The vice-chancellor of Sussex University shares his views on student protests, how he got the university's accounts back in the black and why he's committed to interdisciplinary research

Michael Farthing was a student in the 1960s, when higher education was beginning its big postwar expansion. Built in 1961, Sussex was the first of the new universities and, although Farthing did his own medical degree at University College London (UCL), many of his schoolfriends, particularly those interested in the arts and humanities, chose Sussex. It was, he says, "an extraordinary university", and when the opportunity came to apply for the job of vice-chancellor in 2007, he seized it with both hands.

Is Sussex University still a home for radicals?

It's not hard to see the appeal of a university that has always had a distinctive reputation. In the 1960s and 70s, it was the destination of choice for clever but free thinking students, who preferred it to older universities with stuffier reputations. From the start, Sussex students were the type to demonstrate, occupy buildings, or fast in protest at the Vietnam war.

More than 50 years on, however, the higher education landscape has changed almost beyond recognition. Sussex is no longer a "new" university – that title now belongs to the former polytechnics – and it operates in a climate of tuition fees, impact factors and profit-and-loss accounts. So does it retain any of the character that once made it such a comfortable home for radicals?

On the face of it, the answer would seem to be no. Farthing has made a number of unpopular decisions, closing down both the linguistics department – a move criticised by the renowned linguist and leftwing polemicist Noam Chomsky – and the centre for community engagement (CCE), which ran part-time courses for local adult learners.

More recently, a 2013 student occupation in protest at a decision to outsource campus services resulted in the suspension of five students and a welter of bad publicity. Sussex's position in the Guardian's league table plummeted, in the space of two years, from 11 to 50, though this year it clawed back to 43.

Farthing, however, sees it differently. He didn't come to the job of vice-chancellor through the usual university route. Having begun his academic career as a medical researcher, he switched to administration in 1995 when he became dean of the newly merged Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry. That was followed by a period as dean of medicine, dentistry and nursing at Glasgow University, before he became principal of St George's Medical School.

Financial instability and research struggles

The Sussex post marked a new departure for someone already in his late 50s, but Farthing saw it as a golden opportunity to work in a university he'd always admired. His non-traditional background proved a strength, he says: "It means I'm not particularly bureaucratic, I'm very flexible about the sorts of jobs people do, I don't see people boxed up." His own pro vice-chancellors are rotated through a range of activities in preparation for taking vice-chancellor or deputy vice-chancellor jobs elsewhere.

By the time he took the Sussex post, the university was in what he describes as "an unstable financial position", having reported a deficit for two years. He decided to put in place a "concerted strategic approach to growth," with the aim of improving the university's financial position.

"You only had to take a cursory look at the university's peer group, particularly at the newer research-intensive universities, and they had all grown from the end of the 1990s to the mid-2000s, and Sussex really hadn't," he says. "I could see the university was putting itself in a vulnerable position, particularly in terms of being able to maintain its standing nationally and internationally as a research-intensive university."

The big restructure

Farthing's first step was to engage in a restructuring of the university: "Even before I came here people were telling me that the present structure didn't work. It was unclear where authority and responsibility lay in the university. Was it in the big schools they had at the time, or was it in departments? And if you unpick that structure, you could see quite small departments who had a lot of responsibility, and big schools where it was completely random as to where the responsibility lay."

He was aware that a restructure – which would inevitably entail redundancies – would not be universally popular: "Any form of restructuring however light it is, is always detested. I spent quite a lot of time inviting ideas about what might be the ideal structure for the future."

Farthing decided to go back to what he sees as the vision of the university's founders – a structure that consisted of schools of study with no interdisciplinary boundaries: "There were no departments in Sussex in the beginning but it had become heavily departmentalised over the succeeding years, and so what we attempted to do was go back to that founding principle.

"We created nine schools that really flattened out the structure. We gave important leadership management roles to those heads of schools, and it gave us an opportunity to really focus on what were going to be the important core academic areas for the future."

Getting Sussex out of the red

In 2009, Farthing put in place a strategic plan that set out an ambitious set of goals for the university, with the aim of improving its international standing and strengthening its financial position. These included increasing the number of fee-paying overseas students, generating greater research income and developing partnerships with businesses.

The closures of linguistics and the CCE have to be seen in this financial context, argues Farthing. The linguistics department's research output had dwindled in recent years, and the university was facing competition from the excellent linguistics department in nearby UCL.

The closure of the CCE "was triggered by the fact that the government of the day took away the funding for people doing a second degree, and so suddenly the funding for that activity disappeared in one financial year. The justification for running anything now at a deficit in a university is highly questionable."

What has been achieved?

All but one of the targets – doubling research grant contract income – of the 2009 plan have been achieved, and the university's accounts are now firmly in the black, with a surplus of £14m for the year 2012-13. Farthing created another strategic plan in 2013, which includes goals such being ranked within the top 20 of UK universities, doubling research income to £54m and building stronger partnerships with external organisations.

There are now, for example, partnerships with four Chinese universities that include research collaborations and student exchanges (though Farthing has no plans to build an overseas campus). The university is also working with local businesses and councils and, says Farthing, now contributes £600m a year to the local economy.

So what would a visitor dropping in from the 60s or 70s make of the modern Sussex? They might be pleased to see that the brutalist buildings designed by Basil Spence are still in place, looking trendily mid-century modern. And buildings are springing up all the time.

About £400-£500m is being spent on new accommodation and academic buildings, and the aim is increase the number of students from 13,000, including postgraduates, to 18,000 in 2018, and new accommodation is being built in readiness for that – Farthing is making space by moving the university's unsightly carparks to the periphery of the campus. The number of academic staff is also increasing, from 650 to 1,000.

Our time traveller would also be struck by the variety of nationalities on campus. About one in five Sussex students is now from overseas, says Farthing: "You can hear hundreds of languages being spoken, which, unlike Nigel Farage, I celebrate and delight in." The influx of overseas students – representing 120 nations – has been beneficial, he argues, making the campus more lively at weekends, when many domestic students return home.

Interdisciplinary research is the future

Far from stamping all over Sussex's heritage, Farthing believes he is continuing it. He is proud of the progressive nature of academic staff's research interests and their willingness to engage in research that has an impact.

"Development studies are still very strong in this university, and we are very concerned about the inequalities that could be driven further by climate change, by migration. We now have a medical school, so we're fully engaged with health issues, not just local but global," says Farthing. "There is a sense that the things we do here have got to be important, they've got to have impact, they've got to be relevant to the world outside."

While some universities are still struggling with the idea of interdisciplinarity, it has been part of Sussex's make-up from the start, and the return to a flatter, school-based structure will, Farthing believes, help it to flourish.

The university's neuroscience centre, for example, includes specialists in the fields of medicine, psychology, life sciences and informatics and engineering, while the Sackler centre for the study of consciousness science, built on philanthropic donations, brings together, among others, psychiatrists and computer scientists. A new interdisciplinary centre for Middle East studies is in progress.

There have been setbacks, however. One was the university's treatment of the sit-in protesters in 2013, which was regarded by some as heavy-handed and resulted in unfavourable publicity – though Farthing explains it as a necessary response by the security team (not himself) to criminal activity.

He insists that the university still welcomes free thinkers: "We select students who we believe are going to be critical, thoughtful, think about their studies and their futures. Now if you recruit students and select them for those characteristics, you shouldn't be surprised that you're going to have an active student body. And frankly we celebrate that, and I think it still does make us distinctive."

Another setback was the demise in November 2013 of the 1994 group, an alliance of smaller, research-intensive universities of which Farthing was chair. "I think we've lost a lot," says Farthing. "There is no second voice now for research-intensive universities, and we had a very special voice in that we always had teaching and learning absolutely up there with research. And that voice was well-received – we spoke to all political parties and two governments of different colours."

Four of the 1994 group members left to join the prestigious Russell group of bigger research-intensive universities. Others were Russell group aspirants, he says. But not Sussex: "I clearly asked our senate on one occasion whether they'd like to join the Russell group and about four people put their hands up." So Sussex, along with the other former members, has to make its own case for the importance of combining a focus on research with a focus on teaching.

In 1961, Sussex was a small university, alive with promise and opportunity. Farthing is aware that the expansion has, to some extent, changed the character of the university. But growth, he argues, has enabled the university to increase the breadth and depth of its research and to offer a wider range of courses. He is clear that he doesn't want to lose "those very distinctive features" of the university, such as its commitment to interdisciplinarity. "Everybody here lives, breathes, eats, sleeps, drinks interdisciplinarity. And that is as alive as it was 50 years ago," he says.

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