Appointed January 2011

Ian McNay retired (at last!) at the end of 2025 as Professor Emeritus of HE and Management at the University of Greenwich. His career had started in 1967, as an academic administrator at Strathclyde and after 3 years on the European mainland in Brussels and Barcelona, as Academic Registrar at the, then, Bristol Poly, the youngest person to occupy such a senior post in a major institution. He switched to being an academic at the Open University in 1980 and ten years later became professor and head of an R+D centre for HE Management at, now, Anglia Ruskin university, with all the bureaucracy that entailed, but no public funding, needing to be a hunter gatherer for income through projects around the world, with repeat business as the quality criterion. He left a surplus of about 12% of income over expenditure.

He started at Greenwich as head of the School of Post-Compulsory Education, but an internal merger four years later forced him into well-funded ‘voluntary’ severance, only to be asked to return three weeks later because he was essential to the doctoral programme and two Master’s modules. He has over 160 publications. In an SRHE membership of over 40 years, he has been editor of Research into Higher Education Abstracts, a committee member across the board and organiser of several conferences and other events.