From punk rock to top dog: Nick Petford’s unlikely rise to university leadership

“There was one summer when I thought we could do something,” reflects Nick Petford on the punk rock band, Strate Jacket, that he founded shortly before leaving school aged 16. “We were the first punk band in Southampton, so we had a fairly substantial following there,” he recalls. But, more importantly, the band was also growing a following in London's famous music scene of 1977, recently depicted in the Disney+ series Pistol charting the rise of the Sex Pistols.

Ironically, one of those who had cautioned against pursuing musical stardom was the Pistols’ drummer Paul Cook. “He used to go to the Roxy nightclub in Neal Street, as did the Clash, the Subway Sect and other bands, and I had long chat with him one evening – he was training to be an electrician and was himself very nervous about giving up his apprenticeship,” he says.

That meeting and the demise of Strate Jacket – which, after recording a well-received demo, broke up when two band members were sent to prison for allegedly “causing trouble” after a gig – eventually led Petford away from music but only into a series of poorly paid jobs in retail. Being accepted on to a polytechnic access course in his early twenties and then a degree in geology at Goldsmiths, University of London led to a PhD, academia and eventually university management.

At the University of Northampton, where he has just stepped down as vice-chancellor this month after 12 years at the helm, he led what has been described as one of the most ambitious and exciting UK higher education estates projects for a generation; the university’s relocation from tired 1970s buildings to a new £330 million Waterside campus in the heart of Northampton.

THE Campus views: Blended learning is so bland − we need to punk things up

That project alone is a tangible legacy that few university leaders can rival. Steering his institution through the most turbulent era of British higher education – covering the introduction of £9,000 tuition fees, the removal of student number controls, Covid-19 and the rise of social media – is another underrated achievement.

Petford’s journey from a wannabe punk guitarist and delivery driver to a Royal Society research fellow at the University of Cambridge and, later, a vice-chancellor, is one of higher education’s most unlikely transformations. But maybe the ethos of punk rock was never too far from his thinking?

“As a punk, you’re always trying to be a bit different and go against the grain,” says Petford. “You become comfortable with taking risks too – even just wearing straight jeans was enough to get you beaten up in the early days of punk before it went mainstream,” he recalls of an incident when he was assaulted by a group of youths who “jumped out of a Ford Cortina and pushed me into a hedge” – presumably the inspiration for Strate Jacket’s song Punk Bashing (Ain’t It Smashing).

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“You need to be able to hold the courage of your convictions, often against hostile opposition,” he adds in a thinly veiled reference to criticism by Northampton’s University and College Union (UCU) branch in 2014 of his “risky” pursuit of the Waterside campus project, which led the union to pass a no confidence motion in him and other managers.

“In a band, you’re always looking to create opportunities – making your own magazines or posters – so there is a more entrepreneurial side to it as well,” Petford continues. He insists, however, that he had lost touch with the scene by 1979 and “long before” it was defined by “tourist postcards from London of pink-spiky-haired punk rockers. I was never into that!”

Nonetheless, with its rules, traditions and institutional hierarchies, academia may not seem an obvious place for a youthful rebel to prosper. For his part, Petford dismisses the notion that Britain’s punk rockers were motivated by revolution. “It was very mundane, really – I spoke to Glen Matlock [the Sex Pistols’ original bassist] about this for a show that I do for our university radio station and he agreed it was never about smashing the system,” he says. “The idea that we would bring down British society with anarchy was a marketing gimmick.” 

Instead, Petford’s plans were far more limited than dismantling the system, he explains. “I left school with no real qualifications and my parents were quite keen for me to get a job because they wanted some money coming in,” he explains. “They weren’t too fussed that I wasn’t going to university – even though I’d done OK at school and dropped out because of pure laziness – because they’d never been in higher education themselves,” he adds.

However, his mother, a typist, did encourage him to sign up for a City & Guilds course in refrigerator maintenance. “She’d heard that there were plenty of jobs in this area, but when I finished after a year, there was nothing,” he says. “I got a job working in retail at Comet, then driving a delivery van for Liberty’s in Regent Street – it was all very hand-to-mouth stuff. By the time I was 23, I was unemployed, signing on and thought I’d better get hold of this situation.”

Having excelled on his access course in Southwark, he noticed that the university near his flat in south London was offering a geology degree, which he hoped would lead to a career in the oil industry. “I just knocked on the door of the Goldsmiths geology department and introduced myself – they asked me to do a test in mathematics, which I was always good at, and they let me in,” he says.

Petford got in just in time: his department, alongside other smaller London geology departments, shut the year after he graduated. But he doesn't dispute the decision: “That’s probably the right thing these days because geology should be run by departments linked to research and industry. If students are going to have a good experience, you need that critical mass,” he says. “That said, it would have been a different experience for me if I’d knocked on Imperial’s or King’s College London’s door asking them to let me in without a maths A level,” he says.

Shortly after completing a PhD at the University of Liverpool, Petford won a Royal Society 10-year research fellowship for his work on volcanoes. That allowed him to take up a junior fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge. “In 1983, I was on the dole and by 1990, I’m a Cambridge academic,” reflects Petford.

But while he enjoyed life at Cambridge, he snapped up an offer of a permanent job at Kingston University in 1994 – just two years after it gained university status. “I had a very stiff conversation from someone at the Royal Society who asked me what I was playing at. Taking my funding from Cambridge to an ex-polytechnic wasn’t the done thing and they couldn’t understand why it was such a tempting offer,” he says. “But that job security was very important given my background and it’s why I’ve got a lot of sympathy with the University and College Union’s calls to address casualisation. We should offer full-time contracts where we can.”

Leaving the historic and well-funded world of Oxbridge for a modern university was still a bold move, however. “Again, it’s maybe the punk thing,” Petford reflects. “I was never enamoured by the social status of the university – I was excited to join a growing department that had done quite well in the recent Research Assessment Exercise,” he says of Kingston, where he later became professor of earth and planetary sciences.

Although he has continued to research, supervise PhD students and publish scientific papers, Petford admits he was glad to take up a pro vice-chancellor's role at Bournemouth University in 2006. “It gives you a new perspective on what universities do and there is an intellectual excitement to this – I’ve seen some professorial colleagues stay in departments and become quite bitter and jaded as the young Turks come past them,” he says. “That said, you do burn quite a few bridges in research when you enter management – you become the man in the suit that can’t entirely be trusted.”

His arrival at Northampton in the autumn of 2010 came shortly before huge student protests took place in London against plans to nearly treble England’s annual tuition fee cap to £9,000, which would take effect two years later. “I knew it was going to be a testing time for universities, but the writing was on the wall for £3,000 tuition fees,” he reflects, given that these were topped up by a significant teaching grant and government departments were being asked to make huge cuts in the wake of the 2008 crash. “That fee level was clearly unsustainable – without those changes, universities would have faced significant cuts to staff and student numbers,” he says.

The full impact of the 2012 reforms and the decision to remove student number quotas for universities from 2015, creating a free-for-all in university recruitment that has seen Russell Group institutions expand massively at the expense of other institutions, is perhaps being felt only now. Many modern universities – though not Northampton – have announced redundancy rounds in recent months amid declining enrolments in some departments. “Letting the system become totally market-driven has led to some unfortunate financial deterioration across the sector, but I think the tide is turning now,” he says, referencing the demographic upswing of young people that should feed more students into the sector over the next few years. “We’ve seen students with 3 Bs at A level who can’t get in the Russell Group – maybe they might start to think about an institution like mine if they’re willing to think more creatively about what the ‘best universities’ are,” he says.

While the Treasury might have borne down on recurrent spending, it was keen on backing infrastructure projects, such as nuclear power stations and the High Speed 2 rail link, Petford says. And that was what made possible the wholesale relocation of the University of Northampton to a riverside site in the city: “We persuaded the Treasury that we should be part of this and, although they didn’t give us the money, they backed us by underwriting the loans.” Dismissing warnings by some staff that the £10 million a year repayments would be “financial suicide”, Petford took the plunge. “Borrowing money was much cheaper – at 0.5 per cent – than it is now, so the time was right,” he says. “I knew there would never be another chance to do it again – I don’t think it could be done now.”

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The move to a smaller site without larger lecture halls did, however, require an entirely new approach to university teaching. “Our largest lecture theatre has 80 seats, but moving away from that lecture-based pedagogy costs money and you’ve got to get more creative about how you deliver courses,” he says, adding that this transition stood Northampton in good stead when Covid forced all universities to flip to online learning.

Adopting a more digitally integrated learning system has provided unexpected challenges, too. In March 2021, the university was badly hit by a cyber-attack that interrupted access to its IT and phone systems for more than a week. “We didn’t give them the pleasure of opening their email,” says Petford, of the ransom note that experts say normally asks about $5 million (£4.1 million) for re-establishing normal service. “It’s the cyber equivalent of someone breaking in with a pickaxe and demanding cash – there was no question of entertaining it,” he adds. “We recovered much faster than other universities, but it was certainly not without pain, so we’ve significantly improved our back-up systems.

Financially, Northampton is in good shape, Petford says, having seen its turnover increase from £120 million to £180 million during his tenure. At the Waterside campus, a third of its 12,000 students are international – up from about 10 per cent in 2010 – mainly on postgraduate taught courses such as project management. But while admitting that the income is useful given the “erosion of domestic tuition fees by inflation”, he says that number has now been capped, and he is proud that more first-in-family students are studying than ever: “About 40 per cent of our students are now black or Asian, often from families with limited income or deprived backgrounds – that’s massive for me.”

Given his achievements, it may be unfortunate that Petford’s tenure will, in some minds, be defined by high jinks at a student union event in 2014. During a routine by the comedian Simon Brodkin – performing under his laddish alter ego Lee Nelson – Petford was photographed crowd-surfing. The pictures were splashed in the Daily Mail and one social media wag dubbed him “The Wolf of Northampton” in reference to the scene in the Martin Scorsese film Wolf of Wall Street in which Leonardo DiCaprio, playing the fraudster Jordan Belfort, parties raucously with his employees. Thanks to social media, Google and an obsessive parody account run in different guises for eight years, that moniker has hung around. Does that bother Petford?

“Not at all,” he answers. That is mainly because the supposedly debauched events captured on camera were so at odds with the “catastrophically dull” reality. “The crowd-surfing took place at about 7pm and it was so tame that the student union had already done a dry run to ensure it all went safely,” recalls Petford. “I actually quite admire how it was spun against me – some staff were complaining about vice-chancellors being on big money and they somehow made a parallel with a v-c at a student event,” he adds. “But they couldn’t really decide to dislike me because I was an overpaid toff from the Athenaeum Club or an oikey guy from Romford, so it didn’t entirely work,” he adds.

One lesson he took from the experience was that “anything can be made to appear as the media wants”, and he worries about university leaders’ retreat from engaging with students and broadcasters in recent years. “It’s very different to 10 years ago – people are getting a bit prim. I don’t think we’ll see any more cavalier vice-chancellors any time soon,” he says.

Although Petford retired at the end of last month as vice-chancellor, he aims to continue to research volcanology, as well as undertake some consultancy work in the skills and enterprise world. But he also intends to realise his punk ambition of releasing Strate Jacket’s first album, drawing on unreleased demos. Buoyed by the admission from BBC wildlife presenter and Southampton native Chris Packham in a 2020 BBC documentary that he was a superfan who secretly hung around their rehearsals, Strate Jacket may finally defy, as one fanzine put it, the curse of “appalling luck which meant they never made the impact that many in the town believed was their destiny”.

Petford may have left it too late for rock stardom, but perhaps higher education has benefited from a small dose of his punk attitude.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com