Talking leadership: Bashir Makhoul on making the business case for the arts

Bashir Makhoul is surrounded by boxes and packaging materials as he cheerfully explains that he was up until 2am the night before preparing for his latest exhibition.

Juggling his artistic endeavours with running a university is something Makhoul has become adept at in his six-year stint as vice-chancellor and president of the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), a role he is leaving this autumn to take over as president at University Canada West.

These senior administrative positions – and the ones he held at Birmingham City and the University of Southampton before that – are jobs he describes as “survival mechanisms”, but art is his obsession, even if it does mean some late nights.

“I am constantly making art, always have been. It has kept me going. I would be betraying myself if I turned into an administrator,” he says.

Some fellow vice-chancellors, Makhoul hints, have perhaps been more willing to leave their subjects behind as they advanced to the upper echelons of academic life, but “you can be a much better vice-chancellor if you are engaged in the work you are leading. I could never have led a university having not been involved in the subjects we teach.”

Makhoul, the UK’s first Palestinian vice-chancellor, was raised in Galilee in a two-room house he shared with his widowed mother and nine siblings.

Ever since his childhood, with its creative endeavours – carving out small figures from stones found in bombed-out buildings using his family’s only knife – it was never in doubt that art was his calling. “I had a kind of oblivious optimism that the arts will deliver for me one day.”

While this view could be dismissed as the idealism of a creative type, Makhoul is also something of a pragmatist, recognising that art subjects must prove their worth to students and society at a time when their provision is increasingly under attack.

The business of art

Describing himself as a “strange artist” because he “knows his numbers”, Makhoul created the first business school for the creative arts at UCA, combining an artistic education with entrepreneurial training to allow students to turn their work into profitable businesses.

This approach, he concedes, broke from the university’s tradition and culture but it has proved to be a success, with the school growing from nothing to 3,000 students in five years.

Art is an easy target, which is why it is always the first area cut when a university gets into trouble, according to Makhoul, while the increasing importance of measures such as graduate employability does not always capture the worth of an artistic career, where wages can be low and precarity common.

Politicians, he says, are also full of mixed messages, talking up the country’s creative industries on the one hand while telling universities to prioritise science and technology on the other. 

“At the back of their minds they are thinking what matters is: ‘Can we make stuff?’” he says. “But they seem to have forgotten the UK is not a manufacturing country any more, and engineering alone is not going to make a better society. STEM is important but a balanced society and workforce has to involve a balance of expertise.”

Combining art and business has also given UCA a unique offer that has allowed it to expand its international reach. With the university based across Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham and Rochester – sleepy cities and towns in the south of England – it was never, Makhoul admits, going to be the nightlife that brought students in.

“Attracting overseas students is going to be limited here unless you offer something entirely unique. You can do art and design anywhere, but this is the only school you can go to in Europe to study the business of creativity,” he says. 

Makhoul also established the university’s first joint venture overseas, joining forces with Xiamen University in China to launch the Institute of Creativity and Innovation in 2019.

Closer to home, he decided to end the university’s further education (FE) provision – which accounted for a quarter of its students – a decision that contributed to the decline of the Rochester campus, which will close for good later this year.

Instead, he secured the university research-degree-awarding powers after a battle with the Office for Students.

“I thought, either you can do PhDs or you can do FE; you can’t have both. I decided to concentrate on improving the quality of our master’s programmes. To keep our BA numbers static but grow our postgraduate offer. That is where you elevate the university and ensure it can compete,” he explains. 

Opportunity knocks

Makhoul says his approach to university management has not always been universally popular: “I have taken risks with the university and my board has been living through hell with me. At first they found it quite dangerous and now I think they find it intriguing and quite satisfying.”

He attributes his sense of ambition and desire to “never leave opportunities unturned” to his upbringing, which also taught him “how to work with others and survive and function in quite extreme circumstances”.

Makhoul’s own life was transformed by a very unlikely opportunity, which saw him recruited to design a public sculpture for the tiny Isle of Iona in the Scottish Hebrides while working as a summer-school instructor in Galilee.

This took him to the UK and, eventually, into a BA programme at Liverpool Polytechnic (now Liverpool John Moores University), selling everything he had to pay for it. 

As a vice-chancellor, he sees international students in similar positions, their families having saved for years to cover the inflated fees charged by British universities in the hope of improving their life chances. 

While admitting that much of UCA’s recent success has been built on its moves into this international market, Makhoul is damning about the damage the sector is doing. 

“It is exploitation. It has become a drug to which we are addicted and we can’t get rid of it. We should wean ourselves off it and do international education because we want to do good in the world, not because we want to have yet another building or finance a lab at the expense of these students,” he says.

“We really have to rethink why we charge so much. It feels like it is because we can and that to me is very cynical.”

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com

This is part of our “Talking leadership” series with the people running the world’s top universities about how they solve common strategic issues and implement change. Follow the series here.