On 26 June 2025, Prof Iain Gillespie publicly accepted that he was ‘incompetent’ in his execution of the office of Principal and Vice Chancellor of the University of Dundee.[1] The surprise revelation of a roughly £30 million deficit at the Scottish university in November 2024 had been widely reported, and indicated a lack of institutional awareness of the financial challenges the University of Dundee was facing. This, in turn, triggered the engagement of Scottish Government with Dundee’s financial governance and recovery (a process that remains on-going),[2] including the completion of an independent public investigation into the accounting and governance processes that led up to the deficit being discovered. This investigation resulted in the damning Gillies Report, a detailed work of forensic accountancy that documents the collapse of financial governance at the institution.[3] Given this report, and the live-streamed three-hour grilling of Prof Gillespie by the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children, and Young People Committee, the compiled evidence of the many governmental failures at the University of Dundee under his leadership was stark. When offered the only apparent options by the Committee’s Chair—that he must either be corrupt or incompetent—Prof Gillespie accepted the poor execution of his allocated office.

Tasked with the custodianship of an academic institution, a role that comes not only with general duties of academic office but also with enhanced responsibilities in relation to the institutional articulation of the public conduct of higher learning, Prof Gillespie appeared to have been unable to properly attend to his obligations. And, at least politically, he was held to account for his breach of office by the public power of the Parliamentary Committee. This admission, as part of the ongoing public oversight of Dundee’s financial crisis, provides an opportunity for reflection—not only on the lessons that might be learned for institutional custodians from what the Gillies Report calls the ‘individual and collective failures in the financial governance of the University’,[4] but on the duties and obligations attendant to academic office in general—and their expression in the office of Principal and Vice Chancellor in particular.[5]

The Office of Principal and Vice Chancellor

To be Principal of a Scottish university is to be bound by a certain quality of office, one that demands a practice of institutional governance towards the articulation of the public and communal goods of knowledge production and higher learning. The University of Dundee, for instance, can trace its official heritage from the divine sanction of the Pope that warranted the establishment in 1413 of Scotland’s oldest university, the University of St Andrews.[6] Dundee was first founded as an independent College—on principles of inclusivity, but funded by the profits of slavery[7]—becoming part of St Andrews in 1897, and eventually Queens College in 1953.[8] The University of Dundee was subsequently given independent status as an institution of higher education in its own right, with its own state-sanctioned academic powers and obligations separate from those of St Andrews, under the Universities (Scotland) Act 1966 and the granting of a Royal Charter in 1967. The source of Dundee’s institutional authority is thus a mixture of divine and royal decree, but as an academic institution is necessarily combined—as expounded more fully below—with the wider obligations of learning attendant to its specifically academic role.

The post of Principal and Vice Chancellor, then, is one that is created within structures of public power, bound (at least in Dundee’s case) by the authority of its Royal Charter administered by the Privy Council as part of the state’s technologies of governance, and blended with traditions of higher learning. It is an office. And, as Agamben notes, in the conduct of institutional office the ‘individual’ is distinguished from the ‘function’ they exercise, thereby securing ‘the validity of the acts’ carried out ‘in the name of the institution’.[9] The office of Principal thus comes with duties and privileges that attach to its specific quality as an office, connected to the interests of the institution of which it is a part and which ‘validate’ the conduct of that office insofar as it is in line with the authority that creates and shapes it. Importantly, these duties and privileges should be undertaken without regard to the personal interests or preferences of any individual to which the custodianship of the office is granted. A Principal is obligated to act in line with both the positive regulations that bind them and the wider principles of academic office.

An incompetent Principal represents a breach of office, and a breach of academic office specifically. It undermines not only the technical requirements of an individual role—the details of which become most stark, in Dundee’s context, in the critical minutiae of the Gillies Report—but the duties and obligations attached to the conduct of higher learning in general. While the office of Principal has a particular strategic or constitutional inflection, the general qualities of academic office are of course not exclusive to Principals and Vice Chancellors but permeate the institutional architecture of universities and similar kinds of institution, in Scotland and elsewhere. Universities and those who exercise academic duties and privileges therein are tasked—by the divine, by the sovereign, and by the exigencies of knowledge and understanding—with the public articulation of higher learning. Most significantly, the conduct of academic office is not exclusively within a divine or sovereign mandate, but also expresses a qualitatively deeper and wider set of obligations related to the development of understanding and informed practice that is emphatically outside or adjacent to state power. Academic office is articulated in an institutional sense by universities and their regulations, but also exists in a sense that is independent of or outside such structures.

The Nature of Academic Office

One way of conceptualising the dual quality of academic office, as being both within and outside the particular contingent form of public power associated with the modern state, is through Robert Cover’s binary concepts of jurisgenesis and jurispathy. In ‘Nomos and Narrative’, Cover expounds these concepts as a way of capturing a sense of law and legality that transcends the state form, connecting the establishment and maintenance of law and legal meaning to underlying cultural practices of narration and storytelling.[10] By narratives, says Cover, whether scientific, religious, mythic, legal, or otherwise, we understand the processes that structure and order our universe in a manner that is real and forceful. To characterise as narrative is not to dismiss, but to recognise the contingent and meaningful quality of our normative reality. We are immersed in narratives, and jurisgenesis is the ongoing process by which legal meaning is narratively created, constantly taking place in a plural manner within and across communities. In this way, state law is understood as just one nomos among many. Why, then, does state law have its obvious dominance? State law, says Cover, is jurispathic: it has an oppressive impetus that functions to close down jurisgenesis, supressing the plural values and forms of law that are constantly emerging across communities in supposed challenge to the dominant state narrative. State law, in short, ‘kills’ all alternatives, ensuring it is the only normative universe in town.

Adapting this to the context of higher learning, we can conceptualise the ongoing and insuppressible occurrence and generation of learning and knowledge production that is constantly taking place within and across communities. This generative and vital force is without necessary institutional form or priority, sanctioned instead by the plural values of communal life and its critical investigation and study—broadly understood. Pedagogic processes that shut down possibility, leaving only a singular narrative, way of knowing, or structure of knowledge through the suppression of alternatives, go against this expansive ethos of open and communal learning. To attach knowledge and understanding only to the authority of a state-sanctioned public institution, and thereby claim that academic office is only constituted under sovereign authority, is to connect pedagogy to the ideals of suppressive violence that run through modern state power. This moves in the opposite direction to the developmental ideals of open and inclusive learning commonly associated with academic work and education, and overlooks the ways in which academic office is also granted its duties and privileges from a pluralistic communality of intellectual growth and diversity.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire articulates a vision of education that can be understood to embrace the consistently open and generative qualities of higher learning that are attached to academic office.[11] Freire connects pedagogic practice to large-scale political structures and, in particular, the dismantling of oppression through the resolution of the dichotomy of oppressor/oppressed that he sees repeated in educational settings. Instead of depositing static knowledge, owned and controlled by the ‘teacher’, into the passive and docile ‘student’, a truly meaningful pedagogy is conducted as a community of ‘critical co-investigators’: ‘The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is [themself] taught in dialogue with students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They [student and teacher] become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow’.[12] Preserving the supposed power and control of the ‘teacher’ over knowledge and over students—whether in the classroom, or more widely in terms of the culture or society to which academics’ knowledge production ostensibly contributes—turns pedagogic practice into an ‘exercise of domination … with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating [people] to adapt to the world of oppression’.[13]

Freire, of course, is not without his critics. Subsequent thinkers have observed numerous issues with his model of critical pedagogy, from its assumption of Enlightenment and rationalist knowledge as the foundation of humanist learning and emancipation, to its overlooking of intersectionality, of the complexity and variance in the forms that oppression takes, and in particular of the problems of coloniality.[14] Notably, by placing the task of liberation in the minds of ‘oppressed’, Freire is seen to move against the impetus of decolonial thinking that locates domination in the structures and practices of the colonial project itself.[15] Despite these well-developed criticisms, Freire’s analysis retains importance for a critical understanding of the tenets of academic office that derive from outside of the institutional form of state sanctioned education. One aspect of Freire’s work worth rethinking, for example, is its trajectory against hierarchy and towards a more communal and collaborative model of learning and knowledge production. One that not only works on rationalist bases of liberal humanism, but also on an experiential level of specific and local pedagogic encounters shaped by empowerment and agency in a mobile field of critical engagement and collaborative questioning.

The function of academic office, understood in this general counter-hierarchical way, has overtly political stakes, and a scope and context that extends far beyond the conduct of a specific classroom or research output, and prioritises communal interests and the emergence of communities out of variable and complex forms of oppression and subjectivation, in contrast to the suppressive hierarchical interests of sovereign power. Academic office is grounded not in the presumptive ‘transfer’ of information into docile subjects that props up state dominance, nor the instrumental manipulation of communities through the privileged application of knowledge, as may be exemplified in techniques of governmentality—but the critical co-investigation of the conditions of social, cultural, and political being. A critical pedagogy, as Freire observes, ‘makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed’.[16] While he may have essentialised ‘oppression’ or put too much onus on the minds of ‘the oppressed’ to liberate themselves, his ideas do clarify that meaningful learning and knowledge is not a tool for domination and control, but for liberation and empowerment that works to break down of the layered divisions that structure modern hierarchies, between the powerful and the subjectivated—between those who control understanding and those to which it is variously denied (of which the classroom divide between ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ is one expression).

The proper conduct of academic office is an important means by which this counter-hierarchical project unfolds, carrying obligations to avoid these divisions, to avoid the conscious or unconscious dominance of ‘teachers’ over ‘students’, or of particular methods or modes of learning or static forms of knowledge over a collaborative practice of inclusive questioning—while avoiding the underlying Enlightenment limitations or universalising tendencies of Freire’s initial insights. More generally, the proper conduct of academic office avoids the ‘ownership’ or ‘gatekeeping’ of knowledge but instead treats academic work as a communal practice of cultivation, of the kindling of understanding across its multifarious contexts—be it classroom, community, society, or elsewhere.

Academic Office and University Governance

To return to the office of Principal and Vice Chancellor, a Principal’s successful conduct of academic office needs not only to be in line with the institutional instruments that give it form within a sovereign hierarchy, but also with the wider commitments of academic office in general. The office of Principal is articulated within particular institutions through their constitutional documents, meaning the powers of Principals and Vice Chancellors are thus not absolute but are contingent on those instruments. To be legitimate, an institutional constitution must be seen as a specific positive instrument for the furtherance of academic office, and must thus be read in light of the obligations of that office in general. A Principal’s conduct of office is only legitimate where it is undertaken within the confines of its official sanction—an authority that derives not only from the state or royal warrant of university status, and the positive structures of university constitutions of various forms (warrants, charters, statutes, etc), but also from the ideals of communal co-investigation and collaborative growth of understanding that underpin academic office in its fullest sense, which is independent of, adjacent to, and more generally underpins the state’s positive structures of higher education.

The office of Principal and Vice Chancellor, as well as other similar offices of higher education institutional leadership, is thus tasked with the articulation of an environment that facilitates open pedagogic practice. The conduct of institutional governance, if it is to be in line with the tenets of academic office, should promote a liberating and inclusive pedagogy. If those holding the academic office of Principal and Vice Chancellor conduct themselves in a manner that follows, promotes, or fails to meaningfully challenge the oppressive qualities of sovereign power, that preserves or maintains the division between the ‘powerful’ and the ‘weak’, they fail to act in accordance with the duties and obligations incumbent upon them. For example, this includes, as Freire himself observed, a duty to resist the neoliberal marketisation of higher education that plays into the interests of the oppressors and the maintenance of their position: ‘We need to say no to the neoliberal fatalism … informed by the ethics of the market, an ethics in which a minority makes most profits against the lives of the majority … a perverse ethics that, in fact, lacks ethics.’[17] This is seen, too, in the instrumentalisation of universities as tools of state industrial strategy, in which degrees must represent ‘value for money’, and are only seen as legitimate to the extent they convert flourishing individual lives into labour resources to be slotted into capitalist systems. Academic office comes with a duty to resist such neoliberal higher education policies, a duty that is enhanced in the office of Principal and Vice Chancellor given its particular strategic, leadership, and external-facing dimensions.

If we return to our opening example of the University of Dundee, part of the breach of office arguably committed by Prof Gillespie involved the apparent exclusion of the wider infrastructure of university governance from various aspects of decision-making, with a ‘triumvirate’ of just three members of the University Executive Group (rather than the whole group, in its accountability to the body-corporate of the university), with ‘little transparency or inclusivity’ in the making of decisions.[18] In addition, the Gillies Report details how ‘dissent, or challenge was routinely “shut down”,’ and shut down by Prof Gillespie in particular.[19] In this way, Dundee’s governance was one that did not participate in a collective culture of authorised conduct in line with the communal commitments of academic office. Such centralised and hermetic control is an example of how, to borrow Freire’s words, the ‘oppressor elaborates his theory of action without the people’ and thus, whether consciously or not, de facto ‘stands against them’ and perpetuates oppression.[20] By governing in a vacuum, without collaboration, the academic office of Principal and Vice Chancellor is arguably breached both in terms of the positive instruments of Dundee’s constitutional documents that render the authority of the Principal’s governance functions contingent, and in terms of the underlying academic office of which Principal and Vice Chancellor is a particular expression.

In its context of institutional custodianship, the academic office of Principal and Vice Chancellor is tasked with countering oppression through communal learning by maintaining an institutional form that conducts itself in a suitably collaborative manner. A university, as a body oriented primarily towards facilitating the execution of academic office, must function through consensual and collaborative working, consciously defending itself against the various ways in which divisions between authoritarian oppressors and a docile oppressed might emerge. This is true not only in the classroom, in breaking down the divide between ‘student’ and ‘teacher’, nor only in the public dissemination of knowledge and understanding (which often remains problematically paywalled), but also in the internal organisation and working practices of the institution itself. The benefits of communal governance for the life of academic institutions, in contrast to emphatic trends towards centralised management across the sector, is also noted within studies of higher education governance and policy: as ‘organised anarchies’, academic institutions ‘cannot simply be subject to hierarchical control’.[21] Despite which, a common example seen across the UK sector indicate that such collaborative working is rare, with consultation processes being used as oppressive tools of disseminating static information—rather than taking the problems of university governance as objects for critical co-investigation within a university community.

In Dundee’s case, the predominant institutional structure through which academic voice is expressed is through the body of the Senate—made up of elected representatives from the community of academic staff, i.e. of those holding academic office of various kinds. The Charter and the Statutes of the University mirror and protect the collaborative quality of academic office in this regard, requiring the Court (as the ostensibly sovereign body of university governance, responsible for business and finance matters[22]) to work with Senate in relation to various acts of academic governance. For example, the Senate is ‘responsible for the academic work of the university’, subject to Court’s ‘general control and approval’ and the provisions of the Charter and Statutes.[23] The provisions of the Charter and Stautes require Court to have the ‘recommendation’ of Senate in order to undertake specific acts of governance, including the restructuring of academic disciplines[24] and the creation of new degrees.[25]. There are various ways in which these instruments consolidate power in the Court, or with the Principal as chief academic officer,[26] but always subject to the instruments themselves that render this power contingent and subject to context. And subject, too, to the wider terms of academic office that underpin such positive structures.

Importantly, academic matters are governed through the Senate, which is populated by a selection of individuals that hold academic offices of various kinds,[27] facilitating the positive institutional expression of the conduct of that office within the governance practices of the institution. Those who hold and conduct academic office are best placed to contribute to the decision-making processes that shape and maintain the structural environment for their conduct of that office, derived from its wider underlying obligations towards communal learning and speaking from their experience and official positions as office holders. Read properly, the authority of Dundee’s leadership—like those of other universities with similar kinds of regulatory frameworks—is contingent on its adherence not only to the positive frameworks of sovereign regulation, but also to the underlying obligations of academic office as expressed through those frameworks and the members of the academic community engaged in governance work, which requires a truly collaborative organisation facilitated by its leaders and its constituents together.

A Crisis of Office

Like many other institutions, the University of Dundee faces the task of rebuilding its community of trust as well as its financial and collective wellbeing in the wake of its failings. The problems associated with an incompetence of academic office are not unique to Dundee, and across the higher education sector can be seen multifarious challenges to the finances, governance, and independence of academic institutions and the maintenance of their conduct in line with the obligations of academic office: rampant marketisation; the supplication of institutions to governmental policy with little evidence of resistance or challenge; repeated financial failure and its attendant job-cutting and restructuring processes; inter alia. The duties and obligations of the academic office that underpins the existence and purpose of higher education institutions appear to have been forgotten. Dundee’s experience is relatively unique in the holding to account of its incompetent leadership. Yet the breach of the duties and obligations of academic office is arguably widespread across those tasked—as Principals and Vice Chancellors are—with maintaining the institutional environments in which open communities of higher learning should flourish.

These may be exceptional times, as the language of ‘crisis’ might indicate, but it is in such times that the responsible and lawful exercise of office becomes most important. The alternative is that we risk falling into the authoritarianism of a Schmittian state of exception, in which the terms of academic office, in their entangled positive and communal forms, are disapplied at will and the violence of oppression permitted to continue unchecked.

Disclaimer: Any opinion expressed in this post is solely that of the author, and not of the University of Dundee or its affiliates. The post is informed by the author’s academic research into the intersections of theories of office and critical pedagogy and based upon information in the public domain.

[1] Education, Children and Young People Committee, Official Report: Thursday 26 June 2025 (Scottish Parliament 2025), p 63, available at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/official-report/search-what-was-said-in-parliament/lghp-26-06-2025?meeting=16530.

[2] For more background on the financial issues at Dundee within the context of the Scottish sector, see https://wonkhe.com/blogs/dundees-troubles-and-the-state-of-the-sector/

[3] Pamela Gillies, Investigation into Financial Oversight and Decision Making at the University of Dundee (Report presented to the Scottish Funding Council, 19 June 2025), available at https://www.sfc.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Gillies-Report.pdf (hereafter ‘Gillies Report’).

[4] Gillies Report, p 59.

[5] In this post I am focused on the combined office of ‘Principal and Vice Chancellor’ as found in the Scottish Higher Education sector, but many of the observations I make are applicable to other university leadership offices, notably that of Vice Chancellor in England and Wales.

[6] https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/about/history/brief/.

[7] The various direct and indirect links between Dundee’s founding and endowments and the transatlantic slave trade have been preliminarily mapped by the University of Dundee Founders Project: see Cassandra Gooptar, University of Dundee Founders Project: Final Report (University of Dundee 2022), available at https://www.dundee.ac.uk/corporate-information/founders-project-final-report.

[8] https://app.dundee.ac.uk/50/stories/history/index.html.

[9] Giorgio Agamben, Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (translated by Adam Kotsko, Stanford University Press 2013), p 21.

[10] See Robert Cover, ‘Foreword: Nomos and Narrative’ (1983) 97 Harvard Law Review 4-68.

[11] See Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, Continuum 2005).

[12] Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p 80.

[13] Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p 78.

[14] For a whirlwind summary of some major critiques, see Michalinos Zembylas, ‘Reinventing Critical Pedagogy as Decolonizing Pedagogy: The Education of Empathy’ (2018) 40 Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 404-21, pp 406-408.

[15] Zembylas, ‘Reinventing Critical Pedagogy’, p 408.

[16] Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p 48.

[17] Freire, quoted in Macedo’s introduction to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, pp 25-26.

[18]Gillies Report, p 58.

[19] Gillies Report, p 58. As the report also details, female members of staff were particularly sidelined.

[20] Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p 183.

[21] Colin Scott, ‘Managing Higher Education for a Changing Regulatory Environment’ (2021) 24 Public Administration and Policy 7-20, p 18.

[22] See University of Dundee Charter, Art 7, and University of Dundee Statutes, Statute 9. The Charter is available here: https://www.dundee.ac.uk/corporate-information/university-dundee-charter. The Statutes are available here: https://www.dundee.ac.uk/corporate-information/university-dundee-statutes.

[23] Dundee Charter, Art 8.1.

[24] Dundee Statute 10(4)(l)(vii).

[25] Dundee Statute 10(4)(l)(v).

[26] See Dundee Charter, Art 6.1(a).

[27] See Dundee Statute 10(1).