Universities need more Marcus Aurelius and less Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great, in a cage, being carried aloft by griffins in the mid 15th century | Getty Images

placeholder image — Alexander the Great, in a cage, being carried aloft by griffins in the mid 15th century | Getty Images

The present crisis in higher education suggests the sector has “spent too long rewarding conquerors and too little time valuing custodians”, writes

The financial crisis facing British higher education is usually explained through external pressures: frozen domestic tuition fees, rising costs and falling international student recruitment. All are real. But the sector’s vulnerability also reflects a less discussed problem: a model of university governance that has often rewarded expansion more readily than stewardship.

This tension can be understood through two archetypes from classical antiquity. Alexander the Great embodied ambition and expansion; Marcus Aurelius, stewardship, prudence and responsibility to the wider community.

For decades, governing bodies have tended to favour leaders who resemble Alexander.

These vice-chancellors are ambitious, entrepreneurial and outward-looking. They build international partnerships, attract philanthropic donations, launch new campuses and persuade institutions to move faster than academic cultures might otherwise allow.

Universities need such leadership. Without it, they risk stagnation.

But the qualities that make an excellent expansionary leader are not necessarily those needed when growth ends. Alexander conquered an extraordinary empire in little more than a decade. Yet the political structure he created fragmented rapidly after his death. Expansion proved easier than endurance.

Many universities now face precisely that challenge. The question is no longer simply how to grow faster, but how to preserve teaching, research and public service under conditions of constraint.

The consequences of unchecked expansionary thinking are becoming visible across the sector. Universities made a deliberate choice to use international student fees to compensate for declining public funding and frozen domestic tuition fees. That was understandable: internationalisation became a revenue pillar rather than a strategic add-on.

But it also created substantial exposure to changes in international demand.

In Scotland, the exposure is particularly stark. Scottish universities cannot charge tuition fees to Scottish-domiciled students; instead, they receive a government-set rate per student that is substantially lower than the fees English universities can charge, and that has not kept pace with rising costs. With domestic income constrained by policy, institutions have had strong incentives to rely on income from international and rest-of-UK students. When those sources weaken, there is relatively little domestic fee income to absorb the shock.

The consequences are now visible across the UK. Universities have announced redundancies, course closures and restructuring as they respond to falling income and rising costs. Coventry University, for example, reported a £59 million deficit in 2023-24 after a sharp fall in international recruitment. Even as it announced the deficit, the university pressed ahead with approval for a new campus in India.

The University of Reading provides another cautionary example. Its Malaysia branch campus accumulated multimillion-pound losses, with a subsequent review finding that warning signs had not been acted upon.

The point is not that these decisions were irrational. Expansion can generate income, reputation and opportunities. Nor is internationalisation itself the problem. The problem is governance that asks whether a strategy can generate growth without asking a second question: what happens to the university’s core mission if the growth stops?

That is the question of stewardship.

Marcus Aurelius offers a useful metaphor. As emperor and Stoic philosopher, he inherited a vast and increasingly troubled empire and spent much of his reign maintaining its cohesion through war, plague and economic strain. His task was less to extend the frontier than to sustain the community.

A recurring theme in his Meditations is responsibility to the collective: “What injures the hive injures the bee.” Applied to higher education, the principle is simple. University success should not be measured only through rankings, income growth or estate expansion, but also through the health of the academic community.

A strategy that increases prestige while eroding trust, morale or educational quality may succeed in the short term while weakening institutional resilience. The same applies when financial pressures lead universities to cut programmes that appear difficult to monetise but are central to institutional identity and reputation.

The postwar transformation of Stanford University shows what a productive balance can look like. President Wallace Sterling strengthened the university’s governance and encouraged greater faculty involvement, while Provost Frederick Terman drove research expansion, external funding and closer relationships with industry. Their different strengths were complementary: Sterling provided institutional leadership while Terman pursued anambitious expansion of Stanford’s research enterprise. Together they helped transform Stanford from a strong regional university into a world-leading research institution.

The choice, therefore, is not between Alexander and Marcus. Universities need both. Entrepreneurial leadership remains essential for securing resources, developing partnerships and adapting to change. But governing bodies need to ensure that a culture of stewardship balances expansionary instincts.

This requires some practical changes. First, universities should stress-test major strategic investments against plausible falls in their principal sources of income, rather than treating diversification as a post-crisis remedy. Second, governing bodies should explicitly assess the effect of restructuring on the institution’s academic identity and long-term capabilities, not simply its short-term finances. And third, councils must retain sufficient independence andexpertise to challenge ambitious strategies rather than simply endorse them.

For Scottish institutions, whose funding structure leaves relatively little margin for error, the need for such stewardship is particularly urgent. But the lesson extends well beyond Scotland.

The present crisis suggests that British higher education has spent too long rewarding conquerors and too little time valuing custodians.

The sector does not need fewer visionaries. It needs more stewards.

Dr Francisco J Perez-Reche is a reader in complex systems and applied mathematics at the University of Aberdeen