A couple of weeks after coming to Manchester, Duncan Ivison was accosted on a bus. Ivison tends to wake up at 5.30am and gets into the university he runs around 7.15am, beating most of his students up Oxford Road and avoiding the pre-lecture havoc on the 142. On this summer’s morning in 2024, a woman heard him being greeted by a fellow passenger and spun around to ask if he was the vice chancellor of the University of Manchester.
“You really ought to look after your students a bit better,” she told him.
Ivison was perplexed and spoke to his team when he arrived at work. “Where would she get that from?” he asked them. Soon, he started to work out the answer.
There is arguably no public figure in Manchester – not even the mayor Andy Burnham – whose role matters as much to the prosperity of the city as the one held by Ivison, a 60-year-old Canadian academic who wears a hangdog expression and speaks with the pleasing precision of a political scientist.
The University of Manchester employs more than 12,000 staff and brought in £1.4 billion last year, more income than Manchester City and Manchester United combined. Its research makes waves around the world. Its 46,000 students are so pivotal to the economics of the city that when Ivison was recruited in 2023, Manchester’s council leader was part of the hiring process. When the BBC’s economics editor Faisal Islam analysed Manchester’s success recently, he noted that along with MMU, it makes up Europe’s biggest university campus.
“Everything comes back to this,” wrote Islam, a Mancunian himself. “The knowledge and the educated workforce are the essential raw ingredient upon which this growth has emerged.”
One university staffer describes Ivison as a “breath of fresh air” and a stark contrast to his predecessor, Dame Nancy Rothwell. But he’s taken over a university beset by challenges: frighteningly reliant for its income on Chinese graduate students, applications from whom are “tanking” according to one insider, and working out how to offer a meaningful education to a generation who can instantly gin up a 5,000-word essay using AI.
“I mean, there are days where you think, ‘Why the hell am I doing this? It’s almost impossible’” Ivison tells me in one of the university’s cafes in late November, the first of our two meetings for this piece, which has also involved speaking to multiple colleagues and associates of his, on and off the record.
The role is difficult but also “an amazing sort of privilege,” he says, with some of his students sitting drinking coffee at the surrounding tables. It’s not a perfect setting for an interview covering sensitive questions about the university’s finances and relationship with autocratic regimes, but it matches his approach: he wants to be visible and approachable to his students in a way that Rothwell – widely caricatured as imperious – was not. “One of the dangers of these roles is that you start to believe your own bullshit and you get caught in an executive bubble,” he says, noting that when you’re the vice chancellor, people come into your office and say things “that they think you want to hear”.
It all sounds very Canadian and lovely. But are Ivison’s vast army of students, staff and partners in the city buying into his new style of leadership?
‘Tanking’
It was late autumn last year when staff realised there was a problem: applications from international graduate students were much lower than expected. “I became more aware of the panic around it in October and November,” one administrative worker told The Mill. How bad were the numbers? “Tanking is the word that was used,” the staffer recalls.
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