‘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.