How City’s vice-chancellor left behind a trail of “fear and intimidation” at his last university

Like some kind of endangered wild animal, vice-chancellor Paul Curran is normally only spotted by City students once a year at most.

Perhaps our esteemed leader is busily embroiled in his research into the estimation of terrestrial chlorophyll content (if you know what that means, do inform us), or perhaps he’s labouring away, earning his grand-a-day salary transforming City into a bastion of academic excellence.

After all, at the last university Curran presided over – Bournemouth – he claimed to have pulled off an increase in the university’s “strength, stature and popularity”.

But the staff, students and lecturers’ union thoroughly disagreed.

So much so, in fact, that upon the vice-chancellor’s departure a spokesman for the University and College Union described his tenure as “disastrous”, saying Curran’s legacy “would be a climate of fear and intimidation” and they were looking forward to the chance to reverse many of his changes.

The union also claimed 150 staff lost their jobs under Curran, having a “devastating impact on staff morale” and leaving students complaining about a lack of face-to-face time with their teachers.

Unsurprisingly one of the key points of the vice-chancellor’s so-called ‘success’ at Bournemouth was a push for research standards and engagement – a.k.a. exactly what City has been doing over the last five years.

In fact, it was only two years after Curran joined City he told the Guardian about planned staff reforms to replace staff that “only” teach with those a bit more “research-excellent”.

So is the vice-chancellor a forward thinking university strategist or a tyrannical reformist cutting down lecturers with one swing of his metaphorical sceptre? Or maybe just a late-middle-aged man who enjoys long-distance running and a cushy £280,000 a year salary.

The verdict is yours to decide: