was born on December
26, 1944. He died of undisclosed causes
on May 20, 2022, aged 77He could appear careless about rules
and conventions and was criticised for
arranging the university’s purchase of
his £500,000 luxurious family home
without the required prior approval,
having previously spent £150,000
refurbishing a temporary university
residence.
Yet he continued to display remark-
able tenacity and self-confidence,
describing his critics as “a malevolent
clique of malcontents”; they in turn con-
sidered him to be “a vindictive bully”.
One journalist told how interviewinghim was like talking to an excited pri-
vate-sector entrepreneur: “Words spew
forth in an unending stream as, without
pausing for breath, he whistles through
his university’s achievements, calling for
documents from his staff, getting up and
down from his chair, and giving the
impression he is in a frantic rush.”
One of the biggest rows came in his
final year when he appeared to condone
the arrest of a student and his supervisor
after the student downloaded a copy of
an al-Qaeda training manual for use in
his MA dissertation. Campbell’s insist-Campbell was said to
be Margaret Thatcher’s
favourite vice-chancellor
Professor Sir Colin Campbell
Controversial vice-chancellor of the University of Nottingham whose Thatcherite reforms were introduced with the zeal of a City CEO
IAN NICHOLSON/PRESS ASSOCIATIONObituaries
Neo-Nazi leader who
became an anti-racist mole
Ray Hill
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