In May 2022, HEPI published Policy Note 34, Digging in? The changing tenure of UK vice-chancellors, measuring the lengths of tenure of vice-chancellors at long-standing UK universities.
The year 2022 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the passage of the Further and Higher Education Act (1992), which granted university status to then polytechnics as well as Central Institutions in Scotland. Over the subsequent two years, 42 institutions were newly designated as universities, almost doubling the total.1 Some of our readers highlighted the omission of these universities from the May 2022 paper, with Professor Peter Scott, Professor of Higher Education Studies at the Institute of Education and former Vice-Chancellor of Kingston University, questioning whether ‘it is really reasonable to draw conclusions about the tenure of vice-chancellors based only on pre- 1992 universities?’.
