It is hard to imagine the UK higher education sector without Chris Husbands in it.
The vice chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University is set to retire from the university at the end of the calendar year. A former secondary school teacher, onetime director of the Institute of Education when it was an independent entity (it’s now part of University College London), and chair of the Teaching Excellence Framework, Husbands is unusual among university leaders in having academic expertise in education policy and practice. Perhaps that is why he has been such a consistent voice in public higher education policy commentary, even in a time when doing so appears to go against the grain of most vice chancellors’ preferences.
Retirement will be odd for Chris too – when we meet he jokes that for the last forty years his days have consisted of, “Get up, make a sandwich, cycle to work, work, eat a sandwich, work some more, cycle home, work, then get up and do the same thing again.” But he’s not planning on disappearing entirely from public life or higher education – and I doubt anyone will be surprised to see him continuing to play an active role in sector activity and policy.
A change in responsibilities may well be welcome, too – after the Covid pandemic, the sector saw a flurry of vice chancellor departures, as leaders activated delayed plans for retirement, making for a stressful final stretch. The funding pressures universities are now facing are placing additional demands on university leaders to develop the strategies and make the difficult decisions required when there is scant prospect of a cash injection any time soon.
