‘I’ll sack who I want’: Inside the chaotic, mutinous new University of Greater Manchester

Dear Millers – a few weeks ago, a Mill reader sent us an audio clip that they said had been circulating among students. The clip seemed to record a conversation between two men, one of whom was doing most of the talking. “We don’t want to turn Bolton into small Lagos,” the man says, expressing concern about the arrival of too many Africans who, in his view, look very similar to each other.   

According to the reader who sent us that clip, the man speaking is a very senior figure at the University of Greater Manchester, which until recently was known as the University of Bolton. “At the end of the day, somebody from Nigeria looks exactly the same as somebody from Ghana,” the man adds, apparently speaking to a more junior colleague. A student sharing the clip described the comments as “racist and disrespectful” to national groups the university is outwardly trying to attract.

Joseph Wheeler, a marketing man with no background in higher education who seems to have acquired extraordinary power at the rebranded university in recent years, has had two weeks to deny that he is the voice recorded on the clip, but he hasn’t done so, or answered any of our questions. The university’s long-serving vice chancellor George Holmes described the clip as “astounding” when we called him recently, but he wasn’t willing to say more.

The clip isn’t an isolated story. According to nearly a dozen serving and former staff members at the university, Holmes has handed the keys of the university to Wheeler, paying his company £8,209,000 over the past six financial years to promote it around the world. Under his tenure, the university has consciously rebranded to be more appealing to international students, describing inclusiveness and friendliness as its major selling points.

But behind the scenes, staff say the man driving these changes is Wheeler: a bully who makes racist jokes, shouts at colleagues and openly threatens people with the sack if they don’t bend to his will, creating what one senior member of staff calls a “fear culture”. In response, a spokesperson told us: “The university takes any suggestions of bullying or bigotry very seriously indeed and has robust internal procedures to deal with any such allegations.”

Today’s story examines what happened when an outsider marketing advisor who works in Milton Keynes managed to take over a university and run it – in his words – like a business.

On a cold day in December, staff gathered in the Learning Zone, a large room in the chancellor’s building on the University of Bolton’s main campus. “In two minutes,” said George Holmes, the university’s 63-year-old vice chancellor, “the Secretary of State will announce that we are the University of Greater Manchester.”

It was a controversial change which had been bitterly opposed by the universities (notably the ones along Oxford Road) that have a more historic claim to the name “Manchester” and felt it was in danger of misleading international students. Holmes however, known as a maverick vice chancellor, saw an opportunity. In evidence to the higher education regulator, he said that having Bolton in the name made his university sound “provincial” and he told journalists that employers would take his students’ degrees more seriously with the new name.

Inside the university, staff saw it as a cynical move to appeal to overseas applicants who have never heard of Bolton, or even to trick them. “They’re trying to fool international students,” one former staff member told us.

But it’s not Holmes that staff tend to want to talk about when asked about discussing how the university is changing. Instead, they point to a man called Joseph Wheeler – a marketing executive whose company is paid around £1.5m a year by the university and who actually lives in Milton Keynes.

Wheeler, nearly a dozen sources say, is the man driving changes at the university – and doing so in a way that has created a mini-revolt among staff. “Any decision that needs to be made goes through Wheeler or the vice chancellor,” one senior staff member told The Mill. “How has he been allowed to run an entire university?”

In recent weeks, a clip of his comments about international students has been circulating around the campus, suggesting the unease about Wheeler’s grip on the university is spreading to students too.

The Zoom call

“Racist, disrespectful and discriminatory towards different ethnic groups!” says the caption to the TikTok video, in block capitals. “This individual made discriminatory remarks against different ethnic groups, i.e. Nigerians. This individual is currently in charge of recruitment for the University of Bolton, earning £1,000,000 a year.”

The video seems to have been created by a student at the university, and the text is accompanied by a short audio clip of Wheeler speaking to another member of staff over Zoom.

A few weeks ago, The Mill obtained a longer version of the audio recording of that call, in which Wheeler appears to be speaking to a member of staff about and relaying vice-chancellor Holmes’ instructions about the university’s need for more overseas students. Or, to be precise, different overseas students. 

“One of the big things on the VC’s list is multi race campus, i.e. not 564 Nigerians,” Wheeler says. “He believes that [the] Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore cluster has potential for us.” Wheeler tells his colleague: “We don’t want to turn Bolton into small Lagos.”

When the other staff member on the call says that student recruitment efforts are being made in Ghana, Kenya and South Africa, Wheeler pushes back. 

“I have to be able to talk openly,” he says. “At the end of the day, somebody from Nigeria looks exactly the same as somebody from Ghana. Someone from Malaysia looks completely different to someone from Nigeria. Someone from Singapore looks completely different to someone from Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka.”

It’s unclear why Wheeler or Holmes might be unhappy about having too many African students at the university, but the clip has clearly caused anger among those who have heard it. “Please share this!” says the caption at the bottom of the shortened version on TikTok.

For some of the staff we’ve spoken to, it provides a piece of public evidence for something they have been complaining about among themselves for the past few years: namely, the growing power of Wheeler and what they describe as his deeply corrosive effect on the university.

‘An outsider’

Wheeler, 55, with a scruffy beard and thick black-rimmed glasses, is not a public figure, yet his influence is felt everywhere within the university. Whereas vice chancellor Holmes has been in charge for almost 20 years (he took the role in 2006, just two years after the former Bolton Institute became a university), Wheeler came on board in 2018 when his small marketing agency RSM won the contract to take over the university’s marketing and brand management services. 

Multiple staff note that in the first few years, Wheeler used to “keep himself in the background”. He was a little-known curiosity around the university’s offices, occasionally turning up in a bright green Lamborghini Huracan to complete marketing work and have dinner with Holmes. One former staff member at RSM Agency, who worked at the agency’s office above an Italian restaurant in Olney, near Milton Keynes, noted that the majority of Wheeler’s time seemed to be spent down south.

The only major question about Wheeler at this stage was this: why, if his company was being paid so much money for marketing, was the university’s website so terrible? Inside RSM, Wheeler’s team agreed that they weren’t adding a lot of value for the university. “It felt strange the university was maintaining this contract when nothing was delivered on time and nothing was delivered well,” a former RSM employee told me.

After the pandemic, staff began to see more of Wheeler, whose importance seemed to be growing. From 2019, Wheeler had been listed as the university’s head of marketing and communications, as well as a member of its executive board. But in 2023, a public document described him as the “head of the delivery unit and corporate services director”.

This was a surprising promotion for a man who came from the world of automotive marketing because it gave Wheeler direct influence over academic affairs. The latest financial report from the university says the delivery unit was set up to “undertake root and branch reviews of all university academic provision and professional support services and to make recommendations to improve efficiency and effectiveness.”

As part of this new role, Wheeler arranged “get to know” sessions, where he sat down with university employees and asked about their role and their experience. Three people who attended say they suspect the “get to know” sessions were a way of Wheeler “getting dirt” on other staff members, occasionally asking odd questions like: “So, who in your department do you think is right to let go?”

Wheeler seemed determined to bring a more private-sector management style to the university, but colleagues say this often tipped over into bullying and aggression. A senior member of staff says they are terrified of making mistakes, having watched him “thrash to pieces” other members of staff “to make you feel inferior to him”. Wheeler allegedly boasted about his power at the university, shouting in the office: “I don’t give a fuck, I’ll sack who I want”. That incident was relayed to me by two sources and was referenced in text messages between colleagues, which I have seen.

One former senior staff member recalls Wheeler calling them in the early hours of the morning, shouting requests down the phone and berating them with insults like “retard” when he was unhappy. “It was the lowest point of my life,” the former staff member told me. “You don’t think life can get that bad. You don’t think you can work for an organisation like that, let alone one in education. Education is supposed to be a place where you’re improving people’s lives.”

It’s only fair to note that amidst this extreme negativity about Wheeler, one senior staff member tells me they have enjoyed working with him. “For me, he’s been nothing but charming and very friendly,” they say. “I cannot say he’s a dick because he’s done x, y, z to me. He just hasn’t.” This staff member says he’s been complimentary about their work and the culture in their office, and praises Wheeler’s ability to listen. However, they say they also recognise that morale is low, and that some colleagues “have become very agitated and upset” and “felt threatened”. “Everyone is looking at Glassdoor and looking him up.” 

RSM has an average rating of 1.5% based on 58 reviews on Glassdoor, the website where people anonymously rate their former company. One said they felt “diminished”, another said they had become “mentally unwell” since working there. Another warned that Wheeler may attempt to pass his brash statements off as a joke. “It is not a wicked sense of humour. It is cruelty.” 

‘Paying like a Jew’

Given his leading role in the university’s embrace of international students, staff say the most jarring aspect of Wheeler’s behaviour is his habit of making racially bigoted jokes and remarks. A senior member of university staff remembers being in a café with Wheeler, when a woman went to take her coffee and nearly forgot to pay. The woman was “paying like a Jew”, Wheeler said at the time. Another member of university staff, a few places behind Wheeler in the queue, remembers hearing the comment. “It was very audible,” they say. “I was like, wow, who the hell’s that?”

Other employees have complained about Wheeler making off-colour comments or saying things that made them feel demeaned based on their ethnicity or nationality but asked me not to use the precise quotes because they would be easily identified. “The University has been approached to comment on numerous bare allegations and potentially vexatious and increasingly extraordinary assertions, primarily it appears from hearsay, allegedly made in most cases by former staff members of the university,” a spokesperson told me, while ignoring my questions about why Wheeler’s company has earned millions of pounds from the university and other matters. “To date, The Mill has not provided the University with any evidence to substantiate such assertions. Further, The Mill has, under the veil of investigative journalism, threatened to make public unsubstantiated, potentially damaging, claims by former staff members against a named individual associated with the organisation. It is regrettable that The Mill has chosen to engage with the University in this manner and thereby not afforded all concerned the opportunity to address any legitimate concerns through the appropriate official procedures, if indeed there are any which constitute legitimate issues.” 

That’s a rather different response from the one I got from Holmes directly, when I called him a couple of weeks ago to get his snap reaction to the audio clip that was circulating among students.

“Astounding,” Holmes said when read out Wheeler’s comments about the danger of having too many African students. I sensed Holmes was trying to get me off the phone (“I’m just overseas at the moment with our international partners…”) but I kept him on the line and told him about the multiple allegations of Wheeler bullying and intimidating staff.

 “Again, that’s not acceptable,” he said, telling me he was busy and it wasn’t an appropriate time to chat, but asked if I could email. “I’ll buzz you back later,” he said. Holmes didn’t return any further calls or texts.